Canning Tomato Soup

What to do with 35 pounds of tomatoes?

Nothing like 35 pounds of perfectly ripe tomatoes sitting on your dining room table to make you get over your fear of canning.

Last week, I bought about 30 pounds of Valley Girls, Green Zebras and Sunbursts to add to our own humble pile of Romas that we'd grown in our backyard garden.

It was an envious bounty whose sweet, signature tang I once wasn't so sure of. I spent my youth avoiding tomatoes at all costs, even in pizza sauce, and I think I'm still finding tomato seeds in the shoes I wore while participating in Tomatina, the world's largest tomato fight in Bunol, Spain, in 2003.

So, I'm not quite the tomato head of some of my gardening peers, but I'm coming around to genuinely enjoying one of summer's most beloved crops.

Tomatoes are one of the most labor-intensive, volatile and potentially lucrative of the summer crops for farmers, and with the extreme heat and drought this year, it's been hit or miss for local growers.

Though Green Gate Farms and Johnson's Backyard Garden are reporting bumper crops, other farmers say it's just gotten too hot too fast for the fruit on their plants to ripen. Katie Kraemer of Tecolote Farm east of Austin says the high winds, hot temperatures and lack of rain in the past three months mean their tomatoes are sitting on the vines and not ripening with any speed at all. They are having to cut their summer community-supported agriculture program short and hoping the fall CSA will help carry them through the winter.

However, just up the road at Green Gate, farmer Erin Flynn says they were able to keep their transplants from freezing in the greenhouses in February and were able to get their plants in the ground early this year.

"We took a risk by planting early," she says, but now they have more tomatoes than customers to buy them at their farmstand, open 4 to 6 p.m. Tuesdays, noon to 6 p.m. Fridays and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays at 8310 Canoga Ave.

"Although we have mountains of gorgeous tomatoes, selling them before they spoil is a real challenge. ... If we don't find customers to pay a fair price at the right time, we don't get paid for months of work."

Johnson's Backyard Garden overplanted tomato plants this year and are selling their tomatoes in bulk online at www.jbgorganic.com/tomatoes.

Dai Due chef Jesse Griffiths is hosting a tomato workshop ($30, tickets on the website) at 10 a.m. Sunday at the farm near the airport, where he'll be teaching canning basics and how to make ketchup and salsa.

Sense of Home Kitchen: Pressure Canning Tomato Soup

This past weekend we had a large amount of heirloom Persimmon and Beaver Lodge Plum tomatoes sitting on the table begging to be used before spoiling.  I decided it was time to can tomato soup.  On a cold winters day nothing is better than to come home to a warm bowl of soup.  Even better, after working all day and coming home to shoveling snow we will enjoy having quarts of tomato soup on the pantry shelves just waiting to be heated and served with a Jarlsberg grilled cheese sandwich and maybe even a glass of red wine to warm the heart. Saute' onion and celery in olive oil until translucent. Add garlic and saute' for another minute or two, watch close garlic burns quickly. Add tomatoes, crushing with spoon, then chicken stock and herbs. Salt and pepper to taste and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes. Finish soup by blending with a hand blender until partially smooth, leaving a few chunks of tomato. This is the recipe I made up on the fly last winter and we loved the small chunks of tomato and the light garlic flavor.  The color is not bright red because the Persimmon tomatoes are yellow, there are carrots in the soup to add sweetness, and of course, the chicken stock.  This weekend I used my large stock pot and made five times this recipe.  Since I knew I wanted this soup ready to heat and serve and the recipe has several vegetables and chicken stock in it, I needed to use the pressure canner. When I first started pressure canning, I was hesitant, I had heard the horror stories my grandma told of her mother's cooker exploding.  Pressure canners have come a long way since then and I have found that it is not a process to be intimidated by at all, there are built in safety features.  Just follow the directions, keep an eye on the pressure, turning the heat up or down to keep it as constant as possible, and enjoy the shorter processing time. Defining the sense of home through homemade kitchen adventures, cooking, recipes, gardening, and preserving foods. I designed the Sense of Home Kitchen website to be a useful resource, please have a look around, and in doing so I hope you find your sense of home. I have a passion for cooking, it is like a science experiment and art all wrapped into one. This website is a chronicle of my journeys in the kitchen and kitchen garden. Thank you for stopping by Sense of Home Kitchen.

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