Tomato Seconds

The Copley farmer's market had "seconds tomatoes" (at the Atlas Farm booth) at twenty pounds for $12 on Friday, which was too tempting to pass up, even lacking the inclination to process tomatoes all weekend. Fortunately, I could only carry one box.

I got a new canning book (more on that to come), so I checked out the tomato section, with laziness my chief criterion. (Did you know you can just freeze whole tomatoes?) 

I settled on marinara sauce, which allowed food milling out the skins and seeds (no blanching and peeling here). My laziness did, however, extend to refusing to go out to buy the onions the recipe called for, so the "marinara sauce" is plain old tomato juice and pulp. (I'm thinking I can doctor it, Smitten Kitchen three-ingredient sauce style, when we eat it.) The recipe said to cook for one or two hours to thicken the sauce; I'm past three hours and still sadly runny. 

On the bright side, dinner couldn't wait, so we took the discarded skins and seeds, ran them through the food processor with an onion (we had one), garlic, and carrots, and cooked with some water and olive oil for a faster, chunky sauce. Nose-to-tail tomato eating.

P.S. Another personal recipe modification. Smashing partially cooked tomatoes with a wooden spoon? Not very fun. Crushing halved tomatoes with your bare hands? Amazingly satisfying.

This Year's Tomatoes

Because it wouldn't be summer without some scraggly tomatoes being ineptly coached along the fence, I stopped by the opening day of the Union Square Farmers Market on Sunday to pick up some plants.

The starts I got from Kimball Fruit Farm (Twitter) did well last year, and four plants for $4 proved so irresistible that I came home with eight. (Requiring a substantially larger investment in buckets and container mix, sigh.)

I never have any idea what I'm buying when I pick out the plants, so half the fun is looking up what kind of tomatoes I've planted later. Looks like a substantial bias toward pink-red medium-large tomatoes this year.

Brandywine: large (1-pound) pink beefsteak tomatoes
Carbon: medium-large black-red tomatoes
Cherokee Chocolate: medium chocolate-mahogany tomatoes
Church: large (1-pound) red beefsteak tomatoes
Fenda: medium pink hybrid tomatoes
Mexico: huge (1- to 2-pound) pink beefsteak tomatoes
Rose: medium dusty-rose ribbed tomatoes
Yellow Pear: bite-size bright-yellow pear-shaped tomatoes

Slow-Roasted Tomatoes II

When the weather takes a sudden turn for the snowy and/or single digits, what better than a recipe that has the oven on for three hours?

Last week's Roma tomatoes needed some sexing up (ours also wound up in the fridge, to add injury to not-very-good-winter-tomatoes).

We've made these slow-roasted tomatoes (from Dorie Greenspan's book) before: slice; sprinkle with salt, pepper, rosemary, and olive oil; 225 degree oven for three hours.

This time we served them over pasta with greens and cream sauce.

Canning #2: Tomatoes

The first week in September, Picadilly Farm again gifted us with bulk produce, this time in the form of twenty-pound boxes of tomatoes. We got two. (We actually requested four, so the forty pounds represented a scaling down of our ambitions.)

I told you about the six pounds I diverted off into ketchup and tomato jam. Jack, Anna, and Erica handled the other thirty-four, blanching, peeling, dicing, and canning something like sixteen quarts. (Jack made a neat time-lapse iPhone movie of their progress; maybe if you ask him about it, he'll post it where you can see it.)

(Many thanks to Nathaniel and Ariel who lent their proper canning gear -- pot, rack, and jar lifter -- for the project. You've seen what happens when we improvise.)

High-fives all around! We had our diced tomatoes for the winter ...

... or not. A month of tomato sauces and minestrones and one enormous pot of chili later, all the tomatoes are gone. We barely needed to can them.

Cannery Row

Unexpectedly, the late summer/fall has been all about canning (and somewhat less about blogging) over here, so this week I bring you four stories, stories on the theme of Ball jars.

Act One: It begins with an unexpected ten pounds of cucumbers.
Act Two: The unaccounted-for thirty-four pounds of tomatoes.
Act Three: Locally grown, harvested, and canned applesauce.
Act Four: Forty pounds of peeled grapes make jam.

I also just cracked open the green tomato pickles I told you about, which, like the circus, are IN-TENSE!

(Our first introduction to canning was last winter, with our four Christmas marmalades. We've come a long way since those little jars, which I keep coming upon unopened in my kitchen and the kitchens of friends.)

