Eating Local… Really Local

Eating local and knowing where your food comes from is something we hear about more and more.  It is something we should all pay a little more attention too as there are many benefits to eating local, not to mention it’s important to know where your food comes from.  We have all become dependent on grocery stores to provide us with our food and in doing so, people are losing sight of where our food comes from and kids think food “grows on shelves.”  We have become a society where we care more about what something costs as opposed to where it comes from.  The “Eat Local” movement is trying to remedy this by making us think twice about the food we buy and consume. 

Here’s an interesting watch if you have a few minutes.

Some people take the whole eating local thing to the extreme defining local as a certain radius around the area they live;  have your ever seen or heard of the 100 Mile Challenge show on Food Network??  For many Canadians limiting what we consume to food that was grown or harvested in a 100 Mile radius would make eating a healthy balanced diet difficult.  We consider anything Canadian to be local; if I’m at the grocery store and I have a choice to buy an apple grown in Canada vs. the States, I’ll take the Canadian apple.

With a garden, we know exactly where our food comes from and it can’t get much more local than your back yard.  The wonderful thing about gardening is you can grow as much or as little as you want; you can have a huge garden with multiple vegetables or you can grow a few different vegetables in pots on your deck or apartment balcony.  The only problem with our garden is that it only provides us with vegetables; it doesn’t provide us with any meat.  It may be food for meat, but it can’t grow meat.

Last fall after the garden had been harvested and put to sleep another type of harvest began; a harvest that would add some meat to all the veggies in the freezer, a harvest also referred to as hunting season.  By the end of hunting season we had successfully harvested three deer leaving our freezer close to overflowing with vegetables and meat that we knew exactly where they came from.  In fact, one of the deer came from the green belt directly south of our acreage. 

Now we can proudly boast, at times, that we had a 100 Mile Meal, and depending on what deer meat we eat, a One Mile Meal.

Tomatoes: A Sad Story

Last year our tomatoes sucked – plain and simple.  We didn’t have a single fruit ripen on the vine and the ones that were brought inside didn’t do that great either.  We attempted to ripen the tomatoes inside using two different methods.

The first method was the pick the tomatoes and simply to lay them on a brown paper covered table in the basement.  (The table wasn’t big enough for all of them so we put some in cardboard boxes on the floor.)  These tomatoes did change color but I’m not sure if you could say they ripened.  By the time they were red their skins were starting to shrivel and the flesh inside was starting to dry out and break down.

The second method was to remove the entire plant from the ground leaving the tomatoes attached and hang them in the cold room.  We used this method before and it worked wonderfully; this year it didn’t work at all.  Instead of ripening, the tomatoes shriveled, started to mold, and proceeded to fall off the plants.  This was very disappointing as we had utilized this method on the healthiest plants with the most fruit because of previous success.

When we hung the plants upside down we did one thing different from previous occasions and this “one thing” proved to give the exact opposite results.  Previously we left the roots on the plants, this year we removed the roots.  We cut the roots off because the root system is difficult to remove from the ground and it creates a lot of mess inside.   I’m thinking that by removing the roots we killed the plant rendering it incapable feeding/ripening the tomatoes; if we ever do this again we’ll be sure to leave the roots on the plant.

(If all works out as planned we won’t have to ripen tomatoes inside anymore as the intent is to build a greenhouse in the spring.)

Anyway, we had brought all the tomatoes inside in mid September.  By the time the end of October rolled around, as sad as the tomatoes looked, something needed to be done with them.  We simply couldn’t turf them; there was a lot of time and effort put into them.  There may have been a hand full of tomatoes that we could have eaten as is but the bulk of them were not looking too appetizing.  So what did I do with them?  I made tomato juice – lots of tomato juice.

I washed and cut them in chucks, and placed them in my largest pot; by the time I was done my 2 gallon pot was almost overflowing with tomatoes.  After cooking on low for a few hours I gave them a quick blend with my boat motor (hand mixer) and then they were ready for straining.  To strain them I ladled the mixture into a fine mesh strainer and then used the underside of the ladle to stir/force the juice through the strainer.  This would push the juice and some plump through leaving the seeds and skin behind to be easily discarded.  When everything was said and done, I ended up with about 30 cups of pure tomato juice.  Unfortunately the quality of the juice wasn’t that great, it was watery and quite acidic.

So what does one do with 30 cups of tomato juice? Freeze it and worry about it later!

Last weekend I finally took a few of the containers of tomato juice and made tomato soup.  The recipe I used was one that I had used last year and had found on a blog a visit frequently.  I had to tweak the recipe a little because of the poor flavor of my juice and also because I had tomato juice instead of tomatoes.  All and all it turned out pretty good.

We served it will a dollop of sour cream for some extra richness.  Soup anyone?

Tomato Soup Recipe:  http://www.formerchef.com/2009/08/02/how-to-make-fresh-tomato-soup