Our lone sungold survivor, one month after potting its seed.

It’s been four weeks since I planted a dozen of last year’s sungold seeds in a soil-filled container, and 18 days since the first (and only) sprout appeared. I decided to call it Seth, because I have a soft spot for religious lore; Seth was the brother of Cain and Abel, and is the progenitor of all mankind. So, you know, appropriate. All future generations (ideally) will stem from his line. I don’t much like the name Seth though, so I tend to just call it Tomato.

It’s been two weeks of trying to ensure that the plant stays appropriately watered, properly sunned, and a little mechanically stimulated. A couple of times a day, whenever I can sneak away for a moment, I’ve been giving its leaves a bit of gentle stroking, and maybe talking to it a little bit too — breathing lots of lovely carbon dioxide on him, etc. Providing light physical stimuli to plants imitates outdoor growing conditions like wind, rain, and animal passersby; it’s called thigmomorphogenesis, and it results in hardier specimens. Still, please don’t tell Heather I caress the tomato.

Today, our sole second-generation plant is doing very well. It’s sprouted a number of true tomato plant leaves, and stands at just over two inches tall. I created a little greenhouse dome thing for it by affixing a larger plastic container to the top of a smaller one. Usually I leave him outside during the day to stay warm and sunned (though it’s been pretty gray lately), but yesterday, I left the top down, so he could feel some real New England air for the first time. Now that he’s got the warm(er) air on his leaves and the wind at his back, I’ll pull back on babying it and just enjoy watching it grow. With some luck, it’ll be ready for transplanting at the end of the month. Ish. Wish him luck!

How are your tomato plants doing?

The always-awesome Copley Square Farmers Market. Begins May 17th, 2011; runs every Tuesday and Friday throughout the summer/fall. // Flickr/WBUR

It’s been a very rainy April this year in Boston: over 4 inches have fallen thus far, with a bit more likely before the month is over (last April we got under 2 inches). It’s what we’ve heard is supposed to happen this month. April is wet, and then, just when you can’t stand it any more, things turn beautiful. If you’ve been around the greater Boston area in the past few days, you’ve likely already noticed this phenomenon coming to pass: flowers are blooming, tree buds are blossoming, green shoots are appearing in spots which before were dominated by browns and grays. It’s official: May is upon us.

• Monday, May 2nd: South Boston, Boston, MA. Open Mondays from 12:00pm to 6:00pm. It’s a small market, but I believe it’s the first to open. It’s located at 446 West Broadway St., right next to the Bank of America. Accessible via the Red Line (Broadway stop) or the 9 and 10 bus.
• Tuesday, May 17th: Copley Square, Boston, MA. Open Tuesdays and Fridays from 11:00am to 6:00pm. The market is located right on Copley Square, at Boylston St. and Dartmouth St. in Boston. Accessible via any Green Line train (Copley stop) or Orange Line train (Back Bay), as well as any Commuter Rail trains or buses that stop at Back Bay. Bus routes that stop at Copley include the 9, 10, 39, and 55.
• Sunday, May 22nd: Charles Square Farmers Market, Cambridge, MA. Open Sundays 10:00am to 3:00pm and Fridays (starting June 3rd) from 12:00pm to 6:00pm. The Market is located at Bennett St. and Eliot St. in Cambridge, right on the plaza of the Charles Hotel. Accessible via the Red Line (Harvard stop), as well as any bus routes that stop in the area, including the 1, the 66, 71, 73, 77, and  86.
• Monday, May 23rd: Central Square, Cambridge, MA. Open Mondays from 12:00pm to 6:00pm. The Market is located in the parking lot on the corner of Norfolk St. and Bishop Allen Dr., behind Harvest Co-op Market. Accessible via the Red Line (Central stop), as well as any bus routes that service Central, including the 1, the 47, the 70, and the 91.
• Wednesday, May 25th: Davis Square, Somerville, MA. Open Wednesdays from 12:00pm to 6:00pm.  The Market is located at Day St. and Herbert St., right around the corner from Redbones. Accessible via the Red Line (Davis stop), as well as any bus routes that service the area, including the 87, 89, 90, and 96.
• Thursday, May 26th: Dewey Square, Boston, MA. Open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:30am to 6:30pm. The market is located at Atlantic Ave & Summer St. in Boston, right across the street from South Station. Accessible via the Red Line (South Station stop), as well as the Silver Line, any commuter rail train that services South Station, and bus routes such as the 4 and the 7.
• Saturday, June 4th: Union Square, Somerville, MA. Open Saturdays from 9:00am to 1:00pm. The market is located at Somerville Ave. and Washington St. in Somerville. It’s accessible mostly by bus: the 85, 86, 87, 91, and CT2 all stop right next to it.