Green Tomato Pickles

My tomato plants have given up the ghost (looking at my neighbors' healthy vines and the glossy volunteer plants bursting out of the window boxes at Johnny D's, I suspect the cause was neglect, not seasonality). BUT ANYWAY, I picked all the green tomatoes as a farewell to this year's garden.

And I made two pints of green tomato pickles. (Pretty excited about pickling this year; maybe someday we'll talk about our cucumber pickles.)

The recipe I used came from Brooklyn Homesteader (via a page I tore out of, oddly enough, Bust magazine), but I don't see it online. (There are plenty of other recipes for green tomato pickles, though.)

You can also make it up! Basically, for each pint, put half an onion, a couple cloves of garlic, and some pickling spice* in the bottom of the jar. Add sliced green tomatoes to fill the jar. Bring a mixture of half apple cider vinegar and half water to a boil (you'll need about 1 cup of liquid for each pint you're canning), and add 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 tablespoon sugar for each pint jar. Pour the hot liquid into the jars, carefully screw on the tops, and turn them upside down to seal. (These aren't properly canned, so store them in the fridge.)

My recipe also doesn't say how long to wait before eating them, but we'll probably give them a week or two before tasting.

* What's pickling spice? You can buy it premixed, or make your own according to a recipe, but I combined mine directly in the jars, based on what I had, with no attention to proportions. It's a combination of spicy/savory (mustard seed, celery seed, peppercorns, bay leaf, coriander, red pepper flakes or other chiles) and warm/sweet (allspice, cinnamon sticks, ginger, cloves) spices, often using whole seeds or pieces (rather than ground).

P.S. Loving my "Yes We Can" T-shirt from these guys.

Ketchup and Tomato Jam

I have a story to tell you that starts with forty pounds of tomatoes, but to ease into it, I'm going to start with just six pounds: four for ketchup and two for tomato jam.

Either Malcolm Gladwell ("The Ketchup Conundrum"; totally worth a read) or Jeffrey Steingarten (The Man Who Ate Everything) is the original king of telling you that it's impossible to make a better ketchup than Heinz. Jonah Lehrer has written about the problem. So has the Washington Post. And the Kitchn.

So of course I was going to try. There are lots of ketchup recipes out there, but aspiring to match average all-American ketchup, I used the USDA-approved canning recipe. (I made 1/6 the recipe, using four pounds of tomatoes and ending up with less than one pint of ketchup.)

But to hedge my bets, I also plotted to make a spicy tomato jam from America's Test Kitchen. Should my ketchup disappoint, I could plausibly deny that I had even been trying to make ketchup.

I e-mailed Jack the jam recipe, just to emphasize that I was not planning to make ketchup.

He wrote back, "They are totally talking about ketchup, right?"

But the ketchup recipe and the tomato jam recipe were actually very different. The only common ingredients are tomatoes and sugar (and the jam uses six times more when you consider its yield). They also both have vinegar, but different kinds.

Also, and this is important when you're as lazy as I am: the jam was fast and did not require peeling tomatoes. Or painstaking sieving. It did not bring you to that stage, an hour into the process, when you realize you've made tomato-flavored water that you despair of ever reducing down to ketchup consistency. And it yielded more finished sauce than the ketchup, while using half the tomatoes.

The jam -- whose secret nonvegetarian ingredient is a healthy amount of fish sauce -- turned out savory and jammy and sweet and chunky and every kind of delicious. I'm really pleased with it, and I've been enjoying it on toast and eggs and grilled vegetables and everything else I can think of.

And the ketchup? It turned out almost exactly like Heinz ketchup. I'm not sure what to make of that.

P.S. The upshot of having homemade ketchup on hand is a French fry renaissance in our house. We're trying a new frying method courtesy of Jeffrey Steingarten (really, his The Man Who Ate Everything is mouthwatering, despite the food criticism being fifteen years old). Instead of doing a long low-temperature fry (to cook the insides) followed by a short high-temperature fry (to crisp the outsides), you just cover the potatoes with room-temperature oil, turn the heat to high, and pull them out when the temperature hits 350. Results so far are encouraging.

Almost Enough Tomatoes

This is just the tomatoes that have come into our lives in the last day.

Between our two farm shares, the four plants out front, and a peach-picking trip hastily turned tomato-picking trip*, we are starting to have something almost approaching nearly as many gorgeous ripe local heirloom tomatoes as we can manage to eat.

I know, #firstworldproblem.

