The Morning After

The alarm seemed to go off just a little earlier than usual this morning (for the record, it goes off at 6AM every day of the week). Slowly, we pulled it all together and got ourselves back out to Christie Lake on time.

On getting to the gate, I mentioned to the girl checking our membership "It feels like we just left!"

"Tell me about it!"

The whole place generally looked a little groggy. The giant stage was just starting to come down as we rolled by.

We were quite happy to discover that some new people joined us from Burlington to help build this morning. They gladly jumped in and set about getting their hands dirty.

Many hands make light work

One of the things I really enjoy about designing the trails at Christie Lake is incorporating some of the historical features from the property. Prior to becoming a conservation area, the lands at Christie were working farms and every so often, we encounter a fence line. These are easily distinguishable as the distinct zones of mature hardwoods that crisscross the pine plantations.

We take advantage of these historical features by making waypoints of them. We weave the trail among the hardwoods and use the old fence itself as a point of interest. For instance, in this photo, you can see that we cross the fence twice at the entrance and exit of the same hairpin and show the trail user a magnificent pair of old trees in the bargain.

If these trees could talk...

When I lay out a trail, I try to tell a story about the land. There is a degree of craft that goes into helping users interpret the history of the conservation area. A properly built trail teaches as it wends through the forest.

Anyhow, I promised you a tomato sauce recipe. Mine is deceptively simple in that it only includes one ingredient: tomatoes. However, the devil is in the details.

You'll remember this pic I posted yesterday.

Before

Take a bushel of Roma tomatoes (this is key, only Romas are pulpy enough to make a decent sauce), cut them into eighths and divide into as many pots as you have burners.  Don't core them or get too fussy - weed out the rotten bits and that will do (Heston Blumenthal, the uber-chef from The Fat Duck in the UK actually throws in the stems but I find that a bit too funky smelling for my taste). Get it up to a boil and let it simmer. And simmer. And simmer. Until it looks something like this.

After

Now, you might be thinking that this looks like a bit of a mess. Trust me, you need to wait until the tomatoes adopt an almost coppery colour. This is a sign of slight caramelization and it is the single-most important part of making sauce that tastes like sauce (and not just tomato water).

Once the tomatoes have cooled slightly, set up a workstation that looks like this.

Vry srs

The thing with the handle is called a food mill and it is the one piece of hardware that separates "meh" sauce from "wow" sauce. It is basically a bulk grinder and it divides the good stuff from the yucky stuff. Here's what you get after about an hour of milling (nobody said good food would be easy).

Wow!

Take note of the colour of the sauce - rich, dark and incredibly "tomatoey". All the "junk" that's still in the food mill is all the solids (seeds, skin and whatnot) left from the entire bushel. You know you're done when that mush is about the consistency of Play-Doh (that stuff goes straight into the green bin).

Again, at this point, the only ingredient is tomatoes. It tastes out-of-this-world.

For canning, I highly recommend following the Bernardin (http://www.bernardin.ca/) instructions. They add just enough salt and lemon juice that the sauce comes out of the jar tasting remarkably fresh and full. 

1 bushel = 11.5 jars

So there you have it. I've given up my painstakingly researched and perfected tomato sauce recipe. Deceptively simple yet somewhat labour intensive. One thing is for sure: you can taste the love when you eat it. 

Having said that, it will take something very special (like an election win...) to make the jump from here to get me to share my pasta sauce recipe. Besides, I've just entered the competition at the Ancaster Fair and it wouldn't do to give away all my secrets going into that! :)