Tommy Bound

Tommy the San Marzano tomato is growing by leaps and bounds. All of our tomato plants are thanks to the organic compost I planted them with and regular watering during this annoying drought. I’ve had to pay close attention to keep them from growing into an unrestrained tangle. Last year I tried pruning and staking my tomato plants. It’s not just my inner Bondage Master at work, either. Tomato plants are vines. Except for varieties that have been bred to stop growing at a certain height, they continue to grow through the season and can become a big, sprawling mess. I prefer to keep my plants up off the ground. I do this by pruning them to one or two main vines and tying them to upright stakes.

Pruning tomatoes is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. On a tomato vine the leaves grow out each side as the vine grows longer. Left to its own devices, another branch of the vine called a sucker would sprout from the vine right above each leaf. Here’s a pencil-sized sucker that I’ll remove to keep the vine restrained. The vine is on the right, the leaf is on the left and the sucker is sticking up between them.

 

 

To remove suckers I just snap them off with my fingers if they’re small, or snip them with shears if they’ve gotten big and woody. Then the plant looks like this. The spot where the sucker was removed right in the middle.

 

 

The second part of this equation is keeping the pruned vines up off the ground. Those wire tomato cages you see everywhere? They’re pretty much worthless for any but the smallest plants. I use wooden or plastic-coated steel stakes eight feet in length buried about eighteen inches in the ground. The vines are tied to the stakes using old t-shirts ripped into strips. The fabric is soft and doesn’t cut into the vines if they blow around in the wind. I first tie the strip tightly around the stake, then bring the vine next to the knot and tie a loose loop around it so it has some room to move and grow.

 

 

Why go to all this effort? It’s more than just keeping the garden neater. The spores of diseases that can damage the leaves and fruit of tomatoes are harbored in the ground. Splashing rain—assuming we ever get any again—would move the spores up onto the plants more easily if they’re laying on the ground. Also, by keeping the plants slender and up in the air, they dry off quicker. It’s also been claimed that by limiting their growth this way that they produce less fruit but that it’s larger. That may be true because last year I had some pretty big tomatoes. I don’t particularly want larger fruit, but I do want the other benefits of pruning and staking. Training the plants this way also makes it easier to monitor and pick the fruit. Less stooping is always welcome.

 

Thanks to this tough love Tommy and his friends are coming along well in spite of the uncooperative weather. Before long these green tomatoes will be ripe and ready for eating and preserving.

 

 

How do you grow your tomatoes? Do you prune and stake them? I’m interested to hear about others’ experiences and what they’ve learned.

Puzzlement in the Carrot Patch

I’m puzzled about the carrot seeds I’ve planted. I made seed tape with two varieties of seed I purchased this year following this method and planted them back during the freaky warm spell that is now decidedly over. A few days later I found a package of those cool spherical Parisian carrots on the share shelf at the community garden. They were dated for sale in 2008. In a what-the-heck moment I grabbed them and sowed them thickly in a row since I didn’t know how long carrot sees remain viable in storage. A week or more later I sowed a couple more rows of the seed tape carrots. Here’s the result.

 

See that fuzzy green strip in the middle of the five rows? Those are the old Parisian seeds planted after the supposedly fresh, seed tape seed.  There is one seedling popped up in the first seed tape planting. Otherwise nada. Several factors need to be considered here like the quality of the new seed—I did go with the “low bid,”—the interaction of the clayey soil and the tape tissue, heck, it could even be that the hi-liter I used to mark the seed locations is an inhibitor. Regardless, I’m disappointed since we were hoping to grow lots of carrots this year. It may be time to buy different seed and start all over. What do you think? I really wanted those Atomic Red carrots.

Tommy Turns 18!

Here’s Tommy on his 18th birthday. It seems like just yesterday that I tucked his little seed into a little wad of ecologically-unsustainable peat but it really has been over two weeks, eighteen whole days. Just look how he’s growing! He’s even cut his first pair of true leaves.

 

Tommy is an heirloom cultivar—a portmanteau word from cultivated+variety—of tomato called San Marzano and has a long and distinguished history. The original San Marzano tomatoes were grown in Italy in the Eighteenth Century and have been prized since then for their flavor.  Since San Marzanos are heirlooms, it means they are open pollinated. A plant of this variety will pollinate itself and produce offspring that are the same as its parents. Hybrid garden plants can’t do this. Because of this, seed can be saved from year to year. In fact, Tommy was grown from seed I saved last year from a plant I got from a friend. With luck I’ll be able to save seed again this year and keep my own supply of this line going.