COMING THIS SPRING: Twelve seeds were planted. Only one survived. Dun dun dunnnnn.

Ten days ago, I planted twelve sungold seeds I’d saved from last year into a little plastic container filled with soil. After a week of fretting that nothing was happening, sometime last night, a stem emerged from the ground: the (potentially) only heir to our sungold family lineage.

I’m hoping against hope that more of them sprout up over the next 48 hours or so, that this week’s cold and rainy weather has simply made these little guys run in slow motion. I’m not sure what the odds of any given sprouted plant have of surviving, but given the fact that we’re first-time parents, I’m worried that they’re not particularly good. It’d be nice to have more than one shot at it. But if this is the only plant we’ll get, then dammit, we’ll give it all we’ve got. It’s currently got a front-row seat in the sunniest south-facing window of the house.

What you’re looking at right now is a cotyledon, essentially the first growth which shoots out from the plant’s seed. Isn’t it remarkable how much larger the sprouted plant already is than the seed itself? Tomato plants are dicots, meaning that they have two embryonic leaves, as you can see in the picture. These are not yet truly tomato plant leaves, as they are present in the seed prior to germination (as opposed to growing after the seed germinates), but they are photosynthetic, meaning that as soon as they open up, they’re in charge of supplying the growing plant with energy. That’s why it’s important that they get immediate sunlight.

It looks like there’s some sun in the forecast for tomorrow and Friday, which hopefully is the case. I don’t really feel as though it’s proper to run an indoor fluorescent light just to develop this one plant. It’s going to have to grow naturally or not grow at all. Hopefully the little guy’s hardy. Things happen quickly in the springtime, so there’ll be plenty to monitor in the coming days.

It's okay that they're a little fuzzy, right? I think it's okay.

We had a very successful go of it last summer with our crop of sungold tomatoes. We did make one mistake, though: we weren’t very good about saving our seeds. As such, our eldest plant was mostly expired when we finally thought to try and save seeds from it, and the last seed-bearing stragglers we plucked from her branches from were only half-ripe. We took them anyways, hoping that their champion pedigree would make up for our haphazard collection practices.

Late (very late) last fall, I took the most developed tomatoes I could and squeezed out the biggest seeds I could find, separating them from the pulp etc. using the fermentation method (which is loosely described here).  I wasn’t terribly confident about the whole process, but it did leave me with some seeds of heretofore uncertain viability. These went into a drawer for the winter.

On Sunday, I pulled them out and potted them in soil inside an old plastic fruit container, which are said to be good for starting seeds because the bottoms are lined with holes which allow for some drainage. I stuffed that container into a second container, sans holes, so we won’t have little muddy water spots jeopardizing our security deposit. This container holds twelve seeds, planted roughly three quarters of an inch apart from one another. Roughly.

Dirt: The pandora's box of gardening, the bane of photography.

You’re supposed to plant seeds 6-8 weeks before you want them outside, meaning that these could be a few weeks late, especially if you’re the sort that likes to gamble with frosts. At about 30 days, you should be getting actual tomato plant-looking leaves. This is our first time trying seeds, though, so we’ll be happy to get anything to grow at all. If not, we’ll probably transplant from Farmers Markets around the city (our plants last year came from Atlas Farm, at the Copley Square market).

It won’t take long to find out if any of these things will grow – probably only a week or so. I’m feeling a little parental right now. Do they have enough water? Are they warm enough? I may or may not have played music for them when I was planting them. I’ve heard it makes them smarter. This anxious gardner will be spending many a moment over the next week or so squinting at the soil and hoping for a little green.

(Yes, I planted them on Sunday morning and am writing the update on Monday night. No, nothing has grown yet. Yes, I am frustrated at that. No, I won’t be waking up at 3am to check on them. Yes, that might be a lie).

As the last (we hope) snow of the winter melts, our growing garlic catches some mid-afternoon sun.

We’re officially two weeks into spring here in the Northeast, and while temperatures have been creeping upward, it’s never easy in the early going, as was evidenced by the wholly unwelcome snowfall we saw this past Friday. Luckily, such setbacks tend to be short-lived in the April sun. Snow contributes to May’s flowers just the same. It’ll also contribute to whatever’s been overwintered – like, say, this lovely hardneck garlic!

