The gardening season is winding down. The peas and onions are done. I’m on the second, smaller planting of green beans. There’s only a few cucumbers left on the vine. My eggplants are all getting large enough to harvest. It looks like they’ll all be ready at once, which means I’ll be making caponata and freezing for later.

I might have made my last batch of Summer Vegetable Tomato Sauce. This time, I put in about as many summer squash as tomatoes. I’ve added onion,  garlic and basil, too. I was too hot and lazy to peel anything – not even the garlic – and I didn’t bother to pick the leaves off of the basil stems. I did cut the vegetables into large chunks. After roasting, I ran it through the food mill, which took care of the tough bits, seeds and skins.

It needed some salt and a teaspoon of sugar.

Here it is ready for the freezer.

It will be a welcome sight this winter.

Did you know that I have a FAQ page? I received so many comments and questions after blogging about egg handling, safety and storage, that I’ve added a FAQ on these topics that I hope will be useful. Read it here.

The brightest flavors in the home vegetable garden are often from cherry tomatoes. They are the perfect blend of acid and sweet, a burst of juice and a mouthful of fruit. I eat them like candy and toss them in salads, but at some point during the summer, I can’t keep up, and I am done with them. But I don’t want to waste a one. That’s when I cook them and make Roasted Cherry Tomato Sauce.

Very little preparation is required. Wash and remove the stems. If you have a few extra plum tomatoes, quarter them. You can chop and onion, or peel a few cloves of garlic. Or not. Put all onto a baking sheet. This is my favorite heavy pan. It’s dark patina is from years of use with olive oil.

Pour on a glug of good olive oil –  enough to coat the bottom of the pan and make the vegetables glisten. Sprinkle on a teaspoon or two of balsamic vinegar. Dust on sea salt – don’t use cheap table salt. The salt flavor matters. Kosher salt will do. I have Sicilian Sea Salt that I brought back from Rome that I used for this. Delicious. My stash is almost gone. You can buy good salt at many markets and gourmet grocers. I’d like to go back to Rome, though to get mine!

Shake the pan so that the vegetables are evenly coated with the oil, vinegar and salt. Put it into a 300 degree F. oven. Bake for an hour, or longer. The tomatoes will burst and shrink and their flavors will concentrate.

You could put it through a food mill to get rid of the seeds and skins and have a concentrated tomato sauce. Or, use as is. Toss with cheese tortellini. I used it to top grilled swordfish steaks. Easy. Pure summer.

There is an egg-stomping, egg-smashing hen in the big barn. I don’t know who she is. All I know is that there are seven hens in that coop. Two of them, the golden comets, Agnes and Philomena, are young and lay everyday. One of the old girls lays occasionally. I don’t know which one, although I suspect that it’s Maizie. One of these three laying hens, in her enthusiasm to get into the nesting box, or, perhaps just because she is careless with her dinosaur feet, tramples one of the eggs. When I go to collect the eggs, one is in pieces, a yolky mess in the shavings. She doesn’t eat the egg. If she was an egg-eater, she’d be gone. That sort of bad habit is picked up by the other hens, until you have broken shells and not much else for your chicken-keeping efforts. Sometimes, hens lay thin-shelled eggs that break easily – then the hens learn to eat them. However, that doesn’t appear to be the cause. The smashed eggs that I’m finding look normal. I wish that I had a camera in that coop to spy on the hens. I’d like to know the culprit and see what is going on.

With the mind-blowingly huge egg recall happening, there’s some interesting information getting into the press about the difference between the health of backyard hens and their eggs, and those from factory farms. I learned something in this piece about how eggs stay microbe-free (at least they do when the chickens are healthy and the eggs are handled properly!)

I subscribe to a poultry industry newsletter, which claims that the salmonella at the factory farm came from poor-quality animal-based feed (one reason “vegetarian fed” eggs are a step better than the cheapest eggs at the market.) The same newsletter had an item that claimed that the salmonella outbreak could have been prevented if the hens had been vaccinated, which is yet another example of how factory farming would like to rely on drugs and not good husbandry. Even federal health inspectors admit that one possible reason that the eggs were bad is that the housing was unsanitary (to put it mildly – the hens lived in rodent infested, manure-packed chicken houses.)

At a time when communities are trying to change regulations to allow for the urban and village hennery, it’s very important that the distinction between what we do and what the factory farms do is made clear. Eggs themselves are not bad for you, in fact they’re one of the healthiest foods out there. Fresh eggs from healthy, well-fed hens are nutrient-rich and a very low risk for spreading disease. The general public needs to see that in order to have a healthful egg supply, that it makes sense to encourage the small producer. The consumer shouldn’t fear all eggs! Nor should they fear living near chickens.

As keepers of backyard flocks, it matters how we care for our hens. It’s essential that we keep our coops clean, rodent-free, and manage the manure so that it composts without undue odors. If we give away or sell eggs, they should be clean, fresh, and kept refrigerated. We are the counterpoint to the horrors of the factory farm. Imagine that a news team is about to step into your yard and film your flock. It should be immediately obvious to the viewer who knows nothing about chickens that yours are a source of good food. What we do matters.