New take on marinara, time-saving tips and gardening ambivalence - UPDATED 8/26/2021

The basics for a grand marinara sauce are right here: Sun Gold, Brandywine and San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, onions and basil. Even a few Romas.

I've been making homemade marinara sauce since we started gardening lo these 40 years ago. If that sounds like a lot of years to you, believe me, it sounds even more unbelievable to me. The years fly by and blah blah blah.

So maybe I've learned a few things? Well. Maybe. If so, among the tidbits is a new revelation; when making marinara fresh from the garden, use the sweetest, ripest, and most tasty tomatoes no matter the variety. Duh!

Usually, those are not Roma types, which have been the mainstay of ALL previous marinara/tomato seasons. Every single batch! This year, it dawned on me, after searching around for new ideas for marinara, to simply use the tomatoes with the best flavor. WHAT A CONCEPT!

Our generous garden obliged with luscious Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, succulent Brandywines, and the marvelous San Marzanos. The San Marzano is a cherished Italian tomato grown in a specific soil type in a small area. We have three wild San Marzano plants, snaking their indeterminate tendrils in all directions.

Thick, rich, almost creamy marinara made mostly with San Marzano tomatoes. If you don't grow San Marzanos, as we didn't for most of our gardening years, they're also sold in cans and are reportedly excellent for making sauces.

San Marzanos define tomato goodness. They're super sweet when ripe, and meaty, meaning that they don't have a lot of seeds. They're not bomb-proof like Romas, but they have a deeper flavor. 

I was able to make one batch primarily with San Marzanos from the garden. But other batches made with mixed varieties have also been good. My stainless steel fry pan holds five quarts of whirred-up tomatoes and estimated quantities of other ingredients are based on starting out with five quarts of liquefied tomatoes.

A typical harvest. Most above are Roma types with a few San Marzanos
in the white box, and small Brandywines peeking out from below.

Guidelines for making fresh-from-the-garden marinara and time-saving tips*

If you're hunting for a recipe with precise measurements, this is not for you. If you're an adventurous cook eager to make it work with what you have, stick around. The idea is to use tomatoes in season and freeze the resulting sauce to produce wow-worthy dishes during the dark days of tasteless expensive supermarket tomatoes. (Isn't it odd that mealy tasteless tomatoes can be found in supermarkets even during tomato season?) 

I HAVE DISCOVERED THAT SOME OF THE MORE EXPENSIVE COMMERCIAL MARINARA PRODUCTS ARE ALMOST AS GOOD AS HOMEMADE.  SUCH AS FROM SONOMA WITH ❤️

* Do NOT peel the tomatoes!

Well, you can, but I NEVER do when making marinara, and no one has noticed. Peeling is time-consuming and unnecessary.

I've had enough of dipping tomatoes into boiling water and "slipping off the skins, ha ha" to last a lifetime. Done with that!

In perusing recipes online I noticed that peeling skins from tomatoes, or not, is a point of contention with purists. Let them contend! Maybe they don't have food processors or good blenders, maybe they have all the time in the world, maybe they like peeling tomatoes. But if you don't have the time or inclination, but have a kitchen device to do the trick, use it!

For years the Cuisinart food processor was my marinara friend, but recently I bought a Vitamix blender, which does an even better job of pulverizing lumps, seeds, and skins. Plus it can handle a greater volume, making for even less work.

What you'll need, more or less

• Enough dead-ripe tomatoes, preferably heritage, sweet cherry tomatoes, and/or San Marzanos, but also Romas, Celebrities, Big Boys, and other varieties, enough to make around five liquid quarts. The tomatoes must be ripe ripe ripe. About 15 pounds of fresh tomatoes.
• One large or two medium onions, preferably not sweet, chopped
• Six to eight large garlic cloves, or more, chopped
• Salt to taste
• Generous handful of fresh basil to add late 
• Dried blend of Italian herbs (not herbs that have been languishing in your cupboard for 10 years, but recently purchased or dried by you. The fresher the better.)
• Olive oil to saute onions, garlic, and herbs, but not the fresh basil
• 4-oz can of organic tomato paste if you choose to reduce cooking time

Onion, garlic, Italian herbs. Saute before

 adding blended tomatoes.  

SKIP IT! THIS IS A WORTHLESS STEP

Seasoning your sauce

There's also a camp that goes super simple using canned tomatoes, preferably San Marzanos, maybe a bit of onion and/or garlic, and a sprig or two of fresh basil. The basil is added late to the party, and is dragged through the sauce to extract flavor.

Maybe they do this in Italy. Doesn't work for me. I'm good with fresh basil, without stems, added late, but just leave it in the sauce.