We received a beautiful-looking head of garlic late last summer from Turtle Creek Trading Co., and in the middle of October, I planted it… at 8PM on a Friday night, in the rain. The arrangement was far from ideal, but it was the only free time I had to dig and plant before temperatures were set to drop into “it’s too cold to plant things” territory. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of digging in wet, rocky soil, you’ll understand how much fun this was. Still, I got us a plot about six feet long and two feet wide, into which went twenty-two bulbs of garlic. I think I inverted the shovel, stabbed a hole into the ground, dropped the bulb in, and then covered it with dirt. Two rows of 11 bulbs each, set to overwinter.

It was our first time planting anything in the fall. After the huge amounts of snow we received began to melt in early March, we discovered that a few little green-brown shoots (it felt like a miracle) had begun to poke their heads through the soil. We were worried that they’d started to come up too soon, which I suppose is very human thing to do: could these plants possibly survive the winter? Yes, they can. Luckily, the sunlight has been a revelation for these little guys; the first to sprout are now a good four or five inches tall, and there are probably a dozen of them that have poked through the soil thus far.

In a couple of months, we’ll hopefully have a bunch of scapes to harvest. Cutting off the scapes serves two purposes: it allows the plant to send more energy to the bulb than to the scape, and it provides you with delicious scapes to eat. Then, in July or August, if all goes well, once the leaves of the plant start to look pale and tired, we’ll have almost two dozen heads of garlic to harvest. Spring is back, everyone! Here’s to a long and successful growing season.

From Brooklyn, NY: red honey. It's red because it contains Red #40, a food coloring additive used in things like Mountain Dew Code Red. It's also not honey, because the bees used High Fructose Corn Syrup instead of pollen. Yum! // Gita Nandan (oneearth.org)

Per an article in last week’s Monday edition of the New York Times, a number of beekeepers in Brooklyn were startled recently when their bees began coming home a curious shade of red — and then producing bright-red honey. While the beekeepers were initially perplexed, the mystery didn’t persist for very long.  A bit of common-sense guesswork — and a lab test of the honeycomb — pointed to a likely explanation: the bees were getting into the runoff from a local maraschino cherry factory. The maraschino cherry, for those who aren’t sure, is a fully modernized product: a cherry preserved (and de-colored) in alcohol and then soaked in a suspension of corn syrup and Red 40 (a bright red food coloring). The red coloring in the “honey?” Yep. It’s red 40.

This is an interesting story to consider for two reasons. One is that this sort of thing — contamination of honey — is not new. Unless honey is produced under very isolated conditions, it is probable that it contains numerous pesticides and other chemicals. This is because bees are foragers, and because their furry bodies happen to be very good at attracting tiny particles. Adding to these concerns is a practice dubbed “honey laundering.” To skirt tariffs and other barriers, many honey importers – especially Chinese ones — route their honey through other countries on paper, so that they may evade fees and FDA inspection. This honey may, subsequently, be bulked up with things like water and corn syrup, or may even contain antibiotics illegal in this country, such as when the feds seized 64 drums of honey in Philadelphia last June because it contained the potent antibiotic chloramphenicol. Most honey is contaminated. This is only a story because of the red food coloring.

The other reason the red honey story is interesting is because it’s such an obvious market conflict. When asked about the red honey, Andrew Cote, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, offered as succinct a summary of modern economics as can be delivered:

“…in an interview, Mr. Coté said that the bees were as great a nuisance to the factory as Red Dye No. 40 was to the beekeepers.”

It’s very easy to say that the beekeepers are the victims here. Anyone with even a basic understanding of human nutrition will likely argue that honey is a more important product than maraschino cherries are. Extending this notion further, it’s obvious that bees in general contribute far more to the economy than maraschino cherry producers. We as a society demand both though, however unfortunate it may be that a market for maraschino cherries exists. We can’t simply say that the cherry factory is in the wrong and should do x, y, or z in order to solve the problem.

It’s a complicated economic issue. The factory has the legal right to produce what it does, where it does, how it does. The beekeepers also have the legal right to raise bees, collect their honey, and let them fly around the city pollinating things. The Coase Theorem is a good framework with which to look at this problem. It states that when an externality exists (an externality is a cost or benefit of a transaction not paid for by the parties in the transaction), then the most efficient solution will arise regardless of property rights, assuming there are no significant costs to arranging a solution. In other words, they’ll negotiate it, and come to whichever solution is actually most “worth it” for everyone involved.

