Some days I wake up and the virtual world looks flat and spiritless, and I get the urge to do something that breaks into the physical space. In other words, I get the urge to do something real. Something that involves manual labor. And I have to say, cooking often satisfies.

The tomatoes are at their peak in New England, so now is the time to can for the winter. Yesterday Alex and I canned 1,000 fresh tomatoes—about 160 pounds. I’m still not ready to commit to the 100 Mile Diet, but this is a step in the right direction.

“You’ve got way too much time on your hands,” said my landlord as I was cleaning up the kitchen afterwards. And he’s right. But what I also have is a thousand canned local tomatoes, and that’s pretty sweet.

To pull this off, you will need:

• 1,000 ripe tomatoes
• 2 very large stock pots (20 and 35 quarts)
• a small pan for heating jar lids
• steamer baskets, jar lid rings, or another mechanism for raising the jars 1/2” from the bottom of the pot
• 6 12-packs of widemouth quart jars (average 3 lbs tomatoes per quart jar)
• a jar lifter
• a large hand-held sieve or strainer
• 2 Tbp bottled lemon juice per quart, for acidification
• some kind of plunging device for packing the tomatoes down
• cooling racks for hot jars
• paring knives
• two people
• one very long day

Here’s 1,000 raw tomatoes, which we bought from Red Fire Farm:

Hmm, make that 999.

So, to make canned whole tomatoes in their juice, first you have to skin the tomatoes. Start by scoring a small X in the bottom of every tomato and removing any bad bruises or moldy bits. We decided not to core the tomatoes, but you can if it pleases you. While you’re scoring, bring a few gallons of water to boil in both stock pots—one for skinning, and one for sanitizing jars. For the lids, heat but do not boil water in the small pan.

Dump the tomatoes into the skinning pot in batches for a couple minutes, until the skins split. Usually this takes only 30-60 seconds, but with such a large quantity of tomatoes, it takes 3-4 minutes because the water cools down so much. Pull them out with the strainer, dump them into the sink, spraying cold water on them as you go. Bring the water back to a full boil before you skin the next batch.

When the sink is full, start pulling the skins off. It should be easy, with your fingers. Remove any stems and put them into another pot or bowl or whatever you can find. A spotless bathtub might be prudent at this point. Meanwhile, sanitize your jars and lid rings in the other stock pot, boiling them for 5 minutes, and sanitize the lids in the small pan, in the not-quite-boiling water. Don’t boil the lids, as it might weaken the seal.

As the sanitized jars come out of the water, add 2 Tbsp lemon juice and your skinned tomatoes to fill. Push the contents down and keep adding more tomatoes until the liquid from the tomatoes rises to 1/2 inch from the top.

Clean the jar rims with a damp towel, place the lids on squarely, and tighten down the lid rings with your fingertips, until they are “fingertip tight.” We made the mistake of tightening a few too much, and they bulged because the air could not escape while cooking.

Once they’re sealed, stash all the jars for the moment. Finish skinning and canning all the tomatoes. You will be impressed by the number of jars. Dump out your tomato skinning water, or use it to make a tomato bisque.

The final step is to boil all the filled jars in batches for 50 minutes each. The USDA says the water must be at a full rolling boil for the entire 50 minutes, so give yourself an hour and a half for each batch to account for the cooling of the water when you add the jars.

After 50 minutes of boiling, remove the jars to cooling racks. They may hiss slightly as they come out of the water. That’s OK. Let them stand 12-24 hours until they’re room temperature. Then remove the lid rings, test the seal by pressing the top (it should not give), picking the jar up by its lid (it should not open), and turning the jar upside down (it should not leak). Clean the jars and store them without their lid rings.

Here they are, all canned up. We had another 5 that didn’t seal properly.

Resources:

• Home Canning Tomatoes for the fail-safe USDA method.
• Or the slightly shadier Minnesota Methods that we used.
• The Canning Pantry — online store for lid lifters, canning funnels, and other supplies

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Went to Western Mass last weekend. Geoff showed us around his hometown of North Brookfield. It is bucolic for sure. Not much in the way of commerce, but there is this:

Had some home-made ice cream sandwiches and ridiculous Sundays.

The fab duo.

