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November at Angelkeep can become many things. Some things on the list are identified as “the last of the season” or “the last of the year.” Things like bidding farewell to the last mosquito causes mixed emotion since that also means frost has driven away all but a few rare opportunities to read comfortably outdoors.
Watering flower pots and veggie beds is a chore ended, along with the lawn mowing routine. Mowing simply will all too soon be replaced with shoveling. Home gown flowers and produce will be missed for many months ahead.
The year’s quality crop of Angelkeep tomatoes (4 varieties) now has a breezeway extension-of-use plan already instigated. Green, unripe tomatoes were gathered at the first frost and placed in a cardboard box. Then the enclosed, but unheated, breezeway location offers the tomatoes ripening time, even though they gain no additional size. An alternative is pulling vines and hanging them, with tomatoes, upside-down in the basement, if one is available.
As the tomatoes show signs of yellow or red (depending upon variety) they are moved to the kitchen window sill for final finishing. This process usually keeps the Angelkeep raised tomatoes usable for salads, soups, and sandwiches at least till December.
In a younger life, excess tomatoes were canned. Home juice was allowed to set and separate (pulp from liquid) prior to the canning. The thick meaty pulp was processed while the watery top portion was skimmed off and used for end-of-the-garden veggie soup which contained whatever was yet salvageable from our patch. Dry shelled beans, burst cabbage, peppers grown to only crabapple size, adolescent carrots, and maybe even a late onion created the veg assortment that differed each year.
It would make a large pot and be eaten twice a day till gone.
Did you know the Kemp Brothers of Frankfort, Ind., created a process that stopped the tomato juice separation of pulp and liquid back in 1929? Or did you know tomatoes were first commercially canned at Paoli in 1925? And were you aware the French Lick Springs Hotel originated tomato juice as a health beverage that same year?
Hoosiers love tomatoes. Some younger Indiana locals, back in this writer’s teen years, were known to have celebrated with tomatoes by tossing them into the air, similar to confetti, and toward nearly loaded hay-ride wagons. Tomatoes are versatile and velocitizable.
Indiana was once the largest tomato state. Adams and Wells Counties were very active in tomato production. Perhaps global warming gave other states a longer growing season over Indiana.
Did you know that tomato crops drawing migrant workers used to swell the classroom rosters in local schools? But by November, the temporary families had moved on. It did leave those schools with a little thicker slice of the educational tax-dollars pie for the remainder of the year.
Remember Mrs. Albert Van Camp, wife of the Indianapolis grocer? No? Back during the Civil War, she invented the “secret” tomato sauce recipe used in the new “pork ‘n beans.”
Tomato versatility. Was Mrs. Van Camp’s initial time to toss tomatoes into a ham and bean soup pot, really her rendition of a November end-of-the-garden soup?
November’s also good for homemade chili soup. It’s similar to end-of-the-garden veggie. Mix lots of tomatoes (skins, bug bites, and all), several preformed hamburger patties from the freezer that never made it to the summer grill, garden onions, peppers, if ya got ‘em, any residual beans (dried, green, Lima, or canned red beans if necessary) with ¾ cup cumin. Yes! ¾ cup! You can’t cumin chili too much. It’s the flavor without the heat. Cook to death.
The longer chili brews, the better—like ham ‘n beans.
Serve any of these soups with Hoosier cornbread. Angelkeep has no proof, but believes that cornbread, wonderful cornbread, was invented by Hoosier natives, the Miami tribe. Don’t quote me on the maize bread.
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