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- Written by: Lake County News Reports
I may be overdoing it with this moniker for one of my favorite foods, but that’s truly what their fresh-off-the-vine, locally grown goodness tastes like to me. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the pungent smell of tomato vines can make me salivate.
The midsummer heat brings long-awaited fulfillment of my craving for fresh tomato sandwiches, and there is nothing better with which to make them than the beautiful array of local, farm-grown tomatoes available this time of year.
My affection for vine-ripened tomatoes is so great that the term “heirloom tomato” may be one of my favorite culinary phrases.
I’m thinking of them now, nestled in farmers’ market stalls in all their colorful glory. They’re calling my name: red, charmingly creviced Brandywines with their classic sweet taste; yellow firm-fleshed Persimmons; earthy, smoky Cherokee purples; Marvel stripes with their red and green striations, and oh-so-many more. Together they make a rainbow of sweet, savory, subtle, intense tomato flavor.
I’ll never forget when my husband got inspired by a seed catalog and planted more than 40 varieties of tomatoes in our home garden. We seemed to have tomatoes in every conceivable color and shape that year, from an almost black Russian variety to tiny yellow ones the size of berries.
I’m thankful that our dehydrator endured all its use that summer and that our friends enjoyed their Christmas gifts of our dried tomato experiments.
Tomatoes, along with eggplants and squashes, are botanically classified as a fruit; however, for culinary purposes, they’re considered a vegetable since they don’t have the high sugar content of other fruits.
On an interesting, if unusual, side note, in 1893 the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether tomatoes should be treated vegetables or fruits. In that case regarding importation tariffs, the vegetable designation prevailed.
Supermarket tomatoes are no match for summer’s local crop. While the average American consumes almost 22 pounds of them each year (mostly in the form of ketchup and canned sauces), only 10 percent of us rate them as our favorite vegetable, largely due to the poor taste of those found in the produce departments of conventional markets.
Tomatoes are a fragile fruit, and do best when brought to the table from the vine in the shortest route possible.
Because supermarket tomatoes must endure shipping and cold storage, they’ve been bred for durability and a long shelf life, and that has done away with the complex mix of sugar, acid and chemicals that create good tomato flavor.
In addition, tomatoes that must be transported long distances are picked immature, before they’ve had the chance to develop their natural flavor, and are “ripened” later using ethylene gas, which gives them a red color.
When I buy a tomato from the supermarket in the off season, it’s the plum or cherry variety, which haven’t been as subject to the breeding that does away with flavor. In cooked dishes, canned Italian plum tomatoes often impart more flavor than fresh ones from the store.
Tomatoes are native to the western part of South America, including the Galapagos Islands, but were first cultivated in southern Mexico beginning in about 500 B.C.
They were brought to Europe by Spanish Conquistadors, and by the 16th century had spread throughout Europe.
They were not initially popular as a food, however, as they were thought to be poisonous. (While the leaves contain toxins common to members of the nightshade family, the fruit is – thankfully! – quite edible.)
Tomatoes are an absolute powerhouse of nutrition. They’re full of lycopene, an antioxidant which has been shown to be protective against a growing list of cancers, as well as a benefit to cardiovascular health.
If you’re interested in getting a healthy dose of lycopene, studies have revealed that organic tomato products have three times the amount than their conventionally grown counterparts.
Tomatoes abound in vitamins A and C, a range of B vitamins, potassium and fiber. They’re also high in vitamin K, which is essential for maintaining bone health.
I’m convinced that tomatoes are one of the healthiest things one can eat.
And, speaking of eating, what about that tomato sandwich I mentioned? My favorite way to create one is to layer slices of heirloom tomatoes of varying colors on sourdough French bread and top it with fresh basil leaves, real mayonnaise and a bit of salt and freshly ground pepper.
Sometimes I make a basil aioli to replace the fresh leaves and mayo, and I’ve shared that recipe below.
Modern-day aioli is a spin on the traditional sauce of garlic and olive oil that originated in the Provence region of France.
Aioli is often looked upon as a flavored mayonnaise, but a true aioli must contain garlic. If the garlic clove is eliminated from my recipe below (which is an option for its preparation), it would more appropriately be called basil mayonnaise.
Also shared below is my recipe for one of my favorite summer meals, a cooling tomato-based soup called gazpacho, which hails from the southern region of Andalusia in Spain. Chocked full of fresh summer veggies, you may be able to find most of its ingredients in your garden or local farmers’ market.
While some gazpacho recipes call for blending the entire batch of veggies into a puree, I prefer to puree only half of them to maintain an interesting texture and satisfying crunch.
Enjoy! Researchers have found that eating gazpacho helps guard against depression, so it’s guaranteed to make you happy.
