Dear CSA Members,
If you are like me, you wait all year for tomatoes. I start expecting them in May and June and begin asking ‘when will they be ready?’ knowing full well that it will be late July before I’ll get a decent one. They started trickling in about 2 weeks ago and now they have finally arrived.
Marlene and Kristin have done an awesome job this year raising tomatoes. They chose wonderful varieties of saucing, heirloom and hybrids. The heirlooms are big, bulbous and juicy. Al’s favorite is the big rainbow, a large yellow tomato with faint red striping throughout. The purple Cherokee is a deep purpely red with a greenish shoulders and it is my favorite. The smaller, more symmetrical red zebra is delicious, though a little more acidic than its green cousin. The early girls are as always firm and intense flavored. They are our constant companion now until (hopefully) November. We’re eating a plate of sliced tomatoes with olive oil and salt with every meal. My girls eat tomato toast for breakfast or as a snack. We toast the bread and rub it with garlic, stack with sliced tomatoes and drizzle olive oil over all. We have gazpacho almost every night with dinner; when it’s still 85 degrees at dinner time, nothing else will do.
Since San Francisco is cooler, we can serve tomato soup with crostini, goat cheese and pesto. Roasted tomatoes are going on a pizzetta over mozzarella cheese and our tomato conserva. The conserva is basically a tomato reduction of our amazing saucing tomatoes like the Sam Marzanos and the Amish paste. Every day, we are finding new ways to preserve tomatoes so we can have them all winter long. Roasting and freezing, pureeing, getting them put away so we can have the fall and winter to experiment with new canned tomato sauces and ketchups. Gloria and I are making pasta and pizza sauce to keep Maddie and Millie supplied all winter long.
Jose has begun drying the tomatoes, the saucing and hybrids are best for this as the heirlooms are just too juicy. We are always trying to catch them at exactly the right moment when the moisture is sufficiently low to eliminate the possibility of spoilage but pliable enough to be pleasant to eat. When they are ready, they will be packed in our olive oil and put in jars to be sold for the holidays.
This years’ crop is big and we are doing a much better job of capturing them this year than last. Even when they go, at least I know that I will have them in some form all winter long, hopefully up until next summer.
¡Buen Provecho!
– Chef Becky