Bountiful Tomatoes

     When is the last time you ate a conventional tomato, purchased at your local Hannafords, Shop Rite, Price Chopper, or other homogenized, standardized, predictable food store? Hopefully you have the luxury, and the taste, to purchase local organic tomatoes. Was the tomato red? Round? Maybe plum shaped? How about pink and yellow tie-dyed, black and red-orange, mahogany colored, or vibrant green and yellow? Chances are if you purchase conventional tomatoes you are  not only missing flavor from your tomato, but you are missing out on the chance to explore a world of tomatoes unknown to the average tomato consumer.

      As you know, Eight Mile Creek Farm is a diversified farm, and just a small sampling of this diversity can be recognized in the incredible variety of tomatoes alone. The colors, shapes, sizes, tastes, and names of the tomatoes on this farm are enough to keep you interested and excited from week to week.  It feels like falling into a child's fairy tale storybook where everything is unique and different than anything you ever experienced before, but satisfying in each characteristic they offer. While most people in the world today take advantage of just 150 different plant species for their daily nutrients, there are some ten thousand plant species which have been utilized by humans for food since the advent of agriculture (Costa 2010:92). So where are the other 9,850 plant varieties? This is why farmers such as Pam are crucial to preserving age old varieties that have been removed from the order forms of large food corporations. Chosen for their adaptability to long shelf lives, conventional plant species have been favored while heirloom varieties have been left to disappear just as those who farmed them before us. So through purchasing heirloom varieties you are making a decision to support biodiversity versus a homogenized monoculture. 

     This season has been particularly bountiful for the tomatoes on Eight Mile Creek Farm. It is not every year that we see such plentiful and beautiful tomatoes. The dry, intense heat of the summer we have experienced here in Westerlo, NY is less kind to the green crops, but as all things in nature have a way of balancing out, the tomatoes have really stepped up to the plate, so to speak, and offered themselves as an abundant crop of the season! Our tomato blessings of the 2012 season have been encouraged by this sort of weather. It allows for varieties, such as the heirlooms, which normally have a longer crop season, to ripen quicker and more fully, while reducing the risk of blight.

                Our heirloom tomatoes this season are exceptionally storybook like with their vibrant colors and phenomenal taste! We have seen the most beautiful array of Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Green, Japanese Black Trifele, Valencia, Striped Germans, Brandywine, and Indigo Rose tomatoes which may give the phrase "taste the rainbow" a new meaning. In addition to the heirloom varieties, Eight Mile Creek farm has bushels and bushels of Roma tomatoes, Tomatillas, and varieties of Cherry tomatoes, including grape, Tomatoberry, and Sungold cherry tomatoes.

      Flavor. If nothing else, these tomatoes offer its eater a truly delightful mouthful. Conventionally produced tomatoes have been picked before they are ripe and  forcibly ripened later down their trail to various supermarkets and food chains. Ethylene spray is applied to these conventional tomatoes to ripen them in large cold-holding units, manufacturing ripeness instead of letting them develop full term and produce the most flavor possible. For this reason, what you get when you bite into a non-organic, or at least non-local, tomato is a watered down semblance of what a tomato should be.  You will not miss the difference when you try a local organic tomato picked ripe from the vine. It's easy to forget that tomatoes do have flavor, and you will have lots of flavor with all our tomato varieties!

      When you hear the term "vine-ripened" it will take on a whole new aura when you understand the difference between a grocery store tomato and a locally grown, organic tomato from a farm such as ours. So next time you see "vine-ripened" tomatoes on a menu, take a minute to appreciate the natural order of things and the simplicity of nature's course. Whereas the tomatoes from Eight Mile Creek Farm travel within less than fifty miles, a corporate tomato, as Carol Brandt refers to this commercialized commodity, will cross not just town borders, but state borders, and very often country borders, giving a large timeline between when that tomato was picked and when it finally arrives on your plate. If you are interested in learning more about the life of a conventionally grown tomato and its implications for globalization and commercialization, Carol Barndt's book, Tangled Routes, is a wonderful source to pick up! 

      We here at Eight Mile Creek Farm hope you have all had the chance to indulge in the flavor and variety of this year's tomato crop! Here is one of our personal recipes for those lovely tomatoes:

 

Roasted Heirloom Cherry Tomato Soup

*You can substitute any type of tomatoes for this recipe

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 Spanish onions, peeled and halved

4 Lbs. cherry, roma, or heirloom tomatoes (about 6 1/2 pints)

8 cloves of garlic

3/4 tsp. coarse sea salt

freshly ground pepper

1/4 cup basil leaves

8 cups vegetable or chicken stock

6 oz goat cheese, sour cream, or fresh ricotta cheese

 1 oz. Balsamic Vinegar

Heat oven to 375°. Heat 2 Tbsp olive oil in large, heavy bottomed skillet over medium heat. Place onion halves cut-side down in skillet. Cook until caramelized, about four minutes on each side. Set aside 1/4 Lb of tomatoes for garnish. Place remaining tomatoes, caramelized onions and garlic on two rimmed baking sheets. Drizzle with remaining 2 Tbsp olive oil, or more as needed. Season with 1/2 tsp salt and pepper to taste. Roast in the oven for 30 minutes. Place roasted tomatoes, onions, garlic, basil and chicken or vegetable stock in a large heavy bottomed saucepan. Simmer, stirring occasionally for about 30 minutes. Puree soup in a blender in batches if necessary. Season with remaining 1/4 tsp salt and pepper to taste. Cut reserved cherry tomatoes in half. Serve in warm soup bowls garnished with goat cheese ( sour cream or ricotta if preferred), halved cherry tomatoes and a balsamic vinegar drizzle. 

*Refrences

Costa, Terma.

2010 Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat. Layton: Gibbs Smith.