Depending upon what's in the larder or the garden, I may add, along with ingredients listed above:

• chopped sweet peppers 
• chopped hot peppers, just a kick for back flavor
• garlic chili or serrano sauce, a Tbsp or so
• crushed fennel seed (love this flavor in marinara) 
• a sprig of fresh rosemary (remove after cooking) 

Directions

First prepare the onions, garlic, and herbs, and lightly brown them in olive oil in the same pan you'll use to cook your sauce.* Browning, according to numerous sources, adds depth of flavor whether you're making soup, gravy, or sauces.  OK TO SKIP THE BROWNING 

Then rinse, core, and cut in half the tomatoes before whirring up in a food processor or blender, about 15 pounds in batches. You should have enough liquid tomatoes to fill a five-quart heavy metal pan, preferably a stainless steel skillet. A soup pot may be used instead, but it takes longer for evaporation to produce a rich thick sauce.

Simmer for 3-4 hours until the volume has been reduced to roughly half. A 4-ounce can of organic tomato paste hastens the process, in case you're planning marinara sauce for dinner. 

More - if you're interested in my mental state, plus links to earlier garden-fresh recipes 

If you've read earlier posts, you know I have a continuing struggle with gardening, trying to cut back so we're not tied down. Trying to get a grip on the reality of being retirees and getting older every minute, and not needing all this food and work—spending hours in the kitchen chopping, blending, and trimming to can, freeze or dry the tons of stuff that lands in the kitchen. No no no!

THIS SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE WHAT I WAS THINKING THIS MORNING. 

But then there are the other parts. The tender parts. The pleasure, during the drab winter days, or even spring, while tomatoes are still a dream, of grabbing a bag of frozen tomato deliciousness and turning it into an easy feast. STILL TRUE.

The spring asparagus feasts. The blueberries all winter. The onions and garlic hanging in the PUMPHOUSE IN THE GARAGE.  

And also the garden immersion experience, which occasionally transports me into the sweet world of birdsong, bees, and butterflies. The wild randomness of volunteer sunflowers, cosmos, clover, spearmint, and dill make a fragrant disorder that somehow creates order in my life. Even the work - the tomato harvesting, the weeding, the flower deadheading - is a methodical Zen practice where my hands and body do the work but my attention is elsewhere. Floating.  

I AM STILL TALKING MYSELF INTO IT!

I can lose myself writing (once I'm at the computer and get started) but also in gardening chores, which need to be done. How can I give this up? How can I not? 

There is a time, turn, turn, turn, you know the Pete Seeger song made famous by the Byrds?  One of my favorites.

To everything - turn, turn, turn There is a season - turn, turn, turn. And a time to every purpose under heaven.A time to be born, a time to die. A time to plant, a time to reap. A time to kill, a time to heal. A time to laugh, a time to weep.

Now. Which way to turn, turn, turn?

I loved being in the messy volunteer garden recently, with the wildfire smoke rendering breathing unpleasant but whose eerie light heightened colors. The garden is a reliable rest and release valve, a place of comfort at being alive. Why do I sometimes resent it?

SIGH. PK AND I ARE STILL TALKING TO OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER ABOUT SERIOUSLY CURTAILING GARDENING.  NOT GIVING IT UP ENTIRELY, BUT NEXT YEAR RATHER THAN 13 TOMATO PLANTS WE'LL HAVE 3 OR 4. ZUCCHINI - 1, WE ARE, I BELIEVE, MOVING CLOSER TO THE REALITY OF TURN, TURN, TURN. A TIME TO PLANT A TIME TO REAP. OR NOT.

Earlier posts about feasting from the garden

Our go-to salsa recipe - We keep returning to this one, cutting back on the black beans

Tomato Love Casserole - Too good!

Rich, thick homemade marinara sauce - this precedes the recipe above, but is still good, using Roma tomatoes.

Eggplant Parmesan with Low-Carb notes - I went through a serious low-carb period and posted lots of recipes. If you'd like to see some, type "low-carb" into the Search box on the upper lefthand corner of the page.  Warning: some of the older posts have lost their photos. No idea why. 

Ratatouille with Rosemary - Roasted, not fried. 

spaghetti squash lasagna is here - Our spaghetti squash crop failed this year, but half a squash is all that's needed for this and most recipes. I hear they have spaghetti squash down at the Farmer's Market.

Best Damn Salsa!

Revised September 23, 2017

Here's PK a few years back with a great pepper harvest. For salsa, we use the mixed color sweet peppers on the right combined with lots of the red hot peppers. 

I'm on a roll here with recipies to use up gargantuan garden harvests Here's one for a great salsa. If you don't have a garden bordering on obscene, then head to the nearest farmers' market. You can halve the recipe to make about 8 pints. Otherwise, clear your shelves for 16 - 17 pints.

Just out of the canning pot, 2015's salsa. I love the brilliant color and the crisp pops of sealing jars and the promise of easy tangy salsa throughout  the winter. 

Roma-type tomatoes are best for making canned salsa.