In reality, there are all sorts of problems with applying Coase’s ideas. Property rights aren’t clearly defined in this case, namely surrounding where the bees are allowed to fly. In reality, the factory owner could justifiably poison the bees while they were on his property, a step he has been commended for not taking. Why hasn’t he? Because doing so would probably be bad press (and because he might not have sufficient reason for doing so, if the exerminator would be costly — the bees, after all, do not affect his bottom line). Another problem is that transactions between the beekeepers and the cherry factory are not market-based, but negotiations, and ones in which there is incomplete information at that.

There are other potential victims, depending on the scope of the problem: if the nectar affects the bees abilities to pollinate local crops (or simply causes them to ignore those crops in favor of the maraschino juice), those who depend on local bees for pollination could stand to lose revenue. That means local growers and beekeepers are likely to foot most or all of the bill, either by paying the factory to have bee-discouraging devices (like nets) installed, or by paying local property owners to install high-quality nectar sources, so that the bees will choose those (hopefully) over the high-fructose corn syrup.

The factory owner, because he seems to be a conscientious individual who values neighborly affection (his family has run the factory there since 1948), has actually already spent on the issue — namely his time, as the previously-linked article can attest to. It’s possible that he is the rare individual who sees value beyond his ledger, and, though he wouldn’t have to, will spend money on the problem, too, maybe even just by requiring his workers to take the time to use the preventative measures purchased by the beekeepers. That would be, all things considered, a very encouraging outcome. He can hardly be asked to stop making maraschino cherries — until, that is, we all decide to stop buying them.

Fluffy, nutty, gritty: the fresh-ground whole wheat pancake. Something you need to try.

I think that pancakes are probably one of the finest foods in the world. They’re easy to make, impressively adaptable, and fabulously delicious. Eaten plain, with a little maple syrup? Yes. With fruit and whipped cream? Yes. Studded with chocolate chips and stuffed with peanut butter? Yes. While its true that there exists some debate about whether they should be thin and crispy or thick and pillowy, this is an argument kept afloat by fools: they should most certainly be big, puffy, and ready to sop up whatever’s beside them on the plate. They’re a near-perfect comfort food.

While the pancake’s ability to stand up to anything you can throw at them has helped them to be one of the world’s most popular foods, a little something can be lost through these additions. The rise of the garish, stuffed-to-the-gills pancake seems to have accompanied the advent of boxed pancake mixes made from inferior ingredients: when you’re cooking with leaden bleached white flour, or a just-add-water supermarket mix, you could probably be forgiven for needing to throw in a bunch of sugary extras just to make it palatable (though you’d not be forgiven for purchasing that boxed stuff in the first place). Can’t we cheer, every so often, for the dish at a far more basic level? Can’t we enjoy a pancake made from pretty much just wheat, baking powder, liquid, and a little salt? We can — especially when we’re lucky enough to be able to mill the flour ourselves.

Probably one of the oldest and most ubiquitous (from injera, to the crepe, to the johnnycake) prepared foods in the world, the pancake is simple: ground-up grains, water, and if you’re lucky, a fat source, like maybe milk instead of water, or some egg, or some butter. Nowadays, most of us are lucky, and so in America this is how we make them: flour, milk, eggs, butter, salt, and a leavener (usually baking powder). Common variants include pancakes which use buttermilk instead of milk, or ones which use a little sugar or vanilla for added flavor.

Wheat Berries from White Oak Farm in Belchertown, MA. Flour comes from here.

I recently came into posession of a sack of wheat berries which was grown on White Oak Farm in Belchertown MA. I purchased them through the ladies of the now-defunct Boston Localvores; this was extra-enjoyable, because the berries are local, but you can get whole wheat berries wherever you can buy most grains. Whole Foods carries them, as does Harvest Co-Op.

Flour makes up the bulk of the pancake, and really, the bulk of most baked goods. It is arguably among the more important ingredients in the world, but in America, it’s an afterthought: all-purpose flour is all-purpose flour. It’s a white powder. Sometimes it’s whole-wheat, when you’re trying to be healthier. In reality, flour is just a grain (like wheat, rice, corn, etc) which has been pulverized, en masse, into a powder. Supermarket flours are “refined,” which means that much of the actual kernel of grain is removed, and what is left behind is the fine, carbohydrate-rich endosperm. Why? Because the endosperm is texturally homogenous and doesn’t spoil as fast as the other parts of the grain. Unfortunately, it’s also generally devoid of nutrients (which are all stored in the parts which get discarded), and so is enriched by manufacturers with various vitamins.