Here is where Tommy will eventually make his home. This is a view looking northeast.

It’s kind of hard to see the beds with the leaf mulch still in place, but in this view you can see that garden is now twelve beds,  each of which is approximately 8’x3’ in size.  The second and third bed from the grass path there in the far corner have been reserved for the tomatoes and peppers this year. I prepared them in advance by installing the support stakes and then seeding the ground with a cover crop of buckwheat. My hope is that the buckwheat will have time to grow and be cut back before tomato and pepper planting time. It will help loosen the soil and then provide mulch.

Until then, Tommy’s got a lot of growing up to do. I’ll keep you posted on his progress in the coming weeks.

Meet Tommy

I’d characterize March as the month that has the hardest time making up its mind. The weather changes quickly and even though it looked like this out the back door only a week and a half ago--

--today the temperature was in the lower sixties and crocuses and the early hellebores are blooming.  Curious as to how the vegetable garden was faring I took a walk and found some green poking up through the leaf mulch.

 

Spinach that survived all winter and is now sending out new growth

 

The French sorrel is unfurling red-tinged leaves.

The patch of alpine strawberries seems to have made it as well. I’ll need to divide and separate these early this season since I essentially unpotted the seedlings and stuck them in the ground as a clump last fall.

 

Only a few of the garlic plants have emerged so far. This one is ‘Music.’

 

The biggest surprise survivor is this battered Green Oakleaf lettuce.

 

Indoors the garden is off to a good start, too. I’ve been sowing seeds in the basement and the first batch is starting to germinate. Which brings me to Tommy.

 

At the Co-Conspirator’s suggestion we’ve christened this particular San Marzano tomato seedling Tommy. We’ll be following his progress through the season from the seed starting rack hopefully right to the table. Along the way we’ll share some interesting tidbits about gardening, canning, pickling and cooking. Tommy’s just a little sprout right now, but he’ll be all grown up almost before we notice.

Garden Planning

I suppose it’s time I got thinking about what to grow in the garden this year. It may only be the middle of January but with the way time flies when I’m having fun seed starting time will be here before I know it.

 

Last month I did an inventory of the seeds I have on hand with notes on quantity and age. Armed with a list of crops I’ve run out of and want to grow again as well as a wish list of new things I’d like to try I’ve been perusing the pile of seed catalogs. Some varieties are common to several sources and some are available at only one place. Clearly I’ll have to place more than one order, but I’ll check the local garden centers first, of course. I’m also anxiously anticipating the arrival of the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook that should be mailed toward the end of this month. I joined SSE last year for several reasons including access to that catalog of nearly fourteen thousand varieties. My hope is that some of the more unusual vegetables I’ve been reading about in nineteenth century garden books might be available there. And in addition to those sources, my seed guru will be offering up some goodies.

 

The part of the planning I don’t relish is trying to figure out how to rotate crops. In order to avoid depleting specific soil nutrients and to confuse overwintering pests one should avoid planting things from the same family in the same spot for several years. I like to think of myself as organized but when I look around online and in books at the way some people garden I wonder if they’re putting me on. I see a lot of plans where each bed has been assigned a neat succession of plantings to take it through the season. There’s even a nifty program that will help you in planning rotations. I couldn’t use it because I just don’t garden that way. 

 

To the extent that I do plan, I try to avoid egregious mistakes like planting all the tomatoes in the same place two years in a row. This year, for example, in the half of the garden we’d newly acquired I planted the tomatoes where I was fairly sure the previous gardener didn’t plant hers. Good so far. But I had too  many plants for that area so three additional plants found homes in three different rows of beans. I managed to get my Brassicas in a bed that had been mostly Brassica-free in 2010, but when some plants croaked early on I decided to fill that spot with another pepper. See the picture? Instead of neatly grouping plants like in the idealized plans, I’ve got random, single plants tucked in here and there wherever the opportunity arises. I can look back on previous years’ plans—which are actually records of what went on, not what was anticipated—and try to place things in the best spots. But it becomes something of a puzzle.

