Savor & Save Summer - Organic Heirloom Tomato Paste and How To Freeze

One of the perks of our new Customize Your Box feature is the ability to add more of your favorite seasonal fruits and vegetables to your deliveries. Love heirloom tomatoes? They are certainly one of our farm's and family's most beloved items - and they are currently available by the pound and the case at a special summer's-end, back-to-school price!

What would you do with a bunch of heirlooms grabbed a great price?

Here are two simple ways to save the taste of summer heirlooms for enjoying now and in the winter season.

SUMMER SAVORED - TOMATO PASTE

Tomato paste is a great kitchen staple, adding rich flavor to pastas, sauces, soups and much more. Why buy a can when you can easily and healthily make your own organic heirloom tomato paste? Here are two simple ways to cook down your heirlooms to concentrate and capture their flavor.

Option 1: Simmer On The Stove
A simple way to save your fresh heirlooms is to core, coarsely chop and seed your tomatoes, add a little seasoning and just keep cooking them down...and cooking them down...and cooking them down over a medium-low heat until it becomes a thick liquid/paste.

Option 2: Oven-Roast Your Tomatoes
Some folks swear you should oven roast your tomatoes before pureeing into a paste because baking at a low heat for several hours condenses the sweet flavor of the tomato.

Depending on the size of your tomato, slice in half (smaller tomatoes) or into thick slices, then in half (larger tomatoes). Place cut side up on a baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil (optional) and salt and pepper. Bake in a 200 degree F oven until dry, soft and pliable, like a raisin (this could take anywhere from 2 to 8 hours).

What's next? Two more options!

Option 3: Enjoy Now
Well, when oven-roasted is the route you take, you may want to pull aside some of your tomato gems for enjoying now before you puree the rest for later. Keep in the refrigerator by covering them in oil for a few weeks, or in the freezer for a few months.

COUS COUS - With feta cheese, oven-roasted tomatoes, kalamata olives and fresh basil. This makes for a great Meatless Monday meal. 

FRITATTA - Oven-roasted tomatoes add a touch of sweetness and a lovely texture to this egg dish. 

PASTA - Use oven-dried tomatoes as a great substitute for tomato sauce in pasta dishes.

Option 4: Save For Later

FREEZING TIP - Freeze in an ice cube tray for convenient, smaller portions.

USES - Stir into pasta sauces or salad dressings. Add to soups, stews, chili, casseroles or any other dish where a tomato flavor is desired.

FROZEN: MAKES SUMMER NOT FORGOTTEN

To freeze your tomatoes without turning into puree, make sure they are fully ripe and ready to eat. 

Remove the stem/core. To make skins easier to remove, score a line from the core, around the bottom, and back up again to the other side. In batches, add tomatoes to boiling water for about 2 minutes, then remove and transfer to a bowl of ice water. After one minute, remove and carefully remove the skins and discard. Place tomatoes on a baking sheet and put in freezer. Tomatoes can be frozen whole, chopped or sliced. Once fully frozen, transfer to a freezer-safe container.

Use within 8 months for best flavor. Add tomatoes in cooked dishes as you would fresh tomatoes.

HEAD TO YOUR ONLINE MARKET 

Hope you head on over to our online Farm Stand Market and take your tomatoes before they are grabbed and gobbled up at such a good price. I know that's what we're doing this weekend!

Remember, you can add and make changes to your box contents by 10 a.m. 2 days prior to your scheduled delivery. Not part of our farm family? Find out if we deliver to your neighborhood.

Summer Sights

Our farm is operating at full speed. We are in the middle of the summer harvest. The tall tomato vines are still yielding precious little gems, but the plants are beginning to look old and tired.

The tips of their vines are bright green with new growth, but closer to the ground, shades of yellow and brown can be seen. The tomatoes have grown all the way up the top of the five-foot stakes that were placed in the ground to guide them toward the sun.

At the other end of the farm are second and third plantings that are just starting to be harvested. Beyond that is a fourth planting that we have not taken a tomato from yet. These plants are vibrant green with no sign of fading despite the heat.

Next to the first tomato field sits our melons, which were first planted on the east end, which is where the harvest is happening now. The melon plants have grown to cover the entire field, leaving no view of the brown dirt, only the green of melon plant with the occasional shiny melon.

The melon plants on the west end of the field, which were the last to be planted, are a more vibrant green, and the sun highlights the new vines that are stretching up toward the sky, holding their little yellow melon flowers out for the bees to pollinate – soon those flowers will be weighted down with a quickly growing little melons.

Beyond both of those fields is our creek, which is less of a creek and more of a series of puddles. In these puddles, moss is growing like crazy. Tracks of deer, raccoons, coyotes, birds, rabbits, squirrels and the occasional fresh water otter are easy to find.

Some of the holes are big enough and replenished quickly enough that we are able to irrigate from these natural springs, but the majority of our farm’s irrigation water is being pumped from a precious groundwater resource. In the absence of this groundwater, our farm would be dry and dead.

Farm evenings are amazing this time of year. The fields back up to the creek mark the line from which the golden hills rise in small mounds toward the sky. The sky has been filled with unique summer clouds that offer a texture much more rich that a clear sky.

In the final hour of the day, the smoke in the atmosphere from wild fires is coupled with the amber glow of our sun’s golden hour. Combined with the farm’s fields, hills and clouds, the farm atmosphere puts on a show that might compete with the World Cup.

The Water Pinch

The farm in 1976

The year that keeps coming up in the farming world about the water situation is 1976. For our farm, the last time the canal didn’t open up was in 1976. The one tangible piece of data that could be used to make a prediction about how much water will be in the creek and how long wells will hold out for is what happened in 1976. I was not yet born in 1976, and the piece of farm land that my parents were farming (ironically, 1976 was the year our farm was founded) was small and fed entirely by a small ground water well that had enough water to get us through the year.

Cache Creek on the farm.

For my kids, I started a “Water Log” in my journal for this year.  In it, I am keeping track of the details. The most significant detail this year is that the canal was able to take care of our water needs until May 15th after which point it went dry. Cache Creek is currently holding out for us, but the neighbor across the way who is farming 220 acres of olives and is completely dependent upon canal water moved his pumps into Cache Creek last week. It is hard for me to picture the creek having enough water for both of us through the entire summer.

Irrigation pipes

The farm has a set of ground water wells that we have historically not had to use. The other issue is that the wells are not in the best of locations, some of them are sitting in the middle of fields that we have elected to fallow due to the water shortage (we reduced our farmed acreage by 70 acres this year). The challenge is that it’s a lot of pipe needed to move the water from the various wells to all of the fields that need the water.

Water pump

The good news is that we have options. We sit on top of a healthy aquifer of water that got most farmers through 1976 and will do the same for our farm today — all we have to do it access the water. I sat down and made a water budget for the summer, looking at the crops we have committed to, historical weather patterns and added it all up. In the month of July, our farm will need about 15.7 acre-feet of water per week. If we ran our pumps six days per week, 12 hours per day, they would need to generate 1,187 gallons of water per minute. If we ran the pumps seven days per week, 18 hours per day, we would need 678 gallons per minute. Without the creek, I have a total of 525 gallons per minute of water in my wells.

Drilling a new well.

So, time to drill some new wells. On average, wells on our farm yield 100-200 gallons per minute (wells are about 250 feet deep). I need to develop another 300 gallons per minute, and I need to get that water from one end of the farm to the other. We just finished installing large, buried pipe and as you read this, I have three new wells being drilled. Well drillers are so busy that most of them will tell you they are booked out until December — we have been lucky to get this guy out. Cross your fingers for 300 gpm!