Please try this at home.

Does your counter look like this during tomato season? Do you feel pressed for time, don't want to be indoors too much with the canning pot, yet hate to see a single precious tomato go unused? Well, I can relate. I love to eat tomatoes in winter, the ones from our garden at least, but I don't love spending all that time indoors, canning and fussing. I have been trying something new this year, and I want to share it with you just because I think you will really like it.

I have been roasting the tomatoes in a hot oven, peeling them, and then throwing them in ziploc bags for the freezer. This gives maximum taste for minimal work. I know you can just throw raw tomatoes in bags and throw those in the freezer, but then you are left with watery, ice shattered, flavorless blobs. I prefer to let the oven do a little work to concentrate the flavors and then have an item to pull out of the freezer that tastes special, an item that has some flavor layers already built in. I used to make this with olive oil and garlic and herbs, but realized that I can do a simpler version with naked tomatoes that is quick, easy, and lends itself well to the preserving process.

Roasting tomatoes is super easy.

You just lay out some paste tomatoes (it works with other tomatoes too, but the cooking time will be longer since they are more watery) in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Pre heat the oven to 400F.  Don't add anything - no oil, salt or anything else. We are just going for tomato flavor here. This will allow you to really customize your dish the way you want it when it is time to use the tomatoes in winter. Slide them into the hot oven. Wait 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, take them out of the oven and flip them over. Tongs are handy for this process. If they have released a lot of water, you can drain off some of it, carefully, in the sink at this point.

Then they go back in the oven for another 30 minutes. The beauty of this recipe is that you don't have to watch over them. There is alot of what is called "passive time" in cooking and this method is chock full of passive time- I love that I can be doing other things while this is going on.

When they are done roasting, I turn off the oven, walk away and ignore them for a while until they have cooled down or I am done whatever project I started or wait until even later that night, when it is dark and the late summer sunshine is no longer tempting me out of doors. Then it is time to peel them. Just cut the tops of with a small serrated knife, and the skins just slip off in one or two quick motions. It is super simple. The fleshy, juicy, thick tomatoes have been reduced to a lovely consistency and can just go into freezer bags at this point.  I usually get two quart bags out of one cookie sheet;s worth of tomatoes.

So then what do you do with all those frozen tomatoes? Sauces, soups, stews,vegetable sautees, pizza, lasagna, and more will all benefit from these. Anytime a recipe calls for whole canned tomatoes, you can substitute these. I will be posting recipes using these tomatoes throughout the winter, so if you find yourself with a good supply and a lack of ideas of how to use them, check bag for some tips. Enjoy!

High Priority - Roasted Ratatouille for the Freezer

I have to admit that I don't love frozen vegetables for the most part. So if you have a favorite way to freeze a vegetable from your garden, please share it with me. Here is one I like and eat willingly out of the freezer come the dark days of winter. I want to share this simple thing with you in hopes you might have a similar beloved thing to pass on to me. For some reason, this year has not been a year when I put up a lot of food for winter. A few jars of tomatoes and this amazing thing I will now show you are the only things I have done. No beans, no salsa, no jams, no chutneys. Well there is still time, so maybe I will play catch up and do a plum chutney with the amazing plums passed on to us by our friend, Yvan.

This recipe starts in the spring. I basically plan part of my garden just so I can have all the right veggies to make this. You need

• onions
• garlic
• peppers
• eggplant
• tomatoes
• zucchini or summer squash

The garlic gets planted the previous fall, the onions go in in late April, and everything else goes in June 1. I like to freeze about 10 to 20 quart bags of this ratatouille, so I usually plant about 6 pepper plants (3 Ace and 3 Italia) ,  6 San Marzano tomatoes, 6 eggplants (usually a combination of Listada di Gandia, Orient Express, and Hansel), and 1 zucchini plant ( I do two plantings, one June 1 and one July 1 that way the plants are always healthy). Most households do not need more than 1 zucchini plant. Really.

Harvest all the veggies, wash them well. And start chopping. This year, I was a bit lazy and bought a few disposable pans to do the roasting. It made for easy clean up, but the veggies did not caramelize as much as they would have on metal or pyrex. Lesson learned.

So basically you just chop up all the vegetables into 1" chunks or so. The proportions are different every year, but it is usually about 1 part onions, 1 part peppers, 3 parts eggplant, 2 parts tomatoes, and 2 parts zucchini. I chop everything separately and then add it to the pans. I then drizzle olive oil over every thing. Add lots of salt, good sea salt is best, and then handfuls of chopped herbs to each pan. I like a blend of thyme, oregano, and rosemary. But other combinations work well.

