With an unusually early rainstorm in the forecast for today, we decided last Friday to go out and harvest all the tomatoes still out in our hanging on the plants in our last field. That turned out to be a good decision given that the two inches of rain we received this week essentially guaranteed that tomato season is now over. There’s one catch: the tomatoes are not ripe.
Fried Green Tomatoes are in the same family — culinarily — as baby lettuce, new potatoes, broccolini, Sweet corn, green beans and others. Before supermarkets, long-distance trucking, and refrigeration, crops were harvested at an immature stage simply because there was nothing else to eat while people were waiting for them to mature. Some of these foods came to be seen as superior when eaten at this stage, and over the years plant breeders created special varieties by enhancing the characteristics that made people like them. Sweet corn (also in your boxes today) may be the most ubiquituous example of that as there are now thousands of varieties with little relation to the traditional field corn used to feed animals and make dried corn kernels.
Green Tomatoes haven’t quite developed the same world-wide popularity as the other items on my list. But in certain parts of the U.S., they are a staple of the cuisine: dipped in batter and fried until they are crisp on the outside and juicy on the inside. The flavor is only distantly similar to a ripe tomato but the umami comes through loud and clear. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I had never eaten a Fried Green Tomato until I married a Texan, and we still don’t make them often enough. If this were Winters, Texas instead of Winters, CA, we probably would harvest green tomatoes more often and send them to you in your CSA box. Instead, it will just be this one time.
We also had planned to harvest Strawberries before the rain. We picked a few last week and snuck them into the Large boxes, and figured this week we might get a few more. Turns out we were pretty far off. By the time the rain started at 1 p.m., we had harvested almost 100 flats of berries — enough to put a basket of berries in all of your CSA boxes this week. We’ve never done that before in Autumn.
Strawberries are not a Fall crop for us. We plant them at the end of the summer, and some years they produce a small amount of fruit. Last year in October we got enough to include them in the M and L boxes one week. Some years we enough a second week to send them to the S boxes, but there are plenty of years that we hardly get any. The plants are still tiny, producing just a handful of fruit that doesn’t always ripen at the same time. As always with berries, the weather is a factor too. With just a few leaves, to protect them, the fruit often gets sunburned or cooked outright. If it rains, they turn to mush. And frost destroys them as well.
I consider what happened this year to be close to a miracle. Had the berries ripened just a day or two later, they would still be sitting out in the field, in the rain, unharvested. If we get lucky again next week, you may see them one more time in your boxes, but I definitely wouldn’t count on it. Enjoy.
Thanks,
Pablito