Jack and I scored a co-op hat trick, using up a rock-hard forgotten half baguette, some basil we'd grown ourselves, and a bunch of the tomatoes in a panzanella, or bread salad. (Incidentally, the New York Times apparently did a whole series on things to make with stale bread?)

Then Jack made a fresh tomato sauce over diced eggplant, sort of inspired by Cook's Illustrated's vegetable lasagna. (We also salted and microwaved the eggplant before cooking, as described in the Cook's recipe, which had the result of making one of our housemates ask "Where'd you get all the mushrooms?")

But Anna did it best, with a simple plate of sliced tomatoes topped with balsamic vinegar, a little oil, and salt. Yum!

* A field trip to Smolak Farms (where we had great success picking peaches and plums and nectarines last year) to pick peaches before they were blown down in the hurricane was a disappointment because of 1) lack of ripe peaches, and 2) lack of hurricane. Fortunately, they also have you-pick heirloom tomatoes.

Lazy Tomato

As you may have noticed, we sometimes love cooking complicated and well-Internet-researched recipes for whoever shows up to the house.

Know what else I love? When no one else is home at dinnertime and a sliced tomato and a handful of mixed greens or basil on toast can be my meal. (This one with mozarella and fried egg for added oomph.) I don't think there's much to say about making a tomato sandwich, but here's the New York Times's appreciation of the form.

Not much cooking (and even less blogging) recently because of too much work and too much summer fun. A small gem from the cookbook copyediting work keeping me busy recently: "Portion the pasta using tongues, twirling it onto the plate to create height."

(Incidentally, if you like that sort of thing, you might enjoy Love, Your Copyeditor.)

Make-Up Soup: Broccoli-Cheddar-Bread

Sometimes -- and please pretend to be shocked to hear this -- Jack and I disagree a little bit about cooking.

A few weeks ago, we had some broccoli and we had some rapidly staling baguettes. (How much bread did we have? A friend came by and blurted, "Did you guys get that from a dumpster?")

I wanted to make this broccoli, red pepper, and cheddar chowder. Sounds delicious, amirite? 3 1/2 forks on Epicurious. Like an early summer version of my favorite lots-of-vegetables corn chowder.

Jack wanted to make bread soup. Something like this, or maybe this, the world's most insufferable bread soup recipe. (Objectively! Not just saying that because I was mad!)

In uncompromising spirit, we both went ahead making our own soups, completely disregarding what the other was up to. Jack started sauteeing bread cubes and adding broth. I started chopping broccoli and onions.

We made concessions: In deference to his entire cubed stale baguette, I omitted the potato from my recipe. He pretended not to notice when I dumped a bowlful of vegetables into his pot. And we agreed about adding cream and cheddar and immersion blending the results.

The numerous things we disagreed about putting directly in the soup -- chopped tomato, red pepper, chives, basil, sour cream, and Jack's rocking croutons -- all made fine toppings.

First Enterprise CSA Box

We got our first CSA box from Enterprise Farm yesterday, and I think we can say ... WORTH THE WAIT. This is Enterprise's large share, containing onions, sweet potatoes, lettuce, kale, bok choy, cucumbers, asparagus, fiddleheads, tomatoes, and strawberries.

(Has it really only been two months since our winter CSA ended? We've been through some dark culinary times since, so we've been literally counting the days for this.)

Our whole house gathered to eat the (amazing, delicious, incredible) strawberries and tomatoes with our breakfast of bacon and eggs and Italian grocery leftovers (bread, olives, burrata) this morning, and to collegially argue about what to do with the asparagus (rolled into crepes? with Hollandaise sauce?) and fiddleheads (with pasta? with Hollandaise sauce?). Delicious days ahead!

(Through a minor snafu, we didn't get our box until Friday and missed this week's newsletter. Any Enterprise subscribers know where the amazing strawberries come from?)

Herb Mayonnaise and Pesto

Inspired by Mark Bittman's recent paean to the food processor, we made a couple tasty condiments with farm share herbs this week.

Jack fried some eggplant slices for eggplant-tomato-mozzarella sandwiches for lunch one day and talked me into making basil mayonnaise to go with them. (It's amazing how many of our conversations start with me saying, "I think I'm just going to warm up some leftovers" and end with me emulsifying egg yolks.) We did the mayonnaise recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which is pretty much the same as the method described in the article, and just threw in a big handful of basil at the end.

