The Tomato Machine, or Second Breakfast #18
Why didn't I start making tomato sauce sooner?
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Sunday morning, I packed up my kid and drove out to the LA / Ventura county border to pick tomatoes. It was the kind of freeway drive that during rush hour would be two hours but on a weekend morning zipped by in thirty minutes, shifting from city to burbs to farmland.
Every year on Labor Day, Underwood Farms hosts a pick-your-own tomato event. My friends Maya and Paul suggested hitting it up instead of our normal farmers market run. Underwood is an events-oriented farm, with lots of U-Pick options and a serious pumpkin patch scene in October. But there’s no admission fee to pick the tomatoes. Just show up, haul what you can, and pay forty-nine cents a pound. Underwood provides the wheelbarrows.
As we walked in, we saw multiple families pulling carts and pushing wheelbarrows stacked with boxes of Roma tomatoes. But even though it was a few days into the U-Pick event, the back ends of the rows were still laden. Felix quickly understood that we don’t pick green or yellow or beaten-up tomatoes. He would hold up beautiful red ones to me and say, “This one is good” or “These two are twins.” We filled an enormous grocery bag in maybe twenty minutes.
Our total for the day was twenty-three pounds; Maya and Paul nabbed forty-six. This sounds like a lot, but a sign by the register said the day’s record (so far) was three hundred and ninety-one pounds.
The elation of We have all these tomatoes! was swiftly followed by, Oh no, we have ALL these tomatoes.
We started trading ideas: marinara sauce, tomato jam, pressure canners, food mills versus blenders. Italian grandmother YouTube is an overwhelming font of inspiration. Paul remarked that on more than one video, they called the food mill “the tomato machine.”
My move, in part because toddler lyfe has made my cooking simpler and more mercenary, was to make a basic tomato sauce to freeze and riff with later. Felix helped me cut up tomatoes, which I stewed for twenty minutes with a little garlic-infused olive oil. I broke out my own dusty food mill and turned it into a tomato machine.
God, making tomato sauce rules. Why didn’t I do this sooner? I had a preserving era in the rustic hipster years of 2009-2012, one so intense that at one point I brought canning supplies on a family vacation to preserve fruit we got at the market (in part because I was living in Texas, where the August farmers market is a sea of okra and chile peppers and nothing else). But eventually I got sick of my jams. I only eat so much toast.
But tomato sauce? Tomato sauce goes in everything. I probably have it twice a week. More importantly, Felix will eat all sorts of things topped with tomato sauce.
And I can already see how fast my fresh, bright, sweet sauce made from my 23 pounds of tomatoes will go. Some friends of friends apparently hauled 120 pounds this year, and bought an electric food mill to spend the entire day processing. I’m envious. I’m making plans for next year.
I’ve spent the past month reporting out one story that should run soon, and otherwise finalizing my book proposal on the history of food on the internet. Now, it’s done! Nothing to do but sit back and accept the uncertainty while my agent takes it out to publishers, wheeeeeeee.
August is a quiet month in media, but there’s been a lot of great things to read:
Since getting back from Copenhagen, I’ve been on a bit of Nordic noir kick. I loved the late 1990s Madrid setting, and the post-USSR espionage milieu, of Lime’s Photograph. My local library had it on Libby!
I can’t stop thinking about this tale of two Disneys. There’s a great deal of discourse about “enshittification,” but much less about its shadow partner that this piece expertly describes, the engildification of public life for the rich
Ruby Tandoh on GBBO is the essay I’ve been waiting to read for ages, and it was extremely worth the wait
“On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace.” Glad to have someone to blame for this.
We stan a Robert Sietsema profile
Speaking of my Eater layoff alumni club of 2023, Ryan Sutton wrote a passionate response to the latest, bone-cutting round of layoffs at Eater this summer
“here is what I remind myself when I’m depressed about bestselling dreck or algorithmic slop or declining literacy of the country or any of that noise: that crap has jack shit to do with you or your art.” Bless Lincoln’s newsletter
Hugh Merwin covers how our city’s fruteros have been targeted by ICE
And Jose Ralat has the view from Texas’s taqueros
Labubu Matcha Dubai Chocolate by Elara Voss was the song of the summer
That’s it for me this month. I hope you are enjoying your fall, or the rest of L.A. beach season, which lasts at least another month.
Meghan