We have a half dozen salsa recipes in our canning binder, but this is the one that keeps stocking our pantry, year after year. We've tweaked it many times. It's hot, but not too hot. Sweet, but not too sweet. We've named it after the people who passed it along, Jack and Lois Harris. With numerous refinements over the years we call it:

Jack and Lois Salsa Suprema
Ingredients
16 cups cored and diced  Roma-type tomatoes (you can remove skins first by dipping tomatoes in boiling water, letting them cool and slipping off the skins. We no longer bother doing this.)
3-4 cups chopped green peppers (8-12 medium peppers)
8 cups chopped onions, not sweet
8 jalapeno peppers, seeded and chopped. A few habaneros and other peppers may be added to spice it up
11/2 cups tomato paste (2 small cans)
15 oz can tomato soup (no water)
2 cans whole kernel corn, drained
1 or 2 can black beans, rinsed and drained (we use 1 can)
6 T garlic chili sauce
6 T serrano sauce (or Sriracha sauce)
1.5 cups white vinegar
4 T sugar
4 T salt
8 tsp garlic powder
2 T cayenne pepper

Note: This recipe requires two large soup-type pots. Measure the ingredients and divide between the pots. After simmering for an hour or more, you will be able to combine the two batches for canning.

Directions
Rinse the tomatoes, remove core, cut into large chunks and drain in a colander for a few minutes. Pulse the tomatoes in a food processor or blender until roughly chopped, then dump into your two pots.  Divide and add the other ingredients.

Cook uncovered for 45 minutes to an hour, stirring frequently. Can in a water bath canner for 15 minutes, timing after water reaches a rolling boil. Or use a pressure cooker, which is what we do.
With a pressure cooker, you can stack the pints and get it all done in one batch. Follow the directions provided for your pressure cooker. (After venting steam for 10 minutes after the pressure gauge pops up, place the weight over the steam vent and process until the pressure comes up to 10. Turn off heat and leave it alone until the pressure gauge falls down.)

Seventeen pints came from this recipe. Yowsers! Lots of work, lots of love. Lots of chips.

Other great ways to use the harvest

Rich, thick homemade marinara sauce

Eggplant Parmesan with Low-Carb notes

Ratatouille with Rosemary

Rosemary Ratatouille, Roasted not Fried

            Roasted ratatouille requires less toil than frying each ingredient separately. 

I wrote this post in 2009 when the idea of cutting way back on gardening had not yet occurred to me.(It was updated in 2015 and again today.) Those were the days! Now I'm in the throes of weaning myself away from a prodigious garden. I'll miss this ratatouille. But I hear they sell eggplant at growers' markets?

Ratatouille is one of the best possible ways for turning a garden bonanza into flavorful freezable gold bricks to mine during the bleak winter. In August and September, we have so much garden glory that I have actually chased people down the road, waving zucchini and cucumbers. I leave produce in the mailbox for our rural mail carrier, and deliver cukes and zukes to the community center's "free food" area. Someone came to buy a vacuum I advertised on Craigs List, and she went home with tomatoes, cucumbers, and a spaghetti squash. Anyway. ratatouille is a wonderful way to use up a lot of summer produce all at once. 

About Rosemary Ratatouille

Rosemary isn't a huge ingredient in this recipe, but the fact that it's there to the exclusion of all other herbs is key. Ratatouille has been a favorite way to use summer bounty for years, but I usually included handfuls of fresh basil and sprigs of oregano and never even considered rosemary. I also fried each ingredient in separate batches to develop individual flavors, then combined to blend. Big pain in the arse!

But a recipe I discovered in 2009 at recipetips.com makes the BEST ratatouille ever. I would link to the recipe, but it no longer exists at that site, or at least I couldn't find it. This recipe is a lot less work than frying, and high temp roasting boosts the flavors. The four teaspoons of chopped fresh rosemary are key to the deliciousness of this heavenly dish.

This recipe requires 15-20 minutes of prep and 45 minutes to 65 or 70 minutes of roasting time, depending upon the pan size and the volume of vegetables. You'll need two large rimmed baking sheets or shallow roasting or broiling pans, and parchment paper to make clean-up easier.

Rosemary Ratatouille, Roasted 

Ingredients
2-3 large eggplants, 1-11/2 pounds
2 sweet red peppers
2 yellow peppers
3 small/medium zucchini
2 medium/large onions (not sweet onions)
4-6 cloves garlic
6-8 tablespoons olive oil, or more
4 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary
6-8 large tomatoes, more if small
kosher, sea, or smoked salt to taste (smoked salt is divine!)

Directions
Preheat oven to 400
Cut eggplant, peppers, squash, and onion into roughly 1 inch chunks. Peel garlic and slice lengthwise 3 or 4 times. Combine and toss with 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil and the chopped rosemary. Salt lightly. Oil a rimmed baking sheet or other large shallow pan and spread the vegetables into a single layer and place in preheated oven. If you have too many for a single layer, don't sweat it. After they've roasted for 20-25 minutes you should be able to spread them out.