 

Maybe I just won’t worry about it too much. I’ll use my records to keep from putting entire blocks of plants where their relatives have grown for at least a couple years. But there’s inevitably going to be some overlap. If nothing else, I can use that as an excuse if something doesn’t grow as well as it should.

December Post Produce: Sautéed Brussels Sprouts!!!

Winter may actually be here now that we've had a couple of snowfalls. Now is when the staying power and storage characteristics that have made some crops popular is evident. When I visited the garden recently to harvest the last parsnips I also checked on the abandoned Brussels sprouts. Temperatures had been below freezing more than once so I wasn't really expecting them to be usable anymore. Mostly I wanted to get them pulled out and composted to keep the garden as tidy looking as I could, a hang-up I may work on overcoming in 2012. There were still at least a pound of tight little sprouts on the stalks just the right size for eating. I stripped them all off knocking ice pieces from inside the outer leaves as I went. A few days later we were doing a typical "what should we have for dinner?" and pulled the bag of sprouts out of the refrigerator. I was pleased to find that they weren’t mushy and watery like other vegetables that have been through freezing temperatures.

A quick sauté of lamb gyro sausage we had laying around with onions, red chili flakes and cherry tomatoes made a delicious and colorful dinner. There are still some sprouts in the fridge waiting for the next meal. I’m thinking they’ll probably accompany one of the local, free-range chickens we’ve got stashed in the freezer along with the last of the turnips.

This fascinating dish was brought to you for Post Produce for Daniel’s Your Small Kitchen Garden. Check it out for more gardening, cooking and preserving inspiration.

Not What I Expected

Today I made what was probably my last trip to the garden for the year. The aim was to harvest the last of the parsnips before the ground freezes much more. There were only a handful left. The few that I had dug up previously were really tasty. They were also surprisingly long and straight considering how much clay there is in the garden’s soil. Not so with today’s harvest! Most of these roots were forked and twisted like crazy. Only one was somewhat straight. A couple had wound around each other and intertwined but I managed to wiggle them apart. Another reminder that if I’m going to grow more root crops next year like I plan to I’m going to have to do some more soil prep.

Braised Sauerkraut and Bratwurst

In my last post I mentioned how nice it would be to have a summer kitchen for when canning or cooking are too hot or smelly to be done indoors. Almost immediately after that it occurred to me that we can and do cook outdoors and I'm not talking about the grill. Last evening I wanted to make some braised sauerkraut but didn’t want to risk another case of “outhouse kitchen”--Enter the Dutch oven!

 

I started by setting up a cooking area on our patio. I laid out some of the leftover pavers we've got lying around to make an elevated, fireproof platform for the coals. Cooking directly on the patio would have scorched it. When we are camping and cook in the Dutch oven we just place the coals directly on a patch of bare ground.

 

We had just enough charcoal left over to do one round of cooking. For dishes that take more than an hour or so, we usually end up lighting a new batch to replace the burned down coals but I didn't anticipate needing to do that with this dish. I piled them up and put a match to them. We've always used briquettes because Dutch oven cooking recipes are often calibrated to the number to use. There is a bag of real hardwood charcoal laying around here somewhere and I'm thinking some time I may give it a try and see how the process compares. Incidentally, it was about this time a light breeze kicked up and I was starting to question the wisdom of doing this with a thick layer of dry leaves all over the back yard.

 

While the coals were starting I assembled the first ingredients in the Dutch oven. The full recipe is at the end of this post.

 

When the coals all had some ash on them I arranged two thirds in a rough circle just a bit smaller than the Dutch Oven. They're spaced so they aren't touching so air can circulate. This particular Dutch oven has three short legs that elevate it just above the coals. The one we us indoors in the oven doesn't have legs.

 

The Dutch oven is placed on the cooking area and the remaining third of the coals arranged evenly around the edge of the lid. As you can see, this oven has another feature the one for indoor use lacks. There is a lip around the edge of the lid to hold the coals on. Heating from both the top and bottom are probably more important when baking, but I thought since it was getting cold out a little extra heat wouldn’t hurt.

 

Meanwhile back in the kitchen, we unwrapped the much-anticipated special ingredient. At yesterday’s Market we picked up a package of smoked bratwurst from Pecatonica Valley Farm. 

