Nature's Bounty

  About 5 years ago, my husband and I spent, rather, invested a couple hundred dollars building a raised garden bed in our backyard. We used railroad ties, brought in soil and compost, and built a lattice fence around it to keep the dogs out. The lattice fence was the most expensive part, chicken wire would have done the trick but I wanted it to be attractive. The lattice, however, cast big shadows on the garden when the sun was low and started to look terrible after about a year of weather so we ended up using chicken wire anyway.

  We are strictly recreational gardeners, not professionals. Nor are we experts by any means. Our favorite things to plant are tomatoes, peppers, cucumber, squash, green beans and okra. Our boys love to help in the garden, especially when it is time to harvest! Though growing our own vegetables has not turned them into vegetable lovers, it has encouraged them to taste vegetables that they wouldn't even touch otherwise. If nothing else, it has been a very rich educational experience for them. 

  Usually, we keep our garden alive until about the end of July. The last two years have seen record breaking high temperatures and drought. Almost every year, I have let the garden die because I didn't water while my husband was out of town. Oops! I don't love to trek out in the heat and drag a hose from one end of the yard to the other dodging dog poop, mosquitoes and flies the whole way. I love gardening in the spring, not so much in the summer.

  This year, has been wonderful! Very mild temperatures and lots of rain early on. It was our best tomato year ever! The tomato plants stopped producing at around the time we moved in July. I was a little sad to leave our garden, but I thought it was pretty much done anyway.  This was about the time every summer that our gardens fizzled out. Though we moved, we still own our old house and rent it to my grandmother. We got a call from her that we needed to come pick some tomatoes that were ripe on the vine before the squirrels got them all. Now, I really don't like squirrels eating my tomatoes because they waste most of the tomato as they are trying to eat it. Stick to the nuts bros!

  When she said we need to pick some tomatoes, I has no idea that she meant we needed to pick this many! 

Unfortunately, I am the only one in my house who likes to eat tomatoes. Though  I do love them, there is no way I could eat this many before they go bad so I did what any good farmer would do. I got online and searched for recipes! I made fresh salsa and spaghetti sauce. I plan to freeze the sauce in smaller portions to use as needed. If this ever happens again, I will try my luck with canning. I have never canned anything before and am too overwhelmed with my little life right now to experiment with a new skill.

The salsa recipe was pretty straight forward. Chop some stuff and mix it together. Voila. This was my first time to use a fresh jalapeño and I learned that my skin is sensitive to the juice. My hand burned in several places for about four hours after I chopped the pepper. Ouch! Turns out this is a fairly common problem.

  The spaghetti sauce was a much bigger undertaking. The first thing on the recipe's to do list was to peel the tomatoes. Excuse me? How the heck do you peel a tomato and is it really necessary? Surely, no one will notice a little tomato skin in their spaghetti. Well, I really didn't want to peel the tomatoes but I didn't feel comfortable skipping the step so I searched YouTube for a how to video. There were several. I picked the shortest one. Turns out, that it is necessary to peel when slow cooking a tomato because the skins don't break down like the rest of the tomato and you are left with some yucky stuff in your otherwise, yummy food. In the video I watched, the chef demonstrated scoring the tomato with a pairing knife then dropping it in boiling water. After about 30 seconds, he removed the tomato from the boiling water and placed it immediately into a bowl of ice water. He then picked it up and very easily removed the skin with his fingers. 

  I decided to give it a try. I boiled my tomatoes in two batches. The first batch, I scored first by slitting the top with a knife. The second batch I tried skipping that step. Lesson learned: score the tomatoes first. The tomatoes that had been scored came out of the water with a nice slit in the skin that ran all the way down one side. Most of these, I peeled the entire skin off in one piece by gently pinching it between two fingers. The ones that hadn't been scored had no such slit and I had to use a knife to get it started. After I peeled the tomatoes, I puréed them with an emersion blender that I bought for making baby food. Then I chopped some stuff and sautéed it all before combining everything in my crock pot to simmer for 4 hours.

The round bowl is full of skinned tomatoes. The rectangular bowl is full of the skins. Good thing I took the skins off because after they were cooked, they were thick and tough, yuck.

Peppers, carrots, onion and basil.

Everly waited patiently.

The finished product looks delish. Although, I think it will be necessary to purée the whole thing because it looks a little too vegetably for my crew. 

  Now I am tired and my kitchen is a disaster. I will probably continue to buy spaghetti sauce in a jar from the store but for today, I feel like a chef and my house smells like an Italian eatery. Basil anyone?