Gazpacho
3 large tomatoes, diced
1 cucumber, peeled and diced
2 bell peppers, chopped (combine red, green, yellow or other colors)
1 red onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
¼ cup red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 cups tomato juice
¼ cup fresh parsley, chopped
¼ cup fresh basil, chopped
Juice of 1 lime
Tabasco sauce and salt & pepper to taste
Combine vegetables in a large glass bowl.
Add remaining ingredients and mix well.
Add half the mixture to a food processor and blend until smooth.
Combine puree with original mixture and chill for 4 hours before serving.
Garnish with diced avocado or cilantro, if desired.
Serves four.
Basil aioli
Combine one large egg, 1 clove crushed garlic, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil in a food processor. Process for a few seconds until mixture is emulsified.
Keep the motor running as you drizzle in just under a cup of extra virgin olive oil. Add 1/3 cup roughly chopped fresh basil and pulse a bit until combined. Scrape the aioli into a container and refrigerate.
Makes about 1-1/2 cups.
Esther Oertel, the "Veggie Girl," is a personal chef and culinary coach and is passionate about local produce. Oertel owns The SageCoach Personal Chef Service and teaches culinary classes at Chic Le Chef in Hidden Valley Lake. She welcomes your questions and comments; e-mail her at
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- Written by: Dauna Coulter
Let the countdown begin. NASA's Dawn spacecraft is less than one year away from giant asteroid Vesta.
“There's nothing more exciting than revealing an unexplored, alien world,” said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“Vesta,” he predicted, “is going to amaze us.”
Dawn is slated to enter orbit around Vesta in late July 2011. As the first breathtaking images are beamed back to Earth, researchers will quickly combine them into a movie, allowing us all to ride along.
“It will look as though the spacecraft is hovering in one place while Vesta rotates beneath it,” said Rayman.
Previous missions have shown us a handful of asteroids, but none as large as this hulking relic of the early solar system. Measuring 350 miles across and containing almost 10 percent of the mass of the entire asteroid belt, Vesta is a world unto itself.
“It's a big, rocky, terrestrial type body – more likely similar to the moon and Mercury than to the little chips of rocks we've flown by in the past,” Rayman said. “For example, there's a large crater at Vesta's south pole, and inside the crater is a mountain bigger than asteroid Eros.”
Dawn will orbit Vesta for a year, conducting a detailed study and becoming the first spacecraft to ever orbit a body in the asteroid belt. Later, Dawn will leave Vesta and go on to orbit a second exotic world, dwarf planet Ceres – but that's another story.
Many scientists consider Vesta a protoplanet. The asteroid was in the process of forming into a full fledged planet when Jupiter interrupted its growth. The gas giant became so massive that its gravity stirred up the material in the asteroid belt so the objects there could no longer coalesce.
“Vesta can teach us a lot about how planets formed,” said Christopher Russell of UCLA, the mission's principal investigator. “There is a whole team of scientists sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for that first glimpse of Vesta.”
Dawn's official Vestian approach, which Rayman also calls the “oh man this is so cool phase” of the mission, begins next May. Unlike most orbital insertions, however, this one will be comparatively relaxing.
“This may be the first planetary mission that doesn't cause its mission team members to bite their nails while their spacecraft is getting into planetary orbit,” said Rayman.
A conventional spacecraft's entry into a flight path around a celestial body is accompanied by crucial periods during which maneuvers must be executed with pinpoint precision. If anything goes wrong, all can be lost. But Dawn, with its gentle ion propulsion, slowly spirals in to its target, getting closer and closer as it loops around.
“Dawn's entire thrust profile for its long interplanetary flight has been devoted largely to the gradual reshaping of its orbit around the Sun so that by the time the spacecraft is in the vicinity of Vesta, its orbit will be very much like Vesta's,” Rayman said.
With just a slight change in trajectory, the spacecraft will allow itself to be captured by Vesta's gravity.
“Even that gentle ion thrust will be quite sufficient to let the craft slip into orbit. It's like merging into traffic on an interstate – only gradual acceleration is needed,” Rayman said. “Dawn won't even notice the difference, but it will be in orbit around its first celestial target.”
Dawn's first survey orbits will be high and leisurely, taking days to loop around Vesta at altitudes of about 1,700 miles. After collecting a rich bounty of pictures and data from high altitude, Dawn will resume thrusting, spiraling down to lower and lower orbits, eventually settling in a little more than 100 miles high – lower than satellites orbiting Earth.
Parts of the surface may be reminiscent of features on Earth or the Moon with craters and perhaps even volcanoes.
“We don't expect to see active volcanoes,” noted Carol Raymond, the mission's deputy principal investigator at JPL, “but there could be ancient volcanic features still recognizable among the craters.”
