Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandon the industrial-food pipeline to live as locavores-vowing that, for one year, they'll only buy food raised in their own Appalachian neighbourhood, grow it themselves or learn to live without. The culmination of this year is the eye-opening Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a family memoir, cookbook and journalistic investigation that takes the reader back to basics and reminds us that ultimately we are what we eat.
After carefully planting the 14 varieties of heirloom tomatoes that were nurtured from seeds to plants at the beginning of the season, Kingsolver and her family are seeing red in the month of August as they pick, slice, can and roast their way through their several-hundred-pound tomato harvest…
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.
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 the Virginia's sun can't 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 Moly for short.
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