My friend Kathy told me about something called Farm Box last year and I was intrigued. Canmore-based Farm Box is modelled after a basic CSA (community supported agriculture) program in which we (consumers) buy shares of growers’ harvests at the beginning of the season and receive our shares at our local farmers’ markets at harvest time. Farm Box represents a number of producers and the best thing about the shares (in my opinion) is that we don’t know what we’re getting until just before market day. There’s something different every week.
This week’s Farm Box offered us the chance to buy a case lot of Roma tomatoes, pickling cucumbers or peaches. I went in for the tomatoes and they’ve taken over my life for the past 2 days. I’ve still got a few pounds to process but truly, one can not live by tomatoes alone!
I turned this
into 6 pints of tomato sauce, ready to add a fresh spark to dull, cold winter evening meals.
Another couple of pounds of tomatoes went towards this.
Gazpacho shot, anyone?
There are still enough tomatoes left for some salsa and some freezer-bound tomato soup. Tomorrow is another day.
Beautiful small beets went towards a fully-stuffed pint of pickled beets (one of BB’s favourites) and zucchini turned into zucchini-chocolate chip mini loaves.
All of this cooking, freezing and processing leads me to naming my favourite kitchen gadget/tool of the week.
A food mill. In this case, the OXO Good Grips Food Mill. It’s easy to use, easy to clean, and has 3 discs for your choice of fine, medium or coarse processing. It saved me a lot of time and clean-up, especially when it came to making the tomato sauce. I’ve wanted a food mill for years and just wish I’d gotten it sooner.
That extra time allowed me to start a new needle-and-string project.
More on that later, as well as some new, and local, yarn (!)
Annethologist 
