Share Contents and Kitchen Tips for Week 6!

Thank you all for your patience with us at the close of last week following 7 inches of rain in a one week period. Roads were washed out and some fields were under a foot or more of water. All things considered, we still ended up with some good shares thanks to our hard working farmers. And here are the shares for this week:

Single:

Heirloom Tomato

Potatoes, 2 Lbs

Onion

Mini Cukes, 1 Lb

Beets, Bunch

Swiss Chard, Bunch

Assorted Herbs

Garlic

Kohlrabi

Family adds:
Raspberries, Blackberries, or Jam, Pint

Variety of Medium and Hot Peppers

3 Patty Pan Squash

Green Beans, 1/2 Lb

Large Cabbage

Notice that we have emerged from the season of greens and into the mid summer crops. Watermelons and peaches will be on their way in a week or two.

Kitchen Notes:

For this week's spotlight, we'd like to talk about the colorful history of the tomato. One of the world's most important food crops, it wasn't until the 1820s that American's regarded tomatoes as safe to eat, and not until the 1870s that the breeding work of Alexander Livingston made the plant commercially viable in the modern sense.

In the 1950s, more breeding work was done to create the "perfect" grocery store tomato that would ripen uniformly red, including the area around the stem, which had prior retained the green ring we so often see only on heirloom varieties. The variety that had this all-red trait, however, lacked the flavor, nutrient density, and sugar of the older varieties.

Today's chalky, flavorless grocery store tomatoes are the product of the commercial practice of picking the tomatoes when they are still green, which allows machines to do the work without bruising them. These green tomatoes are then stored until ready for delivery, and placed in a gas chamber flooded with ethylene gas, which artificially turns the fruits soft and red. It sounds absurd, but enough of us seem to buy them that it makes sense to keep doing it. I wonder how many kids growing up today have never eaten a real tomato?

Botanically, the tomato is a member of the Solanum genus, along with the potato and eggplant. It was developed as a food plant in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia as early as 1,000 BCE, and was first encountered by Europeans during the Spanish invasion of the Americas in the 1520s.

There was a great deal of concern and confusion over the tomato when it arrived in Europe, and the debate lasted for nearly 300 years. Many feared the tomatoes were toxic, because their closest European relatives, the night shades, include a series of hallucinogenic and potentially deadly plants such as Angel's Trumpet, Mandrake, Henbane, and Belladonna. It was believed that witches used night shades in many of their rituals, including the evocation of werewolves. The botanical name we know today was given to tomatoes by these superstitious renaissance botanists - lycopersicum, literally translated as Wolf Apple.

I know a good tomato certainly makes me howl at the moon.

The tomatoes we often have as part of our City Fresh shares have their own wonderful story. When the Old Order Amish clan known as the Swartzentrubers arrived in Ashland, Ohio, they were part of a slow-moving migration that arrived in Ohio in 1809 and farmed alongside the Native Americans who still called our region home. They brought with them tomato seeds among others, and we were told last season that the slightly pink variety that appears in our shares is the direct descendent of that line of tomatoes.

Joe Miller was the last farmer still growing that variety. He was one of our best farmers, the first to go organic among the Swartzentrubers, and the first of the Amish farmers to start supplying City Fresh back in 2006. He taught the other members of the community who were willing to take the organic risk and join the City Fresh Farmer Network.

Joe moved to New York last year, and took with him his tomatoes, but before he left, he delivered just a handful to his brother-in-law, Joseph Yoder, just up the road. Joseph carefully saved the seeds and planted his field this year so that the genetic line of this wonderful heirloom tomato could be saved. So far, he's having lots of success.

As for how to cook with tomatoes - I recommend that you don't cook them at all, actually. No sense in heating up your kitchen. One of my favorite parts of summer is the fresh tomato sandwich. Put a thick tomato slice between some bread, add a few leaves of basil and a bit of fresh mozzarella cheese. Call it dinner on one of these hot, dog days of summer.

Warm Regards,

Nick