Then, to use up the herbs on Tuesday, we made a lemon-basil-parsley pesto, based on our usual pesto recipe, but with a few twists:

In the food processor, combine a small handful of walnuts, a shallot (I was too lazy to peel garlic), and a few big strips of lemon zest. Process to combine. Add as much basil and parsley as you have, as well as a few ice chunks*, and process until smoothish. With the food processor running, slowly drizzle in half a cup or so of olive oil. Add a handful of Parmesan and process; add additional Parmesan and salt and pepper to taste.

(Mark Bittman, as usual, one-ups us for minimalism and makes pesto mayonnaise.)

* The ice chunks purportedly keep the herbs bright green. I don't know about that, and I've always skipped this step before, but it turned out that the additional agitation made the herbs process in our tiny Cuisinart much more easily.

Summer-into-Fall Vegetable Chili

I came down with a nasty cold this weekend, to go with the decidedly fall-like weather, so it seemed like time to make a Giant Pot of Chili.

I like this chili because it takes lots and lots of whatever vegetables you have. (Maybe you're noticing a theme here?) Ours struck a nice-but-unplanned balance between late-summery farm share ingredients (fresh corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, and celery from the CSA, as well as zucchini) and those more evocative of fall (butternut squash, carrots, onions).

The best chili is obviously the kind your mom makes, so I'm not going to tell you how to make it, except to say that I think a more-vegetables version is worth trying. (Our recipe is loosely based on Emeril's.) If you have strong feelings about what ingredients are allowed in a proper chili, you're welcome to call this vegetable stew. Or a ragout, if the queen's coming to dinner.

Because of a purchasing error, we didn't actually have any chili powder. (Note to self: giant bag labeled "chili powder" at the Indian market is pure powdered chiles -- something like our cayenne pepper -- not a great deal on the much milder American chili powder). I subcontracted the seasoning to Jack, who claims to have learned to cook by making chili, so all I can tell you is that authentic Farm Share Stories Chili features some combination of the ingredients pictured above (l-r: garlic powder, cocoa, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, apple cider, cayenne, garlic oil, cumin, liquid smoke, salt).

P.S. There is definitely leftover chili for today's food blogger potluck! Still time to RSVP!

White Eggplant Lasagna

So, the Enterprise CSA sent us this beautiful white eggplant. It was literally unlike any eggplant we had ever seen before. (I've never seen one like it in a store. That's why I love getting a CSA.)

This eggplant demanded special attention. We had to respect its gravitas. It simply would not do to give it our usual treatment, dicing it into small pieces and stir-frying it into that co-op favorite, veggie slop. This eggplant wanted to be made into quails. (Well, maybe, but that's not what we wanted for dinner.)

This eggplant deserved the full-court press, four chefs in the kitchen, every burner in service treatment. This eggplant wanted to dirty every pan we owned in its preparation. (This eggplant, as you will notice from our narrative, did not, however, quite merit a special trip to the grocery store for ingredients.)

This eggplant was going to be made into lasagna.

Jack sliced, breaded, and fried the eggplant. (When we later admired its firmness of texture, reminiscent almost of fried fish, he acknowledged, "that could be because I used fish seasoning.")

Meanwhile, I sliced the tomatoes, boiled the lasagna noodles (it turned out we had only four, so they were more of a gesture toward tradition than an ingredient), and sliced and sauteed a box of button mushrooms we'd inherited (thanks, Ariel!).

Liz prepared the cheese, which was a challenge only because we didn't have anything like the cheese you would want to have if you had, say, planned in advance to make lasagna. Jack instructed her to make "something like ricotta," and bless her, she made a medley of yogurt and sour cream and the bits and ends of several items from our cheese drawer that was something like ricotta. (Note for posterity: a little bit of smoked cheddar is lovely in an eggplant lasagna.)

Jack seared the tomato slices, because, honestly, that man will put anything in a frying pan if you don't watch him. (I caught him frying dried mint leaves today, but that's a different story for a different blog post.) While defending his gorgeous stack of fried eggplant from our attempts to nibble, nay devour it. (It was that good. Oh, it was so good. A little fried eggplant would hit the spot right about now, actually.)

Erica washed our never-ending stream of pots and spoons and dishes like the kitchen hero she is.

Liz layered it up: pasta sauce, lasagna noodles, cheese mixture, fried eggplant, sauteed mushrooms, seared tomatoes, basil, rinse, repeat, and grated Parmesan on top. Everything was cooked, but we put the lasagna in the oven for 20 minutes to warm it through and melt the cheese and just because we like dying of slow torture by hunger every now and again.