 

To get a little extra flavor out of the brats we seared them a bit –in cast iron, of course, but they were on the dry side and I think if I were to do this again I’d skip this step. It really didn’t seem to add anything to the dish.

 

By this time the sauerkraut and friends had been bubbling for a while. No foul odors, by the way, were detected!

 

I sliced up the brats into thirds and nestled them into the kraut to share flavors for a while.

 

The final result, served with a delicious mound of garlicky mashed potatoes was a hearty, seasonal and satisfying meal.

 

Dutch Oven Braised Sauerkraut and Bratwurst

Ingredients

• 1/2 White Onion, Sliced
• 1 Pint Home-Fermented and Canned Sauerkraut (substitute other if you absolutely must)
• 1/2 Cup Local Beer
• 1 1/2" Cups Chicken Stock
• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon Caraway Seed
• 1/2 teaspoon Dried Thyme
• Black Pepper to Taste
• 2 Delicious, Local, pasture-raised-pork bratwurst

Method

Start and arrange coals as described above. You will need sixteen coals for under the oven and seven for the lid, a total of twenty-three.

Place sauerkraut in a colander or strainer and rinse off salty brine. Add to Dutch oven along with the beer, stock, herbs and pepper.

Place oven on coals. Note: Do not preheat oven and then add cold ingredients. Shocking the hot metal thusly just isn’t good for it. Allow to simmer for 15-20 minutes.

Slice bratwurst into thirds and add to simmering sauerkraut. Allow to simmer for an additional 2o minutes.

Serve with a delicious starchy side dish and more local beer.

 

Serves 2

Canning the Kraut

Apparently my first attempt at making sauerkraut was successful. Along the way there were a couple of surprises. The first was that it didn't stink. What a relief. I think the method of covering it with plastic wrap had something to do with that. When I'd check on its progress I always did a sniff test and while it developed a "vegetably" fragrance it wasn't offensive. You could only smell it if you stuck your nose right in the crock.

The second surprise was that it was done fermenting long before I expected it to be. I was figuring on a four week process. Somewhere in week three I read something to the effect of "it's done when it stops bubbling." I hadn't noticed mine bubbling for several days at least so I decided to go ahead and put it away.

Freezing didn't seem like a good idea and the refrigerator was way too full at the time so I opted for canning it using the boiling water bath method. The entire batch fit nicely in four pint jars. During the canning I could definitely smell it but didn't think much of it. Soon after I was done the Co-conspirator came home and announced that the kitchen smelled like an outhouse.


Earlier this year I did a fun little "dream home" exercise where I listed on paper all the things I'd like to have as part of my ideal home. One feature is a summer kitchen--an outdoor, covered but unenclosed cooking area. There we could can away to our hearts' content without steaming up the house in the heat of July, fry fish and can sauerkraut without stinking up the place, and share the "external benefits" of our cooking adventures more with our neighbors.

Post Produce: Peppers!

I'm going to spare you all the highly, excessively alliterative content I considered including in this post. Suffice it to say I'm dealing with a plethora of peppers as I participate in my first Post Produce. A couple days ago I finally called the pepper harvest over and harvested every last one of them. We may have some sunny days but it's going to stay cold and the chances of many more of them growing appreciably or even ripening are pretty slim. I selected a good quantity for freezing and then, faced with this abundance I decided it was time to try pickling some.


The first recipe I used was the basic one for hot peppers in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving. It's a simple solution of vinegar and water flavored with garlic. I mixed it up by using different peppers, treatments and additional vegetables. Some recipes I had looked at called for blistering and peeling the peppers first so I did that with the largest of the remaining Chervena Chushkas. These are so good this way I may have to pressure can some next year so I have them for making muhummara. For now the commercial bottled ones will have to do.


In the end I had eight pints. Three are straight, whole jalapenos, two are the roasted sweet peppers with some carrots added to one jar, two are green Italian frying peppers with celery in one and onion in the other and the last jar is plain Ancho Gigantea--none of which were actually gigantic.


With these done and out of the way I'm still left with quite a few more green Chervena Chushka peppers. For these I'll use Ball's "Pickled Pepper Mix" recipe. This version calls for slitting and brining the peppers for twelve to eighteen hours so I'm timing that process so that I can do the actual pickling tomorrow morning.


Now my only question is how we're going to eat all these pickled peppers?!