Preheat the oven to 375F and slide in the pans. Turn and toss every 20 minutes, until everything is cooked and starting to caramelize. The overall cooking time really depends on the amount you are doing, the type of pan you are using, the thickness of the vegetable layer in each pan, etc. Basically, cook it until the whole house smells really good and the veggies are very soft and starting to brown. If I were making this for a meal to be eaten that night, I would do a single layer, in pyrex, and let it get golden brown. This is much harder to do in big batches in a home oven, and since freezing compromises texture and flavor anyhow, I think of these roasted veggies as additions to other recipes all winter long, not the main showcase in a meal.

Once everything is cooked, let it cool down completely, and then carefully scoop it into plastic quart-sized freezer bags. I usually use a measuring cup and one of those funnels for jars, since it makes life a little easier. Once frozen, the veggies can be used in pasta sauces, on pizza, in lasagnas, in soups and stews, as fillings in calzones, or as a topping for polenta, etc. You get the picture. It's such a nice way to have a little taste of summer in the winter and uses up so much of that amazing garden produce. Even in a summer like this one, when I have had to take some time away from gardening and preserving, I made sure to do some of these roasted veggies for the freezer.

Frost Dates in Vermont - South Hero is the Winner!

Here is a great chart that analyses all the temperature data collected in Vermont over the years and gives us the probability of dates for first and last frosts around the state. South Hero and the lake Champlain Islands have Vermont's longest growing season (measured by number of frost-free days according to N.O.A.A).  Take a look and prepare your garden for those first frosty nights. Here is what I do at my house to prepare for those first frosts:

If it is a really early frost, (September in Hinesburg), I will harvest all the ripe fruit on the heat loving plants (squashes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, etc) and if the plants still look healthy and have lots of unripe fruit, I will cover the plants with row cover. You can use sheets, blankets, plastic sheeting, etc. If the frost is coming at a later point, I often won't bother with the plant protection - just harvest all the fruit (green tomatoes can ripen indoors) and call it a day!

I don't bother to protect lettuce unless the first frost is very cold and very early. Lettuce can handle a few light frosts, so it is usually not a problem early on. Later in the season, I set up some simple wire hoops and keep the lettuce under row cover for the remainder of the season. This allows fresh lettuce to be harvested for salads well into November. It is good idea to seed or plant fresh lettuce in late summer and early fall so that the protected plantings of fall are fresh and tender. It is not really worth it, from a culinary perspective, to keep old or bitter lettuce alive. Plus it won't do as well if it is past its prime and won't fend off the cold like a younger planting can.

Hardy greens like kale, mustard greens, collards, etc do not need row cover and can live, unprotected, into December. You can always put some sort of protection over them in November to increase the harvest period past December, but it can be difficult to do with the taller plants. The wind dessicates them and makes them unappealing, and without a larger structure like a cold frame or mini-greenhosue, it can be difficult to give them adequate shelter.

All these attempts at fall crop protection will leave you grateful for the sweet rewards of fresh salads, tomatoes coming out of the cellar ripened and tasty, and nutritious leafy greens sweetened by the kiss of cold.

Julie's Introduction

If you ask me, September is the best month in the garden.

The warm season crops are still doing well (in theory) and the colder season crops are starting to come back, thankful for the cooler nights.

The harvest basket seems to just fill itself up the minute I step into the straw mulched paths, pausing for a moment to ask if I should eat the raspberries before or after I do a little grunt work.

But while all of this pastoral musing seems idyllic enough, there are some other thoughts in the nether layers that I need to reckon with.

First of all, why is my garden so big?

Why is it that every April, the month of good intentions, I decide that this is the year I will finally find time to keep everything weeded and tended?

As we slide from April to September, my good intentions are slowly eclipsed by my desire to spend summertime in places other than the garden. I love to bike, hike, swim, row, travel, read in the hammock, and yes, I love to cook, hence the garden. But gardening feels like work when it is 95 F and the weeds are scratching my neck.

I used to feel guilty about all of this, but now I have learned to cope with the ebb and flow of my gardening enthusiasm-- what I am working on now is gardening without guilt.

While it is true that I am very passionate about gardening, I realize that there is a seasonal drive to every aspect of this hobby. Every gardener must come to terms with his or her own type of engagement in the garden. There is no right or wrong way to garden. There is beauty and purpose in every type of garden and what matters most is that a garden meets the needs of the gardener, not the other way around. Gardens without guilt are places of liberation and revelation....a place to accept both our shortcomings and our successes.

The food coming out of my garden this year is bountiful as always, and I have managed to learn a few things which have made the garden easier to manage in spite of its size. Over the next few months as we go through another autumn and winter cycle, I will reflect on what gardening means to me, what I do with the food from my garden, and how I go about deciding what to grow at Red Wagon Plants.

As I share these thoughts with you, I encourage you to share your notions about The Garden. What works well for you? What are the disasters? How does your garden fit into your life? This garden journal is a collective effort between the people of Red Wagon Plants and the family of customers created by all of those young plants going out into the world of our gardens. We hope you will share the thoughts you glean this season and keep the conversation going until we see you again in the spring.