Tomato Flops: Perfect for Pizza

We are in love with our dehydrator. Slice produce up, season it (or not), and place it all on trays. Turn the dehydrator on, slide the trays in, and forget about it. Half a day later, poof! Dehydrated, preserved garden goodies.

One example is what we call Tomato Flops. We got this idea from The Genius: Mrs. Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, but have adapted it over the past few years to our own liking. These flops are stupendous on pizza in the winter. They pop like little bursts of summer in your mouth!

Here's how we made ours:

Ingredients:
Roma Tomatoes
Dried Italian herbs (Oregano, Basil, Parsley, Savory, Thyme, etc...)
Garlic (if desired)

Process:
1. Slice Roma tomatoes in half. 
2. Sprinkle with desired amount of herbs. Top with a very thin slice of garlic, if you enjoy that sort of thing. We did one tray with garlic and herbs, but the rest were just covered with herbs.
3. Dehydrate until desired consistency. We recommend not completely dehydrating them. We let ours go about 12 hours.
4. Since we don't dry them completely, we freeze them in bags for winter use.

Last weekend, we froze 10 bags, with a dozen flops each. They're piled in the freezer, waiting to bring us a bit of sunshine in the middle of our Wisconsin Winter.

Before

After

Carrots: Spicy Pickles, Pesto, and More

Carrots test our patience as gardeners. Their germination time is long, and weeding them is a pain! I can never tell what's a carrot and what's a weed at the start of the season. But then, the parsley-like leaves begin to develop, and these sweet, orange Popsicle-like roots take form under ground. Once the foliage begins to identify itself, I feel I'm golden. All I have to do is wait a good 2-3 months, and soon, I am digging up loads of carrots.

This year, we had our first successful crop of Danvers Carrots. We planted them in a raised bed which helped tremendously in terms of weed control. To get them out of the ground without breaking them, we saturated the dirt around them with water and pried them up with a shovel.  We harvested about 5 lbs. Then, the question was: what should we do with all of them? We also had another pound from my parents' and our CSA boxes.

We thought about juicing them...but then realized how quickly said juice would be consumed in comparison to the amount of patience exuded to grow and harvest them. We thought about pickling them all, but realized we still had 1.5 jars from last year's canning season. So, we decided to pickle most and freeze some. We also used the greens to make carrot-top pesto.

In the end, we canned four quarts and froze three quarts. We used the same recipe that we used last year, except that instead of guallijo peppers, we used chipotles and dried super hots. And again, we sliced them into rounds versus into spears.

 We also froze four bags (2/3 cup each) of carrot-top pesto. Apparently, carrot tops have a ton of Vitamin K and chlorophyll~ much more than carrots themselves. People drink carrot top tea (sweetened with honey) as a way to quickly get all the nutrients. We thought about drying ours for tea, but decided we'd probably be more likely to eat them up if they were on pizza ~ hence, carrot top pesto.

Use all in varying amounts to your taste (and freeze for the winter, if you'd like!):
Carrot tops (chopped)
garlic
walnuts or pine nuts
Parmesan cheese
salt and pepper
honey
olive oil

Put in a food processor and mix to desired consistency. It's that simple.

Pizza and a Good Book

We had to let this cook down for hours and hours. 

For years, we've been searching to find a thick, flavorful pizza sauce to make and to can. Lo' and behold if my favorite author didn't include the very recipe in her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Throughout the book, Barbara Kingsolver's family writes personal narratives about food, and so this pizza sauce recipe actually comes from Camille, her oldest daughter. She shared the family's secret recipe in a chapter entitled, Living In a Red State ~ both to imply the political leanings of Kentucky at the time and the fact that they harvested nearly a ton of tomatoes the summer about which they wrote the book.


Anyway, our tomato crop has been hit or miss this year, so we ended up purchasing two 25 lbs boxes from our CSA farm, Harmony Valley. Combined with our own tomato crops, we have put quite a lot of work in . . . and we have quite a lot of work ahead of us.

On Sunday evening, we prepared the sauce, using some of our tomatoes and one of the boxes. The house smelled great, our cats acted as if they were about to die from heat stroke (see photo of Tucker to the right), and we ended up with 5 pints and 9 half-pints of pizza sauce. Between those and our freezer pesto, I think Andy's pizza addiction should be covered throughout the winter and spring.                        


