I’ve been picking tomatoes on a regular basis. Unfortunately, most of them have split, the result of too much watering.
I was prepared to throw all of these away, except that I was lucky enough to be in conversation today with a farmer, who advised me that the tomoatoes would be perfectly good in sauce.
I’ve never made sauce from fresh tomatoes, and all the recipes in my old edition of “Joy of Cooking” call for canned tomatoes or paste. So, I improvised, and the sauce actually turned out pretty well.
The boys and I went to a corn maze today, at Sauchuk Farm in Plympton, which is how I happened to meet the farmer.
I was thrilled to find a corn maze so close to the Cape; the only other I knew of is in Fitchburg, about a four and a half hour round trip.
It turns out there are a couple of mazes in Rhode Island, too. Mazes are a country-wide commercial venture. GPS systems are used to map them out, and they are planted with a special type of corn that grows well above the height of an average person. The corn has few if any kernels, so it has no nutritional value for either people or animals, unless it were harvested for silage early in the season.
Sauchuk Farm is in a pretty area, and they’ve built a bridge near the top of the maze that gives you a nice view of their 100 acre property. Due to the weather, there were very few other visitors when we were there, so the scene was quiet and even a little nostalgic.
The boys spent a lot of time at the small petting zoo which a neighbor, the same farmer who advised me about tomatoes, had set up in the field in front of the maze, and they tried out a smaller, left-turn-only maze constructed with bales of hay.
To top it off, while we were in transit to the farm, James mastered the art of creating bubbles with bubble gum, and Bob is close to getting consistent results from his efforts as well.
All in all, a nice day outside, and we got home in plenty of time to catch up with Emme, who spent the afternoon at a friend’s birthday party.