Meanwhile, “other sights could be completely unlike anything we've imagined,” says Rayman. "It'll be pure excitement.”
To see a video about the Dawn visit http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/19aug_dawn2/.
Dauna Coulter works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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- Written by: Tom Philpott
In July, two separate advisory groups reached the same general conclusions regarding what needs to be done to sustain the force. In the nearer term, they say, one step that must be taken is to make military retirees pay more out of pocket for their health care benefit.
“Unless retirees contribute more for their TRICARE insurance, medical costs will not be brought under control and the national defense they served, and for which they fought and sacrificed, will be harmed,” says the final report of the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel.
The panel is co-chaired by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry from the Clinton administration and Stephen J. Hadley who was national security advisor through President George W. Bush’s second term.
Longer term, and for the future force, panelists say, work must begin on designing new retirement, compensation and promotion systems to replace inefficient and rigid systems adopted after World War II. The situation is so critical that the Hadley-Perry panel asks Congress to establish a new National Commission on Military Personnel to lead the reform effort.
Arnold Punaro, a defense industry executive and retired Marine Corps Reserve major general, chairs a task force for the Defense Business Board that will deliver its final report to Defense Secretary Robert Gates in October.
Task force “initial observations” for cutting defense costs through best business practices, briefed to the board July 22, reinforces the notion that personnel accounts must be brought under control by modernizing retirement, pay, health benefits and the “up-or-out” promotion systems.
Both studies deal with a far wider range of initiatives to restructure forces and streamline organizations. The Hadley-Perry report can be read online at www.usip.org/files/qdr/qdrreport.pdf and task force observations are at http://dbb.defense.gov/meetings.html.
What both conclude on the need to control health costs and modernize compensation systems, Punaro said, is consistent with findings of the 10th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation and the 2006 Defense Advisory Commission on Military Compensation. But now, with Defense Secretary Gates’ leadership and a new awareness among military leaders to the burden of mounting personnel costs, there’s a fresh groundswell for change, he said.
“I’ve heard a four-star military leader comment that DoD is turning into a benefits company that will occasionally kill a terrorist,” Punaro said in a phone interview Tuesday. The remark plays off a popular critique of General Motors before its recent bail out, that union contracts had transformed it into a health care company that occasionally built a car.
Both the business board task force and the Hadley-Perry panel agree that the current force must be protected from the changes to retirement, pay or promotion policies needed to create a more efficient future force.
“Updating military compensation and redesigning some benefits does not necessitate cuts in pay or benefits for current service members,” said the Hadley-Perry report.
“These are areas where any adjustment you make will take decades to change,” Punaro said. “With something like military retirement, you are not going to break faith with people who joined expecting a certain benefit, even though only 20 percent stay long enough to earn a retirement.”
But rapid expansion of military entitlements has become part of “the nation’s mandatory spending problems,” the task force found. Among “significant unsustainable trends” that the task force listed is paying military retirees and their families “for 60 years after they have served only 20.”
Another task force slide give details of how military entitlements have expanded “rapidly” over the last decade with Congress passing TRICARE for Life, a more robust pharmacy benefit, concurrent receipt for disabled retirees, extra-size active duty pay raises, an improved survivor benefit plan, sharp growth in housing allowances, a bigger death gratuity and more.
Punaro declined to criticize any specific initiative. But, he said, “nobody ever sat down and said, ‘What’s the cumulative effect of all this?’ ”
The effect, says the Hadley-Perry report, is personnel costs “have grown drastically on a per capita basis.”
As the economy recovers and the job market rebounds, Punaro said, the cost of sustaining the military will accelerate even more.
Punaro, who served as staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee for eight years, noted that much of the recent entitlement growth has helped only retirees and their families, a population that now outnumbers the active duty community.
“TRICARE for Life, the largest new benefit ever passed, was not subject to any kind of serious review or debate, as best as I can tell. Is that the way to pass something like that? And, okay, just because you passed it, does it have to be in existence for 100 years? Bob Gates makes a pretty compelling argument that ‘health care costs are eating us alive’.”
Punaro criticized military associations that, he said, push continually for benefits with little heed to more pressing defense priorities. Military leaders and lawmakers this decade have been complicit, he suggested.
“It doesn’t’ take a profile in courage to stand up and be for every benefit that anybody has ever dreamed up. That’s easy. It takes a lot of courage to be responsible….It looks to some of us that we’ve changed the slogan ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’ to ‘Praise the Lord and pass the benefit.’ I remember working with military associations when their number one goal was a strong national defense, not more benefits.”
Tom Philpott writes a weekly column on military issues. To comment, send e-mail to
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