My name is Tiffany and I, along with my fellow intern, Rebecca, have been at The Farm for a little over a week. And…what a week! We were put straight to work picking ripe tomatoes, weeding, basket-weaving tomatoes, and learning how to wrangle the watering hose to submission (still working on that, actually, as evidenced by my soaked shoes after a watering session). I’m a dietetic intern, like Janine before me, but I am also a Ph.D. student doing research on environmental exposures and obesity. So, I get to be a farm hand by day and a researcher by night!
Intern Tiffany Yang prepares a hoophouse bed for planting.
About the farm hand…I have a garden at home and it’s definitely not small, but it’s no farm! All this work makes me really appreciate the farmers that I buy my food from and a little part of me winces every time I have to throw a bit of produce away because I know how much work goes into nurturing that seed into something edible.
Actually, not just edible. Edible and unblemished. On our first day at The Farm, Rebecca and I were picking ripe Sun Gold tomatoes—one of the varieties grown on The Farm. They are ridiculously delicious and have an appropriately high price tag because they are so hard to pick! Due to their fragile skin, these tomatoes tend to split easily and these split tomatoes can’t be sold. So, what’s a normal, rational, tomato-loving person to do? Eat the splits! So, the beauties were sold at the farmers market on Wednesday and we gorged ourselves on the splits.
If you’ve got “uglies” and don’t feel like eating them or if you were tempted by the low prices on second quality tomatoes at the farmers market, have I got a recipe for you! This recipe is awesome. A few adjustments I’ve made are to up the tomatoes to 2# and cut the sugar to ¾ cup. Also, I would highly recommend adding ½ tsp (or more!) of red pepper flakes. This stuff is truly amazing…I love it plain on toasted bread, on sandwiches, with chicken, with meatballs…the list goes on. I’ve even eaten it with a spoon!
Until next time,
Tiffany