I’ve just finished watching 5 Films About Christo & Jeanne-Claude (please excuse the amazon link). These documentaries are about an hour each and span from 1974-1995.

These films expertly exhibit Christo & Jeanne-Claudes’ art: very large scale temporary transformations of the landscape. The films are the closest relationship we can have with these pieces, which were in place for no more than 3 weeks, like the peak of spring. Each piece has unique sounds, undulations, and interactions with the landscape, just as each piece has its own ad-hoc community of workers and locals, landowners, politicians, and art patrons that helped make it happen.

While Andy Goldsworthy makes beautiful sculptures out of nature itself, Christo & Jeanne-Claude bring the artificial into nature, which for me is not quite as compelling artistically. But their work has an added element of public interaction and debate that Goldsworthy, working in solitude, fails to bring to such a fever pitch. About half of each film is dedicated to the process, sometimes 10-15 years long, of obtaining permission for the project. Permission must be granted from dozens of legislative bodies, regulatory committees, other government entities, and private individuals. For the Japanese Umbrellas project, permission had to be obtained from 750 individual farmers.

All this red tape results in a fantastic public dialog where the artists take center stage, often going door to door to gain public support for their project. They engage farmers, politicians, families, many of whom rarely discuss art or go to art museums. So the project quickly becomes the talk of the town, and the biggest question is, “Is It Art?” This is precisely the point: outsiders coming into a community and confronting people with a project, asking that they accept that it is art or, if nothing else, it is beautiful and worthwhile. Christo & Jeanne-Claude may not be the best sales people, but they are incredibly tenacious, very well organized, they’ve learned to play the political game, and they are ultimately successful at eliciting joy from doubters and supporters alike when the project is finally unveiled.

Christo & Jeanne-Claude demand complete control over their projects, so they do not accept contributions and they craft contracts that allow them complete freedom over the execution and timing. They make all of their money selling prints, design drawings, books, movies, and other memorabilia around these works. So, this is in opposition to the typical selling of art pieces. Christo & Jeanne-Claude do not sell their art at all, they sell only the frame. This was most clearly demonstrated with the wrapping of the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, which has for centuries been the subject of countless paintings and sketches. But they turned the bridge itself into art, and the idea of painting the bridge on its head.

Jeanne-Claude makes a point of frequently telling people “We spend the same amount on each project, which is everything we have raised plus everything we have saved.” The couple goes broke every time they do a project, but because they’ve managed to gain so much public support over the years, each project is more and more ambitious. According to Wikipedia, the Valley Curtain project of 1970 had a budget of $400,000, and the Umbrellas project of 1995 cost over $26 million.

I highly recommend these films, especially the Pont Neuf and Umbrellas documentaries. Here’s some of their work:

Umbrellas — California

Umbrellas — Japan

Pont Neuf Wrapped

I am tired of sending people to Amazon from my blog to find media. I want a web site that has a static page for everything that Amazon has, with links to many different sources for acquisition: your local libraries, sites that let you trade with people, your local independent bookstores, and then, yes, if you really have to, an online bookseller.

What I’m talking about is a site that promotes the library and the local economy at the same time. Have you thought lately about how great the library is? The library is a network that can get you pretty much anything. It saves trees and oil by sharing a local resource. And now that we’ve lost most of our town squares, it is one of the few local non-commercial community spots left. What’s more, you’ve already paid for it in your tax bill, so it is a wise financial move. Of course, libraries don’t have many copies of the hottest new books and movies, so that’s where the independent bookstore comes in.

I know about WorldCat, and I’m excited to see the upcoming WorldCat.org. But even with a new face, they don’t have circulation data. I wish libraries had open APIs like Amazon does, where you could query availability, request books, and so on. I’ve heard about “Library 2.0,” but where is it? I’ve read about LibraryLookup. I’ve seen Google Print. None of give the complete answer when the readers’ question is “what is the fastest, cheapest way for me to borrow/acquire/read/view X?”

And isn’t that always the question?

Well, no. Other questions might be “what did people think of this book?”, “what other library books did people check out when they checked this one out?”, and “how can I save this book for later checkout/purchase?”

I don’t know of a site that answers even one of these questions and includes my local library.