Turns out, it was lasagna worth waiting for.

And the eggplant? Delicious. To die for. Every complaint anyone has ever had about eggplant was resolved here. It was not bitter. It was not mushy. It was firm-but-tender, delectable, mild-tasting, non-slimy eggplant. It was eggplant even a nonvegetarian could love.

(P.S. Dear Enterprise Farm, please send us some more of those white eggplants!)

Not-So-Lazy Corn Chowder

The lazy days of summer seem to have come to an abrupt end today.

First the summer part: With the sudden change in the weather, it began to feel like fall, and wool socks and blankets and nourishing soups all of a sudden started sounding appealing.

Then the lazy part: The weather canceled our original plans (to picnic with a crowd of friends at the Waterfront Performing Arts Series), and from the point of view of two in the afternoon, still in my pajamas (I was working from home) and nothing planned to cook, it seemed like a good idea to spontaneously invite everyone over for dinner and a movie instead.

(It's really a blessing to live in a house where you can say to your housemates, "Hey, I might have invited a few dozen people over for dinner in an hour," and they just shrug and say, "Do you want help peeling those potatoes?")

How not lazy is this? I even followed a recipe. (Well, okay, I omitted the bacon for vegetarian-ness, and increased all the ingredients by approximately 1.5 or 2 times, except where the math was hard, and didn't measure anything, and added the peppers late, and paid no attention to the directions on the bouillon cubes, and didn't have any sea salt. But I did actually use the fresh thyme sprigs -- upper right in photo -- not because we managed to grow any ourselves, but because we happen to be babysitting a traveling friend's well-equipped herb garden.)

We've made this corn chowder before (last year, chowder season began on September 15, so you see how unseasonal the weather is). It's my favorite because it has so many vegetables besides the corn -- onions, carrots, celery, red peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes -- and they're all vegetables that look beautiful in farmers markets (and even grocery stores) right about now. (You'll notice that I took the exact same cutting board photo last year.) In fact, Sara tried a ladleful just before the corn and cream went in and pronounced it a perfectly fine vegetable soup.

May you all be as warm and cozy as we were this evening, with our chowder and movie and good company and hot chocolate.

(This post is part of a Massachusetts Farmers Market Week blogathon organized by In Our Grandmothers' Kitchens as a benefit for Mass Farmers Markets. See Loving Local for evidence that local food bloggers are as prolific as local farms. Lots of excellent vegetable reading!)

Lazy Days and Loving Local

The laziest days of summer seem to be here, and we're happily feeding ourselves from our farm share without terribly much cooking effort.

Last Thursday, lunch was the farm share sandwich pictured here (somewhat inspired by an earlier version): lemon cucumber, tomato, fried egg, mozzarella, and basil-parsley pesto, on a multigrain bagel.

Dinner was a cold pasta salad, reprising the lemon cucumber, tomato, and basil; adding CSA red onion and defrosted frozen edamame; and dressed with crumbled goat cheese, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar.

And for dessert, we popped our CSA popcorn (oops, that was delivered back in June; it's from Next Barn Over Farm in Hadley), and took it to Powderhouse park to watch Up. (Incidentally, if you haven't quite reached your quota of free summer outdoor movies yet, here's a listing of Boston-area series.)

So for lazy cooks, among whom I count myself first, it's a good time to be thankful for the bounty of beautiful late-summer produce that arrives in our CSA, ready to eat right out of the waxed cardboard box and the best for having the least done to it.

In the spirit of beautiful local produce, this post is part of the Loving Local: Celebrating the Flavors of Massachusetts blogathon, which is itself part of Massachusetts Farmers Market Week (August 22 to 28, 2010; events PDF).

Fellow food bloggers, here's how to participate in the blogathon.

Readers, check out Loving Local sometime this week for links to lots of other local foodie bloggers.

The blogathon was organized by In Our Grandmothers' Kitchens, as a benefit for Mass Farmers Markets. If you'd like to support them, this is the donation link.

Tastes-Like-Summer Grilled Cheese Sandwich

This grilled cheese on sourdough, topped with parsley pesto and a farm share tomato, was enjoyed on a sunny back porch one recent summery-feeling evening.

The pesto, which we made to use the two big bunches in last week's share, was one we've made before. (Recipe is here. Lazy version: Parsley, garlic, and a couple tablespoons of nuts in the food processor. With the motor running, drizzle in olive oil; when it looks ready, pulse in some Parmesan.) We served the pesto with pasta originally; this is just the leftovers.