Line the second rimmed pan with parchment paper making sure that the paper is larger than the pan. You don't want the juices to get underneath the paper. Cut tomatoes into halves or quarters depending on size and arrange them in a single layer. Drizzle with olive oil and salt lightly. Put in preheated oven.

Roast vegetables, turning with a spatula once or twice.

Tomatoes don't need to be turned, and they roast faster than the other veggies. When roasted, they should be soft enough so they go flat when pressed lightly. The juices may brown, and that's good. If you put tomatoes and the other veggies into the oven at the same time, the tomatoes will be ready as  much as a half hour before earlier than the veggie mixture.

This is an extra-large load  for a double recipe and required about 90 minutes of roasting at 400.  

Remove veggies when roasted. You'll know they're roasted when they're beginning to brown and are soft.

These tomatoes could have  roasted another 5-10 minutes. This batch made a good puddle of juice, which when mixed with the brown bits, was added to the other veggies.

Let the tomatoes cool. Turn each tomato half or quarter over and pinch the skin; it will come right off.  Place the pan with the roasted veggies next to the tomatoes. Carefully lift the parchment paper and pool juices and tomatoes in the center, then slide it all into the  roasted veggies to mix. Alternatively, you could use a spatula to transfer the tomatoes then pour the juices. Mix thoroughly. May be served hot, warm or room temperature.

Ratatouille freezes beautifully and is a wonderful reminder of benevolent summer during winter's churlish days.

Other ways to use the harvest

Rich, thick homemade marinara sauce

Eggplant Parmesan with Low-Carb notes

Ratatouille with Sizzle

I trotted out to the garden late in the afternoon to pick a few veggies for dinner. Well, it turned out to be way more than "a few veggies." Did I forget it's August? The month of way too much produce for the ordinary person in her ordinary life? Stay away from the garden for a couple days and gremlins sneak in to inject plants with steroids. It's crazy! But wonderful.

Whew! The garden surprised me after a couple days away with about 20 times more than we can eat.
I'll give away most of those great English cucumbers (they're appreciated by residents at the assisted living place where my mom lives). I'll put on my apron and figure out the rest. 

Anybody up for eggplant? We planted just one variety this year, and it all ripened at the same time. How inconvenient!  The eggplants are at their peak—purple/black and glossy. They must be used soon. The fruits are too small, mostly, for eggplant Parmesan, which is my favorite. It's a good year for eggplant volume, but not so much for size. So it'll be ratatouille that makes its way into the freezer to remind us in the dead of winter that we had a glorious August harvest. Why is it so difficult to remember when it's cold. grey and wet that we had these bright warm days (even tho smoky) just a few months back?

Usually I make roasted ratatouille in big batches and freeze it. Today I didn't mean to harvest all this stuff, but since I had so much, and it was so perfectly fresh and beautiful, I decided to revert to my earlier approach to ratatouille—frying—and make enough for one dinner for two. Let me tell you, it hardly made a dent in the volume of just-picked produce. I'll rally tomorrow or the next day to do the big ratatouille roasting operation. (Roasted ratatouille recipe coming soon.)

In the meantime, I remember how much work it is to do fried as opposed to roasted. With small amounts, however, it isn't that big of a deal. I added a couple new elements: jalapeno peppers and smoked salt. I gotta say, yummers! Here's how to make fried ratatouille with a peppery twist.

Ratatouille with Sizzle

Ingredients (for 2 or 3 people)

• 2 small to medium zucchini, yellow, green, or striped
• 1 medium eggplant
• 1 small onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 3 jalapeno peppers (optional)
• 1 sweet red pepper
• 2 cups roughly chopped fresh tomatoes 
• smoked salt to taste (I used Trader Joe's South African Seasoning Blend)
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary (important!)
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
• 2-6 tablespoons olive oil (huge disparity, I know. Stick with me.)
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Make life easier and use two non-stick fry pans. Cut the zukes into about one-inch sized pieces. The eggplant may be sliced into slightly larger uniform-sized pieces. Dice the onion and mince the garlic. Mince the jalapeno and slice the sweet pepper into uniform chunks. Get it all ready before starting.

Stir fry the zukes in 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium-high heat. At the same time, stir fry the eggplant in a separate pan. Eggplant tends to eat oil, so I start with 2 tablespoons and when the pan gets dry and the eggplant threatens to burn, I add a little water. It boils away and the eggplant is just fine. Combine the eggplant and zukes and set aside.

The eggplant and zukes are in the smaller pan. The onions, peppers and garlic are in the larger pan, where all ingredients will converge in the end. 

In the larger pan, saute the garlic and onion for a few minutes in 2 tablespoons olive oil. Add the peppers and stir fry for a couple more minutes. Dump the zukes and eggplant into the onion/pepper/garlic/rosemary mix and turn off the heat. Rosemary is a big deal for this recipe. Nothing else will do the trick.

Zukes, eggplant, onion, garlic, peppers stir fried and combined. 