Sauerkraut? Yes, Sauerkraut

For nearly a year I've had a little voice in the back of my head urging me to try making my own sauerkraut. It started whispering about the time I attended the first Fermentation Fest last fall in Reedsburg. I didn't attend a sauerkraut workshop, but in an exhibit I saw there and the reading I've done since I've discovered that making sauerkraut at home is a pretty simple and straightforward process.

What may have been holding me back was the memory of a crock of cabbage fermenting in my grandmother's kitchen. First, it was huge. At least it seemed huge to me and I've seen some big ol' crocks at the Fest and elsewhere. Also, the recipes at the National Center for Home Food Preservation and in my USDA book call for twenty-five pounds of cabbage! I hate wasting food and was concerned that if it "went bad" or we didn't like it that there would be a lot of cabbage to throw out and it wouldn't even be compostable because of the salt. Second, I recall my grandmother's batch of sauerkraut having an odor my young nose didn't care for. This week the weather is going to be open-window warm, but we can't always count on that. A closed up house and a stinky food experiment brewing on the kitchen counter are not a good combination.

The first hurdle I overcame fairly recently. Looking around at people on the Internet making sauerkraut revealed many were making smaller batches. Duh! I've known how to scale recipes pretty much forever but for some reason I had a mental block about this one. I blame the looming image of those ginormous crocks. The second apprehension I reasoned away. I know my food tastes have changed since I was young so I probably have developed some kind of odor tolerance, too. As long as it's not as bad as the collard blanching episode, I figured we'd survive.

The ingredients in basic sauerkraut are simple and inexpensive: cabbage and salt. The cabbage, just shy of six pounds, I picked up at the Westside Community Market for a whopping $1.50. I'm sure it's available for even less at other places. The salt I already had on hand of course and I would only need three tablespoons probably costing pennies. The crock was another matter. I've got a rectangular food-grade plastic container I use to make kombucha. The shape is no problem since a scoby will grow to fit, but for the sauerkraut I wanted something round so I could use the traditional method of weighting it down with a plate. As luck would have it we actually had a real stoneware crock sitting around that had not been drilled to function as a planter. I scrubbed it up thoroughly and put it to work.

The first step was to cut the cabbage into as thin of strips as I could. I set to work with a knife and decided after less than two minutes there was no way I was going to do the whole head that way. Instead I resorted to the food processor and made much faster and perfectly acceptable progress. I began to get worried when the cabbage filled our two largest stainless steel bowls. There was no way it was all going to fit into that little crock! I decided to just proceed with the recipe and then either try to scrounge another container once the crock was full or grudgingly pitch whatever didn't fit.

I began salting the cabbage and mixing it around in the bowls with my hands. One of those little kitchen miracles started to occur. The strands of cabbage wilted and collapsed and the mounds got smaller and smaller. Soon I was able to get it all in one bowl and it still continued to collapse as I moved it around. When I started packing the cabbage in the crock, tamping it down with my knuckles as firmly as I could without breaking it it took up even less space.While a whole head of cabbage may feel dense and heavy, it's clearly got a lot of air in it. By the time it was all in, the crock which is less than eight inches across and maybe ten inches deep wasn't even half full!

By this point in the process a bit of juice but not a whole lot was starting to come out. There was just enough to cover the cabbage so I didn't add any additional brine and put in one of Grandma's plates in weighted down with a clean jar full of water. Soon after I got thinking about the gold band on the rim of the plate and substituted another kind of plate. I think the paint/glaze probably contains some kind of metal and I didn't want to risk either the brine damaging it or the metal reacting with the brine and creating off flavors or even making the sauerkraut toxic.

The final step was topping it with some plastic secured by a rubber band as suggested here. Now all I do is wait four or five weeks and keep the surface of the brine . As of this moment it's been fermenting four days and yesterday began to show a small amount of foam bubbling up around the plate. I skimmed a bit of it off but am trying to keep the top on as much as possible to maintain at least a low oxygen if not actually anaerobic environment. Stay tuned for updates as this little project progresses.

Roasting Peppers -- I've Figured It Out

This year the only pepper seeds I started for planting in the garden were for an heirloom variety called Chervena Chushka. The plants turned out to be prolific producers and I was able to harvest a good number for roasting.