The tomato made the sandwich say summer to me, and it also made me feel wicked excited about growing my own. (One of my plants was amputated in the decidedly not-summery-feeling wind and rain storms of a few days ago, but the upside-down one is hanging in there.)

Slow-Roasted Tomatoes

This simple technique is prescribed for "tomatoes that aren't as flavorful as you'd like them to be." It's from an everyday-French-food cookbook manuscript I was logging art for at the office this week. It seemed like a good match for our January tomatoes.

My recipe called for halved cherry or grape tomatoes; I used this week's roma tomatoes, cut into thickish slices. They're spread out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

The recipe said to sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and olive oil. (I also added a little rosemary.) Then just roast them in a 225-degree oven for three hours.

(Okay, I did a 225-degree oven for two hours, then a warming-to-400 oven for about half an hour more -- I had other things to get going for dinner.)

I ate a lot of them off the cookie sheet, but I'm planning to serve these in a salad with this week's mesclun and beets and some goat cheese.

(If you're fancy, call these tomates confites; here's how a more famous food blogger does them.)

Out with the Old ...

We ended 2009 by trying to eat down our accumulated vegetables, so I present Things You Would Never Think to Make If You Were Buying Ingredients at a Grocery Store, in two courses.

1. Squash-carrot-(avocado!?) soup

Just the latest in our long history of making large quantities of orange soup, this even-oranger-than-usual concoction included squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, giant garlic, and avocados. Non-CSA additions included a can of diced tomatoes, milk, curry powder, nutmeg, and a spoonful of Marmite.

Presumably there's a technique for making the soup, but I have to say this one was less rehearsed than usual.

Approximately: Cook the garlic in oil. Add squash and potato chunks and cook for a bit. Add grated carrots, tomatoes, canned tomatoes, water, and Marmite and cook until the vegetables are soft. Blend the soup a bit with an immersion blender, add avocados and milk to achieve desired consistency, and season to taste.

Makes an enormous amount of soup.

2. Stir-fried greens and ham

Our authentically vegetarian housemate is still out of town, so excuse the foray into carnivory.

Farm share items herein: Onion, green pepper, zucchini, basil, bunch of kale, bag of salad greens (I don't think normal people cook these, but I put them in at the very last minute to just wilt them a bit, and it reduces the volume a lot).

Non-CSA additions: Mushrooms and ham.

Brown the ham and mushrooms until the smoke detector goes off; set aside. Saute the onions, green pepper, and zucchini until just about cooked. Return the ham and mushrooms to the pan. Add the kale and a small amount of water, cover, and let steam until the kale is cooked. Add the basil and salad greens and steam for just a moment more. I seasoned with salt and pepper, red pepper flakes, and lemon juice.

Jack got a mandoline for his birthday (hi, Jack's mom!), so we did a beautiful mise en place with the onions, mushrooms, zucchini, and pepper very thinly sliced.

Mix-and-Match a Minestrone

Minestrone fulfills two of my major cooking needs: 1) you can make it entirely from ingredients you already have and 2) it doesn't require a recipe.

As long as there are some kind of tomatoes in the house, I will attempt to make minestrone. (And I haven't tried it yet, but I am not 100 percent sure that ketchup does not count as tomatoes.)

1. Cook your aromatics (any combination of onions, shallots, leeks, celery, and carrots) in oil in a large pot.

2. Add long-cooking vegetables (potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, turnips, parsnips).

3. Add some kind of tomatoes (fresh, canned, paste, jarred pasta sauce) and some kind of broth (from a can, box, cubes, or even just water).

4. Add quick-cooking vegetables (zucchini, corn, green beans, broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards).

5. Add starches (cooked beans, cooked barley, uncooked rice, uncooked pasta).

The trick is really just to add the ingredients in approximate order of how much cooking time they need, so everything gets done at the same time.

Add whatever seasonings you like (I totally phoned it in this time with a jar of "Italian seasoning") and salt and pepper. Serve with grated cheese (traditionally Parmesan) on top.

This particular incarnation was leeks + celery + carrots + purple potatoes + butternut squash + canned chopped tomatoes + vegetable broth + cabbage + white beans + barley, and it made a serious dent in accumulated CSA vegetables.

(If fast and loose is not for you, here is a very serious approach to minestrone making, with beautiful photos.)