198 a n i m a l , v e g e ta b l e , m i r ac l e and three occurred at all Tomatoes (like children) never achieve the villainous status of squash—they’re too good to wear out their welcome, and if they nearly do, our in-town friends are always happy to take them Fresh garden tomatoes are so unbelievably tasty, they ruin us utterly and forever on the insipid imports available in the grocery In defiance of my childhood training, I cannot clean my salad plate in a restaurant when it contains one of those anemic wedges that taste like slightly sour water with a mealy texture I’m amazed those things keep moving through the market, but the world apparently has tomato-eaters for whom “kinda reddish” is qualification enough A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience Drowning in good tomatoes is the exclusive privilege of the gardener and farm-market shopper The domain of excess is rarely the lot of country people, so we’ll take this one when we get it From winter I always look back on a season of bountiful garden tomatoes and never regret having eaten a single one / At what point did we realize we were headed for a family tomato harvest of 20 percent of a ton? We had a clue when they began to occupy every horizontal surface in our kitchen By mid-August tomatoes covered the countertops end to end, from the front edge to the backsplash No place to set down a dirty dish, forget it, and no place to wash it, either The sink stayed full of red orbs bobbing in their wash water The stovetop stayed covered with baking sheets of halved tomatoes waiting for their turn in the oven The cutting board stayed full, the knives kept slicing August is all about the tomatoes, every year That’s nothing new For a serious gardener, the end of summer is when you walk into the kitchen and see red We roast them in a slow oven, especially the sweet orange Jaune Flammes, which are just the right size to slice in half, sprinkle with salt and thyme, and bake for several hours until they resemble cow flops (the recipe says “shoes,” if you prefer) Their slow-roasted, caramelized flavor is great in pizzas and panini, so we freeze hundreds of them in plastic bags We also slice and slide them into the drawers of the food dryer, which runs 24–7 (“Sun-dried” sounds classy, but Virginia’s sun can’t l i f e i n a r e d s tat e 199 compete with our southern humidity; a low-voltage dryer renders an identical product.) We make sauce in huge quantity, packed and processed in canning jars By season’s end our pantry shelves are lined with quarts of whole tomatoes, tomato juice, spaghetti sauce, chutney, several kinds of salsa, and our favorite sweet-sour sauce based on our tomatoes, onions, and apples August brings on a surplus of nearly every vegetable we grow, along with the soft summer fruits Squash are vegetable rabbits in terms of reproductive excess, but right behind them are the green beans, which in high season must be picked every day They’re best when young, slender, and super-fresh, sautéed and served with a dash of balsamic vinegar, but they don’t stay young and slender for long We’ve found or invented a fair number of disappearing-bean recipes; best is a pureed, bright green dip or spread that’s a huge crowd pleaser until you announce that it’s green bean paté It keeps and freezes well, but needs a more cunning title Our best effort so far is “frijole guacamole,” Holy Mole for short We process and put up almost every kind of fruit and vegetable in late summer, but somehow it’s the tomatoes, with their sunny flavor and short shelf life, that demand the most attention We wish for them at leisure, and repent in haste Rare is the August evening when I’m not slicing, canning, roasting, and drying tomatoes—often all at the same time Tomatoes take over our life When Lily was too young to help, she had to sit out some of the season at the kitchen table with her crayons while she watched me work The summer she was five, she wrote and illustrated a small book entitled “Mama the Tomato Queen,” which fully exhausted the red spectrum of her Crayola box Some moment of every summer finds me all out of canning jars So I go to town and stand in line at the hardware store carrying one or two boxes of canning jars and lids, renewing my membership in a secret society Elderly women and some men, too, will smile their approval or ask outright, “What are you canning?” These folks must see me as an anomaly of my generation, an earnest holdout, while the younger clientele see me as a primordial nerdhead, if they even notice I suppose I’m both If I even notice But canning doesn’t deserve its reputation as an archaic enterprise 200 a n i m a l , v e g e ta b l e , m i r ac l e murderous to women’s freedom and sanity It’s straightforward, and for tomato and fruit products doesn’t require much special equipment Botulism—the famously deadly bacterium that grows in airless, sealed containers and thus can spoil canned goods—can’t grow in a low-pH environment That means acidic tomatoes, grapes, and tree fruits can safely be canned in a simple boiling water bath All other vegetables must be processed in a pressure canner that exposes them to higher-than-boiling temperatures; it takes at least 240°F to kill botulism spores The USDA advises that pH 4.6 is the botulism-safe divide between these two methods Since 1990, test kitchens have found that some low-acid tomato varieties sit right on the fence, so tomato-canning instructions published years ago may not be safe Modern recipes advise adding lemon juice or citric acid to water-bath-canned tomatoes Botulism is one of the most potent neurotoxins on our planet, and not a visitor you want to mess with Acidity is the key to safety, so all kinds of pickles preserved in vinegar are fair game In various parts of the world, pickling is a preservation method of choice for everything from asparagus to zucchini chutney; I have an Indian recipe for cinnamon-spiced pickled peaches But our Appalachian standard for the noncucumber pickle is the Dilly Bean, essentially dill pickles made of green beans This year when I was canning them on a July Saturday, Lily and a friend came indoors from playing and marched into the kitchen holding their noses, wanting to know why the