The KitchenAid Grain Mill attachment smashing up some wheat berries to make the tastiest flour ever.

As a result, almost all flour that Americans purchase from stores is of dubious nutritional value and has absolutely no flavor whatsoever. That’s why you have to add all that other stuff to white flour pancakes in order to make them good. Even supermarket whole wheat flour is bland and stale-tasting. Luckily, making flour yourself is extremely easy, especially if you can afford to make a modest investment in a grain mill, either a hand-cranked one or an electric one.
And what better thing to do with that mill — and that flour — than make pancakes? The flour obtained from the mill is grittier than refined flour, but this is more charming than troubling: it gives your baked goods an extra layer of character to go along with the fresher, nuttier flavors of the flour. This flour also wicks up a little more moisture, so add liquids slowly and be prepared to fiddle with the recipe a tiny bit.

• 2c flour
• 2tsp salt
• 2tbsp baking powder
• 2 eggs
• 2c liquid (milk, soymilk, almond milk — even water will work)

Yes, it’s that linear. If you find that you like things a little thicker or thinner, just adjust the amount of flour or liquid you use, but a 1:1 pancake recipe will absolutely work. Mix the wet ingredients in one bowl and the dry ingredients in another, and then  mix with a spoon until just barely combined. Wait a minute or two before baking, because with whole wheat flour, the consistency will change as the flour sucks up the liquid.

If you prefer, you can swap out a small amount of the liquid  for something like melted butter or canola oil. You can also whip the egg whites and then fold them into the batter just before cooking. They’re best cooked in a skillet with butter.  Pancakes are a relatively simple thing to make. The best cooking strategy is to make them all the time — not only will you learn how to make the perfect pancakes for you, but you’ll get to eat all of the hits, misses, and everything in between. They’ll all be good. They’re pancakes.

The results are awesome. Because of the flecks of bran throughout the mixture, the pancakes, while still light, seem much more rustic and authentic. They are also delicious without needing to add any sugar whatsoever; eaten plain, they are somewhat akin to a bran muffin. They’re also more substantive and filling than regular pancakes — even though the recipe is virtually identical, these feel like a serious treat, like you’re going back in time to enjoy an old-timey meal on the farmstead. Topped with some homemade jam (from our massive quantities of strawberries picked at Sapowsky Farm in Granby this summer), honey from Jamaica Plain, and fresh greek yogurt (from Sophia’s Greek Pantry in Belmont, purveyors of what is easily the best greek yogurt in the world), these are one of our favorite breakfasts to make. With a good grain mill, they actually only take a few more minutes than using store-bought flour. Home-milling flour isn’t for everyone, but if the idea interests you, go for it — you’ll have all the more appreciation for what used to be a boring, uninspiring pantry item.

Boston's city Hall Plaza -- one of the ugliest places in the developed world. Sustainable food trucks would spruce up the area, improve Boston's rep as a leading green city, and, you know, be delicious.

As has been mentioned here previously, the City of Boston has recently begun an initiative to populate City Hall Plaza with (hopefully) sustainably-minded Food Trucks beginning in approximately April of next year.  The Mayor’s office’s folks just finished running an open call for submissions; that call is now over, and they’ve winnowed down the entrants to a list of 12 Semifinalists. That list is available here; please check out the entries and vote on which six concepts you’d like to see advance to the next phase.

As a reminder, there’s a good chance that the restaurant which wins the contest will actually be serving many thousands of meals in City Hall Plaza to the workers of downtown Boston next year, so its important that we select a business whose sustainability plan seems earnest and legitimate. It’s obvious, when reading the blurbs, which businesses gave more thought to this than others.

(Sorry, Sushi Station — you’re probably not making my Top 6).

Downtown Boston really, really needs healthy, sustainable alternatives to the food that’s available there right now. Go read about the potential trucks and vote!