Put the cut-up tomatoes into the now-vacant frying pan. Cook over medium-high heat until the tomatoes are soft and the moisture is steaming away. Add the chopped rosemary and a little table salt.

Tomatoes are beginning to sweat and reduce.

Cook until about half the tomato juice has evaporated and then add to the rest of the ingredients. Turn the heat to medium high. If you're using smoked salt, add it now and be careful—it can overpower, especially the African blend that includes other spices.  Add the chopped basil at the last minute.

The finished ratatouille took about 35-40 minutes to prepare, not counting the time required to grow and harvest the ingredients. It is served with simple cucumber onion salad, Trader Joe's hot Italian sausage, grilled, and the ubiquitous (at our house) chipotle and creamy garlic dill sauces. 

The garden also provides food for the soul. I didn't get any bird pictures, but from my harvesting position I admired swarming swooping chattering avians plus other garden beauties.

Bird-planted sunflowers with lots of bees. 

Lovely cosmos, which self seeds all over the place.

Yellow zinnias with a fig "tree" behind.

Fifteen-feet tall sunflowers. I'm not kidding. 

Impressive weightlifting, if I do say so myself. 

Eggplant Parmesan + Low-carb notes

Revised August 23, 2015
Email subscribers, please click on the blog title to get to the website where photos look better and text is easier to read. 

Most everything you need for eggplant Parmesan is right here. Jalapenos optional.

This time of year all our dinners look the same—red and green—mostly red. That's because of tomato bounty, tomato beauty, and so many greens and eggplants and onions and garlic and basil and on and on. Truly an embarrassment of dishes/riches from kitchen bitches. Of which I am apparently one. I'm a little bossy about diet and cooking. An eggplant Parmesan recipe follows, pictures first. This year I have had to beg or buy eggplants as we had a mysterious eggplant crop failure.

I published an earlier eggplant Parmesan recipe that included this step: slice and salt the eggplant. Let drain then rinse and dry before proceeding. The next time I opined about how to make it, I said this:

Eggplant Parmesan is so much easier when you skip the salting-the-sliced-eggplant-then-rinsing-and-drying steps and also the dredging-in- flour-or-crumbs part. I omitted the flour/crumbs step because of my carb-avoidance behavior, but discovered that dipping the slices in a beaten egg and frying in olive oil is just as good, if not better, than the carb-dredging routine. Oh joy! I left out the salting part when I was in a big rush and discovered THAT doesn't matter either. So right there you lop off another 15 or 20 minutes.

I am sticking with the no-salting method. Anything that saves prep time is good, especially when you can't tell the difference with the finished product. 

Most eggplant Parmesan recipes direct you to dredge  the eggplant in a seasoned flour mixture before frying or baking. No, no, no. Not at all necessary. Some suggest you bake the eggplant after dredging in flour mix, ostensibly to save you from fat. No, no, no. No need to be saved from olive oil! The need to be saved from flour is, however, compelling.

Layered egg-batter fried eggplant. Full recipe below.

This is the deluxe eggplant Parmesan, which means I needed to use sweet onions and peppers, which are undulating toward the kitchen from our crazy pumped- up garden. A very aggressive garden indeed. Onions and peppers are optional.

More layering. Did we talk about the homemade marinara sauce?  Only if you have time and tomatoes to spare.

Eggplant Parmesan

Let's make some assumptions. You have fresh tomatoes and nice firm glossy eggplants. You have time. (The biggest assumption of all.) But listen. If you don't have time to make your own marinara from fresh tomatoes, but still want to make a fabulous eggplant Parmesan, buy a good marinara sauce and pump it up with garlic, a little pesto, some pepper flakes, and your desire to make yourself and others glow at the dinner table.

Do what you can do. Good cheese helps no matter what.

This makes enough for 6-8 servings in a 9X13 inch pan. It freezes well, and keeps for several days refrigerated.

Ingredients
2-3 medium to large fresh eggplants
1.5 to 2 quarts marinara sauce, more or less, homemade preferable
8 - 10 ounces grated Parmesan cheese
12-16 ounces shredded mozzarella, jack, cheddar cheeses, mixed
salt and pepper to taste
salt for treating eggplant slices
2-3 medium eggs
2-4 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup thinly sliced sweet red pepper or jalapeno pepper or combination—deluxe version  
1 cup thinly sliced sweet onion—deluxe version.
   
Directions
1. Slice the eggplants into 1/2 - 3/4  inch rounds.

2. Beat the eggs in a small bowl. In the meantime, heat half the olive oil  over medium heat in a non-stick pan. When the oil is hot, but not smoking, coat the eggplant slices in beaten eggs and fry in olive oil until lightly browned on both sides. Add more oil as necessary. (May be more than 4 tablespoons.) Set aside fried eggplant slices on a grate to cool. Blot with paper towels, if you're weird about oil. If you have leftover egg, fry quickly, chop, and add to casserole. It's a sin to waste food.