whole house smelled like cider vinegar I pointed my spoon at the cauldron bubbling on the stove and explained I was making pickles I wonder what my kids’ friends go home to tell their parents about us This one dubiously surveyed the kitchen: me in my apron, the steaming kettle, the mountain of beans I was trimming to fit into the jars, the corners where my witch’s broom might lurk “I didn’t know you could make pickles from beans,” she countered I assured her you could make almost anything into pickles She came back an hour later when I was cleaning up and my finished jars were cooling on the counter, their mix of green, purple, and yellow beans standing inside like little soldiers in an integrated army She held her eyes very close to one of the jars and announced, “Nope! They didn’t turn into pickles!” l i f e i n a r e d s tat e 201 Every year I think about buying a pressure canner and learning to use it, so I could can our beans as beans, but I still haven’t Squash, beans, peas, okra, corn, and basil pesto are easy enough to steam-blanch and put into the freezer in meal-sized bags But since tomato products represent about half the bulk of our stored garden produce, I’d rather have them on the shelf than using up electricity to stay frozen (We would also have to buy a bigger freezer.) And besides, all those gorgeous, red-filled jars lining the pantry shelf in September make me happy They look like early valentines, and they are, for a working mom I rely on their convenience I’m not the world’s only mother, I’m sure, who frequently plans dinner in the half-hour between work and dinnertime Thawing takes time If I think ahead, I can dump bags of frozen or dried vegetables into the Crock-Pot with a frozen block of our chicken or turkey stock, and have a great soup by evening But if I didn’t think ahead, a jar of spaghetti sauce, a box of pasta, and a grate of cheese will save us So will a pint of sweet-and-sour sauce baked over chicken breasts, and a bowl of rice I think of my canning as fast food, paid for in time up front That price isn’t the drudgery that many people think In high season I give over a few Saturdays to canning with family or friends A steamy canning kitchen full of women discussing our stuff is not so different from your average book group, except that we end up with jars of future meals Canning is not just for farmers and gardeners, either Putting up summer produce is a useful option for anyone who can buy local produce from markets, as a way to get these vegetables into a year-round diet It is also a kindness to the farmers who will have to support their families in December on whatever they sell in August They can’t put their unsold tomatoes in the bank Buying them now, in quantity, improves the odds of these farmers returning with more next summer If canning seems like too much of a stretch, there are other ways to save vegetables purchased in season, in bulk Twenty pounds of tomatoes will cook down into a pot of tomato sauce that fits into five one-quart freezer boxes, good for one family meal each (Be warned, the fragrance of your kitchen will cause innocent bystanders to want to marry you.) Tomatoes can even be frozen whole, individually on trays set in the freezer; once they’ve hardened, you can dump them together into large bags 202 a n i m a l , v e g e ta b l e , m i r ac l e (they’ll knock against each other, sounding like croquet balls), and later withdraw a few at a time for winter soups and stews Having gone nowhere in the interim, they will still be local in February / In some supermarket chains in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, shoppers can find seasonal organic vegetables in packages labeled “Appalachian Harvest.” The letters of the brand name arch over a sunny, stylized portrait of plowed fields, a clear blue stream, and the assurance: “Healthy Food, Healthy Farms, Close to Home.” Labels can lie, I am perfectly aware Plenty of corporations use logo trickery to imply their confined meat or poultry are grown on green pastures, or that their tomatoes are handpicked by happy landowners instead of immigrants earning one cent per pound But the Appalachian Harvest vegetables really come from healthy farms, I happen to know, because they’re close to my home Brand recognition in mainstream supermarkets is an exciting development for farmers here, in a region that has struggled with chronic environmental problems, double-digit unemployment, and a steady drain of our communities’ young people from the farming economy But getting some of Appalachia’s harvest into those packages has not been simple Every cellophane-wrapped, organically bar-coded packet of organic produce contains a world of work and specific promises to the consumer To back them up, farmers need special training, organic certification, reliable markets, and a packaging plant A model nonprofit called Appalachian Sustainable Development provides all of these in support of profitable, ecologically sound farming enterprises in a ten-county region of Virginia and Tennessee In 2005, ten years after the program began, participating family farms collectively sold $236,000 worth of organic produce to regional retailers and supermarkets, which those markets, in turn, sold to consumers for nearly $0.3 million The Appalachian Harvest packing house lies in a mountain valley near the Virginia-Tennessee border that’s every bit as gorgeous as the storybook farm on the product label In its first year, the resourceful group used a converted wing of an old tobacco barn for its headquarters, using a donated walk-in cooler to hold produce until it could be graded and ... think ahead, a jar of spaghetti sauce, a box of pasta, and a grate of cheese will save us So will a pint of sweet-and-sour sauce baked over chicken breasts, and a bowl of rice I think of my canning... North Carolina, and Tennessee, shoppers can find seasonal organic vegetables in packages labeled “Appalachian Harvest.” The letters of the brand name arch over a sunny, stylized portrait of plowed... reliable markets, and a packaging plant A model nonprofit called Appalachian Sustainable Development provides all of these in support of profitable, ecologically sound farming enterprises in a ten-county