Clover Food Lab has enjoyed a very successful summer in Dewey Square. Who will be the star of next summer's mobile food scene? // weeklydig.com

Food trucks! Long a staple of the West Coast food scene, food trucks have been gaining popularity both locally and nationally in recent times. They’re a hit with consumers (especially young ones) because they offer quick, lower-cost meal options which don’t necessarily offer a significant downgrade from restaurant-quality food. Local governments, too, are starting to pay attention to them, seeing them as a low-cost way to potentially attract foot traffic and patronage to previously underutilized public spaces. The trucks are just one part of a resurgence in the larger ”street food” scene; carts, bicycles, and towable stands have all been benefitting from renewed interest in this form of straightforward food delivery. The city of Boston jumped on the bandwagon this summer when they worked with the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy to install a number of mobile food vendors on the Greenway. Now, the mayor’s office wants to do the same for City Hall Plaza. 

 Boston’s Mayor, Thomas Menino, seems to have become a little smitten in the recent months with the idea of mobile food, especially “healthier” mobile food. It entered onto his radar when, so goes the story, he tried a soy B.L.T. from Clover (despite being disappointed to discover it was made without meat) and, unexpectedly, loved it. Later, he was spotted at the city’s inaugural Food Truck Festival, held last August 8th in the South End. The festival was equal parts invigorating and frustrating; while hundreds showed up to patronize the trucks, carts, and stands, capacity was limited, and many waited in lines over an hour long only to find out that food items they’d been waiting for had run out. Demand handily outpaced supply, a market failure owed almost entirely to regulations preventing more food trucks from operating within the city. Some, like Roxy’s Grilled Cheese, could only sling t-shirts: they’d been waiting for months to receive their license, and as of the festival, still had not. 

Menino may have been paying attention. Eager to boost the city’s image and provide some relief for the universally derided City Hall Plaza, his office recently issued a call for ideas — the 2010 Boston Food Truck Challenge – designed to result in an influx of mobile food options to the area. The deadline for applications is next Monday. What’s so interesting about this? The city has mandated that any vendors which get through this “competition” will need to meet the administration’s criteria for being both nutritionally reasonable and environmentally responsible. Among the contest’s stated goals: 

 - To provide high-quality food and beverage options on City Hall Plaza that support dietary and environmental health.
 - To support unique entrepreneurship and empower local business owners.
 - To make creative and sustainable use of Boston City Hall Plaza space.
 - To help create and support an environment of diverse activities and excitement in and around Boston City Hall Plaza. 

I’m curious, more than anything, to see how the city judges the above criteria. What does Menino’s office consider high-quality? How serious is it about encouraging environmental health? How will the space be used “sustainably?” 

As healthy food options go, the downtown Boston area is woefully underserved right now. Clover in Dewey Square is a good start; the food isn’t exactly health food, but their most popular lunch sandwich (the chickpea fritter) clocks in at 455 calories and 12 grams of fat while a quarter pounder with cheese runs you 510 calories and 26 grams of fat. You might not want to eat Clover multiple times daily, but when you do eat it, you can feel good about it. If searching for healthier options elsewhere, you’d really have to walk to the Whole Foods at Charles River Plaza, or settle for a beans-and-rice mexican dish or run-of-the-mill salad. Not ideal. 

Anything could come of this competition, really. It’s difficult to say how many responses they’ve received. The Mayor’s office isn’t requiring that applicants already have a business, or even a truck for that matter, but they did ask that applicants be relatively specific with their plans. The proposal deadline is next Monday. After that, downtown Boston’s food scene will get a glimpse of a potentially brighter future for itself. Can the city score two victories — more downtown food options, and more sustainably-minded local businesses – with one program? Here’s hoping.

The answer is NO. Absolutely not, you cannot have too many tomatoes.

Although, it may seem like you do when you order over 20lbs of them in bulk from your CSA for canning. I think it was just first-time-canning-tomatoes-jitters, but I was terribly worried I wouldn’t be able to get through all of them. Thankfully, peeling tomatoes (which I had never done before) is so amazingly, miraculously easy that prepping these tomatoes for processing only took about an hour out of my evening, and I still managed to make dinner! (If you don’t know – all you do is cut a little cross in the base of each tomato, dunk them in boiling water for 60 seconds and then immerse them immediately into cold/ice water. The skin comes right off!)

I decided to turn all 20lbs into canned crushed tomatoes, because I’ve found that’s what I buy most frequently at the store. I think this is a good way of choosing what you’re going to can. If you buy whole peeled – can whole peeled. If you buy crushed, then get crushing. This will, hopefully, prevent you from running out to buy the aluminum canned variety at the store mid-winter, when the only fresh tomatoes in sight are Florida, California or Chile. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware that cooking the tomatoes for more than 5 minutes would break down their natural pectin causing separation in the jars. Some of them don’t look perfect, but they’ll still be just fine to eat!