3. When all eggplant slices are fried, spoon a layer of marinara on the bottom of your casserole dish. Add a layer of eggplant, sprinkle with cheeses.

4. If you're using sliced sweet onions and/or peppers, spread some atop the cheeses
.
5. Add another layer of eggplant topped by more "deluxe" items, if using, then cover with marinara.

If you have leftover eggplant slices, place a piece of waxed paper between slices and freeze for later use. 

Pop uncovered into preheated 350 degree oven. Bake for 35 - 45
minutes, or whenever sauce is bubbling around the edges. Remove from oven and apply the final layer of mixed cheeses plus a few fresh pepper/onions, if you like.  Return to oven and turn off the heat. Allow the cheese to melt for five to seven minutes. Remove from oven and let it rest for about 10 minutes before serving.

Low-carb notes
Eggplant is low-carb to the max. One medium unpeeled eggplant has about 13 grams of carbs plus 19 grams of fiber. Which, with fiber grams subtracted, is a minus-carb count.

Peppers are also very low in carbs, but onions are not, and fresh tomatoes, depending upon sugar content, may be high in carbs. However, they also have a lot of fiber, especially if you follow my directions for using the entire tomato, skins included, to make homemade marinara.

Do you know about subtracting the fiber content from carb content to figure out how many carbs you're consuming? Example: a half cup of chopped raw tomato has 4.2 grams of carbs and 1 gram of fiber. Subtract the fiber gram and you get carb 3.2 grams. (The Complete Book of Food Counts by Corinne T. Netzer)

People who are serious about losing weight with low-carb diets count every carb and most try to keep their carb consumption at 30 per day or fewer. That's roughly the equivalent of two thin slices of bread, One large baked potato with skin has about 50 carbs and just 4.8 grams fiber. You could run on that thing for two days! Except that after eating that many unbuffered-by-fiber carbs, you're likely to feel hungry a couple hours after eating.

Taking Stock. Making Soup.

Creamy soup made with last summer's canned  tomatoes,  a pesto "cube" etc.
Simple and delicious recipe below.

I had a reality check recently as my dwindling list of rainy-day activities led me to take stock of what remains from the 2011 harvest. In a word: plenty. We have a small chest freezer, and its bottom quarter has not seen daylight for months. Ditto the pantry, where home-canned and dried goods are stashed, along with a box of still-perfect onions (!) a few heads of deteriorating garlic, and bags and boxes of fragrant richly colored dried peppers. More than enough. Ridiculous excess!

In a world with so much hunger and need, this is embarrassing. Two people—it seems we could feed the world, or at least the neighborhood. We need to share more and also get a grip on garden quantity, unless we decide to supply our larger community. In the meantime, we are loaded with everything tomato and enough beets to supply an army of borscht-starved Ukrainians. Thus I developed a menu plan to plumb the depths of our stores during the coming weeks (days?) when the Adventuring Son will be home for a visit. I shall strive to replenish any caloric deficit that he may have developed during his four months in Africa and a couple weeks in Brazil.

I think he goes to sleep hungry sometimes, not that that would be unusual for the native people in the far-away and exotic and sometimes dangerous places he finds himself. (Do you know anybody who has illegally camped, unprotected, on a river beach in a tiger reserve in India alongside huge paw prints? I do.)
Chris and his exploring/adventuring/risk-taking pals sometimes go for days with only what they can carry in their kayaks, and villages along the waterways don't always have food to share or sell. I know he's gotten by on candy bars and skinny dried fish, full of bones. So big mama here enjoys cooking up a storm when he occasionally alights on home turf.

Coming soon, all including remains of the 2011 harvest:

• Jambalaya
• Chili
• Lasagne
• Eggplant Parmesan
• Rama Shower - Thai curry dish, which uses a huge amount of spinach plus the peanut sauce in the freezer
• Borscht (beets, beets, beets!)

Then: young beets happy in the sun and soil.
Now: frozen beets wondering what the hell?
And there I go again, anthropomorphizing food!

I'm sure I'll revisit the simple tomato soup I made in a big hurry after I discovered how many canned tomatoes we have! I'd call it tomato bisque, but I've learned that "bisque" applies primarily to fish-based creamy soups. (Dang it, Wikipedia!) So instead, let's call this—ta da!


Creamy Tomato Delight Soup
1 quart canned whole tomatoes, preferably home-grown
1 medium onion, cut into quarters
1 large celery stalk, cut into 2-inch lengths
4 ounces cream cheese or sour cream (or more)
1 heaping Tbsp pesto (one pesto cube)*
salt and pepper to taste
ground pepper flakes to taste
Top with grated Parmesan cheese or dollop of sour cream, if desired.