In the past my attempts at roasting peppers haven't been entirely successful. The idea is to char the skin so that it rubs off cleanly and easily and in the process the flesh of the pepper is rendered soft, sweet and delicious. The method I previously used consisted of taking the grid off one of the gas burners and laying/holding the pepper directly in the flame. When I tried that this time, I got the same results I always have. The skin blistered, blackened and peeled readily on the bulges of the pepper but stayed fresh and undercooked in the valleys, so to speak. I got frustrated with this process and decided to try the broiler method. I arranged the peppers on a baking sheet and positioned them as close to the broiler element as the oven rack allowed and watched closely as the wider parts began to blister and char while the tips remained red and fresh this time. This wasn't any better than the flame. Deciding that at least on the stovetop I could tediously direct the flame at the spots that obviously still needed it, I pulled the peppers from the oven. That's when the discovery happened. Now that the peppers had been pre-roasted or at least had the chill taken off them, they blistered and charred quickly and evenly in the gas flame.



After each pepper was completely roasted I placed it in a pan covered with foil to allow them to steam a little longer and loosen the skin.



After they'd all been roasted and rested, the skins slipped off ridiculously easily revealing the sweet, fragrant flesh.



In the end we stuffed them with polenta and goat cheese and served them with some nice roasted halibut and Tasty Evergreen and Sungold tomatoes also from the garden.

The Tasting

Earlier this week I pickled some golden beets and eggs together. I waited a few days and this evening took out a beet and an egg to give them a taste.



The eggs were a little rubbery but not as firm as past ones I've made. Maybe in time they'll get tougher. I'm hoping not. The yolks were just set in the center so if anything I undercooked them. The flavor was delicious, as was the case with the beet. Sweet, spicy, earthy. The gold color hasn't penetrated far into the egg white but it might given a couple more weeks. We'll see if they last that long.

And if you're feeling like hearing me yammer on about pickling, check out my conversation with Steve Howard over on the Growing Your Grub podcast.

Pickled Beets and Eggs

Yesterday I was contemplating the heap of beets accumulating in the crisper drawer and wondering what I was going to do with all of them. As luck would have it, I had managed to harvest some of the Burpee's Golden when they were still small--just the right size for pickling. For some added interest, I decided to include a few hard-boiled eggs.


In the past I've pickled the typical red beets together with eggs. The color from the beets works its way into the egg white giving it a rosy pink color. While the color of the golden beets isn't as intense as the red ones, I'm hoping to end up with some golden eggs. They may not protect us from a failing economy, but they'll be fun to eat.


The recipe I used is the "Spicy Pickled Beets" in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, a book I highly recommend to anyone looking to try canning and pickling. As you can see in this shot of the finished product, I didn't use the recommended two-part lid canning jars. I'm treating this batch as refrigerator pickles that will be eaten up in a relatively short time. Now I just have to have the patience to wait a few days for the flavors to develop before I can taste the results!

Tomatoes

I've wanted to write about tomatoes for a while now, but I just couldn't figure out how to approach the subject. To me, tomatoes are one of, if not the best reason to have a garden of one's own.

This season I "undertook" growing tomatoes like never before. I decided to get into cultivating them, coaxing them toward maximum production, treating them like the special, Chosen plants they are. The results have been fairly satisfying.



Have you seen the movie "Ratatouille?" Do you remember the scene where Anton Ego takes a taste of the special ratatouille and is immediately transported in his mind to a childhood moment where taste and memory meet? Tomatoes do that for me.



I can munch (if I had to) on the pathetic, bland commercial tomatoes from the grocery store all year and not feel a thing. There's nothing to them. But when I get my first, real local.,home-grown tomato of the summer my eyes close and I'm taken back. I don't know when it is, but I can picture exactly where. I'm at the supper table with my family and there's a plate of thick slices of vine-ripened tomatoes. They were, and still are, the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. Hands down.



So far the tomatoes I've harvested this summer have become snax-off-the-vine while gardening, salad items, sandwich additions and tasty side dishes all on their own. I've also cooked them into thick sauce with and without spicy local Italian sausage. Today I oven-dried a big batch which, of course, became a little batch of concentrated savory/sweet flavor. They'll be stewn on pizzas and folded into pastas over the coming months and taking me back to this time when ripe tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes are easy to come by.