her able hands

I took a sick day today, courtesy of my skull-tingling, spine-wrangling sinus headache. I thought I would just drop the Lila Bean off at school and head back home to sleep for a while because I only got about two hours last night. But when I came in, flashes of red winked at me in the bright morning sun from the garden beds next door. I grabbed the colander and walked over in the still cool air, passing by the chickens who are still happily scratching bugs up out of the soil, making those contented little gurgly chicken noises.

So instead I’ve been listening to Natalie Merchant’s, The House Carpenter’s Daughter, while coring, seeding and quartering the colander full of San Marzanos, and tiny dicing eggplant, a variety of peppers, and mincing shallots and Red Russian garlic. Slow-roasted Ratatouille for the freezer. The house and neighborhood are so quiet, just the music twanging from the speaker on top of the fridge, the kitties wandering around, scratching at the door for in, then out. The cicadas and crickets sing their swan song of summer and I know I made the right choice staying home today. I’m in desperate need of some alone time in my own house, a little head space for the head case, so-to-speak. Almost perfect, except for the pounding headache, the perpetual sneezing and the constant chills which we will attempt to ignore for the remainder of this gift of a day.

San Marzano paste tomatoes, as described at High Mowing Seeds where I purchased my seed two years ago:

A favorite among processors due to its high solids and outstanding flavors, this classic Italian variety makes an excellent, all-around tomato for paste, puree, or canning. Long, 3” X 1 ½“ intensely red cylindrical fruit resists cracking and holds well both on the vine and in storage. Indeterminate.

This year I bought my plants from a grower through ebay because I didn’t get my seed-starting act together in time. I swear I posted about that, but can’t find where to link back to it. I’m not very good at the meta-blogging. Aaanyway, even with the less-than-optimal access to the sun, these plants produced some fine tomatoes that are ripening at just the right rate to make a batch of roasted sauce at a time (today a double-batch). I’m all addicted to roasted sauce now—gas bill be damned—with small diced eggplant and lots of garlic and peppers and plenty of fresh herbs tossed in for the last hour of cooking. It comes out so sweet and caramelized, tasting of earth and sun and captured summer.

I can’t see any real reason to grow other types of paste tomatoes if you’re looking for a true paster and are low on space to grow them. (Although I am a big fan of the Amish Paste and Italian Giant Paste tomatoes as well.) The San Marzanos have very few seeds, almost no gel and thick, dry walls with a terrifically meaty texture. They’re super fast to prepare for cooking, with very little mess. Steven’s been very busy with his San Marzanos this summer, too.

I can only imagine how incredible they must taste when grown under the Italian sun, hugging a trellis built by wizened peasant farmer’s hands on soil that has been tended by the same family for centuries—as opposed to my second year Ohio soil, overshadowed by giant old oak trees.

Oops! Sorry. I seem to have fallen down the romantic stereotype rabbit hole.

See how neat and tidy that looks? The seed clump slides right out leaving a truly empty, dry cavity that’s just begging for a good slow roasting.

Don’t you think?

You should smell my house right now. That’s what someone needs to do—write a wordpress plugin for fragrance blogging. Come on all you code wizards out there, heed my call!

So here we have one of two pans about to go into the oven.

And here’s the finished batch from Saturday.

Hee. Do you like how I did that? Now, you can see that I didn’t take the skins off the tomatoes. I seldom do. I’m just one of those weirdos who doesn’t mind the papery skin sticking to her teeth and the roof of her mouth. Or maybe I’m just too lazy to deal with that extra step of dunking them in hot water, then plunging them into cold, then peeling them. I mean, let’s cut to the chase, what’s a little tomato skin between teeth?

So I think I’m going to do this Ratatouille thing with the rest of my tomatoes as they come in. The eggplant at the market has been great—medium sized, skin not too thick, not too seedy and affordable. I’m thinking ahead to February and how wonderful a container of this is going to taste over rice while I’m balancing my bowl on my belly and browsing through seed catalogs.

Technorati Tags: San Marzano paste tomatoes, Ratatouille, slow-roasting, garden, eat local, locavore, stocking the freezer

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