Liquify the canned tomatoes in food processor and dump into a sauce pan. Add cut-up onion and celery. Cover, bring to a boil, then simmer for 30-45 minutes til onion and celery are soft. With a slotted spoon, remove onion and celery. Reduce the soup if it seems too watery. Add the basil cube, or pesto. Add the cream cheese. (May substitute sour cream). Mix with an immersion blender til smooth. Do not boil after cream cheese or pesto is added, if the pesto includes cheese.
Season. Serve with grated cheese and pepper flakes.

*About pesto cubes below.

Spring Cleaning—Fast-Forward, Freezer to Mouth

Winter/spring greens at their most tender and succulent flourish in the south-facing cold frame.

No corners are being reamed or closets cleared here at the ranch. Not that they don't need it. The cleaning has to do with freezers, pantries, and all the other nooks and crannies where last year's harvest was stashed. Potatoes, now history, were stored in burlap bags in the chilly pump house; winter squash occupied shelves in the cool dark pantry in the back porch, sharing space with garlic and onions, canned salsas, dried peppers and tomatoes. Fresh garlic and spaghetti squash remain pantried in small amounts. Spaghetti squash lasts at least six months in cool dark storage. Impressive!
Onions may have persevered as long, but we ate them way before they could rot. And garlic? Well, we're still using what we harvested last June, but it is yearning to reproduce or decompose. The 2011 garlic crop, planted in October, is vigorous and will be ready to harvest in June.

2010 garlic is trying to have babies in the pantry. It's still good, even at the early sprouting stage.

But the freezers! Two refrigerator top freezers and one small chest freezer were crammed after the 2010 fall harvest. Items that now need to be exhumed ASAP? Pesto cubes; chipotle cubes; blackberries; kale; chard, and two-cup portions of grated zucchini in anticipation of zucchini bread throughout the year, which, of course, I never did bake. I'm not at all into throwing any of this into the compost, although it may come to that.
Yesterday was the first of the serious "clean out the freezers" meals. Since spring has arrived, at least in name, and we're full tilt into eating wonderful spring things such as fall-planted broccoli, kale, chard, and spinach and soon the asparagus that will begin fingering through the mulch, followed by peas, and more chard, kale, and spinach, and on and on throughout summer and fall. It's difficult to dip into the freezer for last year's harvest. But it must be done.

2011pepper, tomato, eggplant starts in the solarium soon-to-be transplanted into 4-inch pots.

With so much food insecurity going on around the world, and in our own community, it is humbling to outline our excesses. We share, but we need to share more—or grow less? Maybe somebody's up for frozen grated zucchini in two-cup measures? I know that PK will pot many more pepper, tomato, and eggplant seedlings than we'll be able to plant, and he already has in mind people who will welcome them. But on to clearing the deck for the coming bounty, as a recent prodigiously caloric menu exemplifies.

An out-the-freezer dinner combined with  2011-spring-garden menu:

• Smoked trout (A yoga friend gave me frozen trout last fall. We used our Traeger Grill to smoke it a couple days ago. I buried the trimmings under where we'll plant corn.)
• Steamed fresh broccoli and kale with ample butter, fresh Parmesan. salt and pepper

Spaghetti squash Mexican/Indian casserole center  on the left with fresh spring salad on the right, and a little
smoked  trout front and center. A big dollop of chipotle sauce spices up the casserole.

• 
  Last year's baked and shredded spaghetti squash casserole seasoned with frozen basil pesto, dried tomatoes,  fresh onions, olive oil, canned salsa, and a couple T spoons of commercial  red curry unearthed from the freezer, an unlikely but delicious combo. This was baked topped with Parmesan, and then dabs of mayo and sour-cream-loaded chipotle sauce. Wow! A testament to fusing Mexican and Indian flavors, which I would not have considered if I wasn't spring cleaning.

Cole crops in March on an island. Too much rain! But they survive, and recently provided a load of broccoli and kale. Coming soon, I hope: cabbage and Brussels sprouts.

A seasonal staple for salads, soups, and side dishes.

"Fresh" from the freezer, soon-to-be soup. Ham bone, ham broth, pepper/tomatillo broth. 

Today it was soup made from freezer dregs and fresh garden greens. But mostly freezer dregs. Here's what it looks like tonight, thawing for a gourmet treatment: ham bone; ham broth; pepper/tomatillo concoction; grated zucchini; semi-dried tomatoes that needed to be frozen, and dribs and drabs of salsa and marinara. Wish me luck. 

February's promise- signs of spring

The broccoli was a surprise after removing the remay cloth that's been protecting the winter plantings for several months. Then we have rosemary, oregano, and thyme to season frozen plain tomatoes for the marinara sauce,
and baby kale and chard for the salad.

Feb 1. I went for  my first bike ride in 2011. It was brilliant sunny, about 50 degrees, and endorphin-making. Last night, Feb. 2, we enjoyed our first mostly garden salad: baby chard, broccoli, and kale, devoured with a luscious eggplant Parmesan constructed from last season's harvest. This is reason enough to rejoice for living in Southern Oregon in the State of Jefferson. But tonight, Feb. 3, was a red sunset after a warm afternoon with day lilies and  peonies edging toward the sun. I was edging toward feeling uncommonly good. A few pics below.

