Plain tomato sauce and, "You've Gotta Have Heart"

Late season fruits are the sweetest... I turned the last tomatoes of the summer into a plain, sweet sauce that I can use through the winter. And, organ meats!

I've been asked by people who want to eat more healthfully, for advice on selecting produce. The good news is that we can all do it. If there's one thing human beings have been doing forever, it's picking out what's best to eat. A school of thought in personal nutrition that has always fascinated me are the Instinctos, or Anopsologists, who always eat their foods singly---there is no Instincto "cuisine"---as well as fresh and raw. They choose their nutrition, one food at a time, and eat it until they no longer want it. This is the way I'd advise you to select your fresh foods, at least as a starting point. Be a human animal, first: if it helps, pretend you're a gorilla, or a chimpanzee. Look for what catches your eyes. Pick it up and weigh it in your hand. Prod it gently with a finger. Give the bunch of celery or melon or whatever it is a sniff. Do you want to eat it? Put it in your basket.

Beef heart stew

I was late to the fields this tomato season, so I only got one unlimited harvest. By then, most of the fruit was on the ground. The one kind of tomato that was most plentiful was a small, orange variety that was similar enough to last year's golden tomatoes, which made a wonderful sauce, that I was willing to take some risks to get some home. The other shareholders were avoiding these tomatoes, for being on the ground, but I got down and started gathering. If it felt firm like a grape, I picked it up for further inspection. If it was especially dirty, I'd wipe off the dirt so I could check it for bug holes. I was looking for an unbroken skin, no bruises, and especially no round marks, indicating that a bug had made its way in and might still be inside---it or its offspring. If the tomato met all those requirements, I put it in my bag.

At home, I dumped them all into a sink full of water and started washing and sorting. Some tomatoes got squished on the way home, so they went into the compost bucket. I gently rubbed each fruit's firm skin with my palms and fingertips to get the dirt off, and removed the stems, then set the clean tomato in a colander to drip.

From top: Red dal (see link for recipe), spinach sauteed with garlic,
well cooked broccoli, and roasted sweet potato with butter

In batches, I ran the tomatoes through the food processor, then into a big pot on the stove to simmer. I added a generous glug of red wine and one of olive oil, and a little salt, and let it cook for several hours. The resulting sauce was thick like jelly. And when I say it was sweet, I mean that I didn't even use onion, and the sauce was still nearly as sweet as store bought. That's vine ripened sweetness for you.

I let the tomato sauce cool, then bagged it in cups and quarts for freezing. Some of it I used right away in place of fresh or canned tomatoes: in the red dal in the photo above, and in a stew of beef heart, turnip, and kohlrabi that we're eating right now. Like the beef tongue I posted about last time, heart makes good stewing meat, and is very cheap. This heart was given to us by the farmer when we picked up our order---some people don't like the organs and just won't take them. Honestly, I'm not crazy about kidneys or livers, and I've never tried brain, but heart and tongue are muscle: a good starting place if you're just trying organ meats for the first time. They cook up like beef and are lean, but become tender with stewing. Heart has a touch of that organ-y taste that liver and kidney have, but not much. I'm surprised beef hearts haven't caught on more, especially with the Paleo crowd.

How to harvest the fruits of the field

Advice on picking beans, berries, tomatoes, and more this summer.

If you’ve got a you-pick as part of your farm share, or you’re planning to go to a commercial you-pick farm this season, you’ll want to be prepared to make the best of your time. Going out for the fun of berry picking or choosing a jack o’ lantern pumpkin is one thing, but if you’re out there to bring in a harvest of food for your pantry or freezer, you will want to make the most of your time.

Fruit or vegetable?
But what if I want vegetables? you ask right away, thinking of green beans, tomatoes. In fact, most you-pick fields are for fruit: tomatoes are a botanical fruit, not a vegetable, as are pumpkins, eggplants, peppers. Green beans are seed pods; not exactly fruit, but closer to the meaning of the word than vegetable, which is everything else: undifferentiated plant matter. When I think of harvesting a vegetable, I think of taking the whole plant, or at least the parts it’s using: leaves, stems.

It’s not that easy
My first job harvesting, I merely held the clipboard while my new boss, Terry, wielded the machete, decapitating cabbages neatly at ground level. I began to understand that harvesting is a skill, not something to stumble into and expect to be any good at.

The cabbage harvest came in January; it was in Florida, with growing seasons all year round. My next lessons in bringing in the crop would come with my mother-in-law, who took me with her to the strawberry you-pick fields. Here, I got lessons that could be more broadly applied.

Make hay while the sun shines
Make the time to pick when the picking is easy, or you will lose too much of your time to gleaning instead of getting a high return on your investment.

Bring containers
Bring containers to pick into that will protect easily bruised fruit. I bring stacks of plastic quart yogurt containers to pick berries and herbs into. Green beans are sturdy and can be picked into a cloth grocery sack. Tomatoes need sturdy-sided buckets to help prevent crushing.

Don’t be a redneck (unless you want to)
Wear a hat and clothing that will protect your neck from the sun. The term “redneck” comes from the burn a farmer gets across the back of his neck, working outside. If you pick shirtless, you may end up with your neck and shoulders blackened while your belly remains as pale as it started, because to pick, you must bend, kneel, squat, or otherwise get down as close as possible to plant level. Child labor begins to make sense, here.

Hide and seek
The fruits of most plants will hide under the leaves, if they can, to avoid burning in the sun. You can’t see the ripe fruit easily by standing over the rows and surveying the leaves. Your eyes will try to pick out the color of sweet berries, and will find only the sunburnt outermost leaves of plants, crisp against the sandy bed.

Push back the leaves so you can see the stems, and let your eyes adjust. It can take several seconds of focus on the inner parts of the plant before your brain can play the “Where’s Waldo?” game it was designed to play: find the food.

This focus is particularly important when the food isn’t bright red and round. Ripe green bean pods look very much like the stems of green bean plants. The critical eye you are developing in the field is for what the ripe fruit looks like, so it leaps to your eye.

Eat some
If it can be eaten raw, brush off any visible dirt and have a bite. It helps motivate you for the picking and processing, and if your body is pleased with the food, it may help you find it more easily while you’re out there in the field, picking.

Avoid waste
Don’t bother to pick the underripe, the overripe, the split and the damaged. Nothing gets bigger after it’s picked, and most fruit will not continue to ripen. Strawberries don’t ripen after you pick them; tomatoes, once they’ve reached mature green (a paler shade), tomatoes will ripen off the vine. Don’t pick more than you can clean and process before it begins to wilt. Don’t pick what you don’t like to eat.

Bottom up
Note where the ripe fruit is on the first plants, and continue to look in those places on subsequent plants. Tomatoes ripen in hands, or clusters, from the bottom to the top of the staked vine. Work your way methodically down the row, not skipping the first or last plants in the row, or those that have fallen over or been overtaken by weeds. In fact, gleaning after other you-pickers, who are inevitably amateurs, you find that these are precisely the places that the leery avoid. Some of the fattest berries are in the tall weeds on the edge of the patch.

Processing
When you get your haul home, clean and process it as quickly as possible. Enlist friends and family to help with the processing. It’s the most boring part, and the easiest for even the unskilled and uncoordinated to do.

Wash everything gently and thoroughly. Discard anything you’ve brought home that isn’t fit to eat. Remove tips and strings from green beans, hull berries, blanch and skin tomatoes … research the food you’re going to put up before you even set out, so you know what will be involved after you come home from the fields.

Clean up and plan something easy for dinner.

Rest.
You earned it.




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