Here's the amazing recipe, Family Secret Tomato Sauce, from the book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Our assembly line. L to R: boiling for 2-3 seconds, ice bath, and then skinning/de-seeding.

 

Look at all of those onions!

Art in the Form of Food!

Six years ago, we signed up for a vegetable Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share with Harmony Valley Farm in Viroqua, WI. We get a box of fresh, in-season, local produce each week, May through February. Veteran CSA-ers often say it takes about three years to really get into the rhythm of the vegetable box. Through experience, we tend to agree. Our first year was a bit of a blissful struggle ~ we often would rack up a big grocery bill buying the extra ingredients for a recipe calling for bits and pieces of our CSA box ~ like 1/4 cup of asparagus or 1 beet or 1 cup spinach! Years two and three, we began to see that substituting one vegetable for another was beneficial and necessary. By year four, we were completely in the groove -- improvising, creating, and really just throwing veggies together to see how they worked with one another. Art in the form of food! Trial and error has been 100% helpful. Now, after six years, we feel confident that we utilize the box well, but we still continue to improve with each passing year.

One of our favorite ways to utilize a lot of veggies is by making pizza! Pizza is tasty at any time of the year, and any veggie pairs well with cheese, crust, and tomato or pesto sauce! Here are three we've made over the last few months.

Homemade Crust (adapted from Bob's Red Mill)
1 Tbs. Active Dry Yeast
3/4 c. warm water (105-115 degrees)
1/4 c. warm milk
2.5 c. flour
2 Tbs. olive oil
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt

Combine flour, salt, and sugar in a small bowl. In a separate bowl, dissolve yeast in water and milk. Add oil and dry ingredients. Stir until dough becomes tough, then knead on lightly-floured board until smooth and elastic. Form dough into a ball and place in a greased bowl. Cover bowl and let dough rise until doubled. Divide dough in half and form two 12 inch circles, using fingers or a rolling pin. Top with desired toppings and bake in a preheated 450 degree oven for 15-20 minutes.

We often pre-bake the crust in 450 degrees for ten minutes to make it crispier. All a matter of preference!

Pizza #1: Gold Beets and Goat Cheese

We used tomato sauce from last year's tomato harvest for this pizza. Then, rummaging through our fridge, we found 3 gold beets, a small package of goat cheese, numerous scallions and garlic scapes, and local Parmesan cheese (via our CSA cheese share!). We roasted the gold beets in the oven, and then threw on the veggies. After dolloping the pizza with goat cheese, we dusted the whole pizza with grated Parmesan cheese. Way yummier than we expected!

Check out those delicious gold beets!

Pizza #2: Goat Cheese, Greens, and Caramelized Onions

Harmony Valley frequently provides us with recipe ideas for what's in the box during any given week. A few weeks ago, they suggested making a pizza crust, spreading a package of goat cheese on it, and then topping it with a prepared saute mix (which is basically baby greens). We took this idea a step further by caramelizing some onions we had gotten in our box that week and adding walnuts. Delicious!


Pizza #3: Pesto and Seasonal Veggies
This pizza was more traditional than the other two. Our basil plants are flourishing, so pesto pizza seemed an obvious choice. Using the basil and garlic from our garden combined with the basil from our CSA box, we made five cups of pesto. We froze most, but spread a bit on a homemade pizza crust (see recipe above). On top, we put veggies that we had growing in the garden or given to us in the box: cherry tomatoes, zucchini, onions, and garlic. We topped it with summer cheddar cheese from Otter Creek Farms in Black Earth, WI.

This cheese is special in that the farm prides itself on its pastured cows. The cows, in effect, eat seasonally. Therefore, the farm offers a spring cheddar, a summer cheddar, and a fall cheddar. The farmers encourage consumers to take note of the subtle changes in flavor throughout the year as the herd's diet changes. Even more special (in the eyes of any animal-loving vegetarian) is that the farmer himself used to be a vegetarian. This tells me that consumers can trust that the cows are treated with respect. After all, happy cows come from Wisconsin!