Kale, broccoli, and cabbage plants liberated from remay
Let the 2011 growing season begin!

Volunteer chard in the cold frame.

Winter sun slanting into the living room.

The evening sky above the garden.

Reflection looking into the house. 

Late summer harvest & an eggplant recipe

Tomatoes are the garden star in August, followed closely by those glowing purple eggplants.

After a strange summer with a June that tried hard to be winter—and almost succeeded— and many night temps in July and August dipping near 50 degrees, the garden has finally come around. The fruits of our labors are spilling into the garden trenches, and the bounty pictured above is typical of what we harvest a couple times a week in late August into mid-September.  Melons are peaking and yesterday we picked seven more of the sweetest juiciest-imaginable cantaloupes living up their name, Ambrosia. 

To see more of the garden, click. 

 

The eggplants are abundant but a challenge. What to do with about 100 of them? Here are a couple ideas:

Making a Mean Marinara- updated

Updated August 23, 2015
Email subscribers, please click on the blog title to get to the website where photos look better and text is easier to read. 

There's a lot going on here. Fresh cucumber/sweet onion salad, zucchini noodles, balsamic glaze drizzled over all, but the star of the show? Thick and rich homemade marinara.

We could about fill a bathtub with the tomatoes from our garden.  We could take turns lolling in the red, lush and lovely Romas, Celebrities, Early Girls and Brandywines to convert them to mush in preparation for making marinara. The sticky sweetness would drip from our limbs, and we could funnel some of the juices into our upturned and smiling mouths before diverting them into pots to boil and bubble into wondrous sauce for eggplant Parmesan, lasagna, spaghetti and so on to bring summer back during the inevitable dark, dank, dreary months.

Romas are the best choice for marinara as they are meaty with not as much juice to cook down.

But don't worry. You don't have to watch for hair or scabs in your spaghetti sauce, should you be invited to dinner. My best friend in the kitchen—the Cuisinart food processor—does all this squishing and smashing in a hot minute.

Process thoroughly to puree the tomato skins, which you do

NOT need to remove. Keep the fiber and the vitamins.

I ignore recipes when making marinara, especially any that require plunging tomatoes into boiling water first to remove the skins. DO NOT DO THIS! It adds immeasurably to the work and makes no difference in the end. Except for you've salvaged for your sauce all the fiber and flavor in the tomato skins.

Here's a rough guide on how to take advantage of tomato season to make a mean marinara for dinner and also the freezer. I'm not being coy with the "rough" stuff. So many recipes are approximations. When you're dealing with fresh garden produce, either from your own backyard or from farmers' markets, exact amounts depend on the cook's creativity. (Except, of course, when you're canning and absolutely must adhere precisely.) So here's how I make marinara, and you can adapt to fit whatever you have on hand.

Rich Delicious Marinara using Fresh Tomatoes

Ingredients

• 12-15  pounds of fresh tomatoes, mostly romas, cored and pureed
• 6-7 ounces of prepared basil pesto, without cheese. In the absence of pesto, process in a food processor 10-12 cloves of garlic, 2 packed cups of fresh basil, 1/2 + cup of olive oil, a 2 teaspoons of salt, and 1/4 cup of pine nuts or walnuts 
• 2 large winter onions, chopped fine
• a teaspoon each of finely crushed dried fennel seeds, oregano, thyme and rosemary
• 2-3 finely chopped jalapeno peppers, seeds removed, if you relish a little hotness. Or you could add pepper flakes to taste.
• salt and pepper to taste, using kosher, sea, or smoked salt. Smoked salt adds a whole new dimension.
• 1-2 tablespoons honey, if needed

A cheat: If you lack the patience or inclination to simmer anything five or six hours, add a small can or two of tomato paste early on. It'll still be a great marinara.

Directions
Start with dead-ripe fresh tomatoes, the redder the better. Roma types are best, but I also use round tomatoes that need to be used. Rinse, then cut off the stem end and core. Squeeze out seeds (and a lot of juice), tear or cut once or twice and load up the food processor. Process until there's nothing but air-fluffed tomato puree, then dump into your cooking pot. Often I have a couple pots going at the same time. Keep adding pureed tomatoes until the pot (uncovered, of course) is full.  Cook at low/medium heat until the volume is reduced by half.  Stir often to make sure it's not sticking. When the volume is about half add the rest of the vegetables and seasonings.

This is A LOT of pureed whole tomatoes! I had to scoop three 

cups out so it didn't spill over the sides. This large deep stainless

steel pan has become my favorite for making marinara.

That's it. Simmer until it is reduced by at least half the original volume. This can take hours. There should be very little watery stuff at the top. I always have to tinker with the seasonings near the end. Taste and adjust to your satisfaction. What we don't eat for dinner, I freeze flat in quart bags.