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Carla McDowell and Belinda Neff leap from their comfy seats in the McDowell family room, race to the kitchen and are in their places ready to go in less than five seconds flat.
It’s nearly 10 p.m. on a weeknight and even though they race to their positions like track stars, it isn’t the sound of a gun going off to signal the beginning of a race that has them moving so fast – it’s their kitchen timer.
McDowell takes her place behind the large 22-quart pot on her stove and begins to stir. Thirty-five sterilized pint jars are already lined up on the counter in front of her, ready to be filled.
Neff moves to the end of the counter and takes her position. To her left is a large pan filled with 35 lids and seals, all within easy reach.
Then the process begins.
McDowell places a funnel over an empty jar and with a large ladle she begins scooping the hot mixture in the jar. She knows exactly when to stop, leaving a half an inch at the top to allow for cooling and the vacuum process.
Neff then reaches over and moves the filled jar in front of her, puts on the seal and then tightly screws on the band to make a lid. When she’s satisfied, she then carries the jar of McDowell Farms Salsa into the next room and places it on the floor in what will be the first of several rows of salsa made tonight.
In no time, this batch is complete and the kitchen is all cleaned up. The women’s husbands, David McDowell and Louie Neff offer their support from the family room and occasionally are called in to help chop or do whatever is necessary, especially during planting season.
They have the process down to a science. This final step is the easy part. Most of the work comes in the chopping and mixing steps.
Tomorrow will be here soon enough. Early in the morning McDowell will be back at her regular job as a first-grade teacher at Straub Elementary and Neff will be back in her nurse’s uniform, shuffling patients at Meadowview Regional Medical Center in her position as director of the operating room.
The sisters have filled hundreds of jars like this for family and friends. And because of the response they’ve gotten from them, they have started a business.
The pair didn’t have to buy a book or look up the canning process on the Internet to know how to do it. As soon as they were old enough to break beans, their mother, the late Doris McCormick put them to work in the kitchen.
As little girls they watched her can tomatoes, green beans, pickles, sauerkraut, relish, apple sauce, apple butter, jams and jellies for her family to eat all year long.
The joke in the McCormick family, said Neff, was that if you stood too close to their mother, you might just end up in a can, too.
In May, 2002, McCormick died. That summer there was an abundance of tomatoes, even with the drought. The sisters started making jars and jars of salsa to give to family and friends.
Looking back, Neff thinks the time they spent making all that salsa last summer served a greater purpose than sharing a homemade gift with those they cared about.
“It was therapy for us,” she said. “We were together, working through our grief.”
“And Mom would have been right in the middle of it,” said McDowell.
The more jars of salsa they gave away, the more the recipients of their gift said, “You should sell this stuff!”
This year they set out 300 tomato plants on the McDowell Farm just out of Germantown. They also planted all the peppers and onions necessary to make lots of salsa.
Earlier this summer, with a jar of fresh salsa in hand, they paid a visit to the office of Debra Cotterill. Mason County extension agent for Family and Consumer Sciences.
The visit started a whirlwind of activity that has resulted in starting their business.
“Debra Cotterill, Bill Peterson, Angie Mitchell and the whole staff in their office have been so supportive,” said McDowell.
The first step was to get the women certified as home-based microprocessors. Specific requirements must be met in order for products to be sold directly off the farm. Home-based microprocessors must attend special training and be certified in a University of Kentucky College of Agriculture workshop and be inspected by the Kentucky Food Safety Branch.
Four workshops were scheduled to be held around the state in August and September and Cotterill insisted the sisters attend the very first one in Princeton, near Paducah. The day of intense training included an afternoon microbiology session, followed by a test.
“I was very thankful for my nursing background when I took that test,” said Neff.
The two received notification late in the day they had passed the tests and received certification. They breathed sighs of relief all the way back home since 75 percent of the class that day didn’t make the grade.
New legislation allows farmers with the certification to use their own kitchen to make and sell product by word of mouth and at approved sites certified by the Kentucky Farm Bureau.
The two will be meeting again with Cotterill in the coming weeks as she helps them put together a business plan.
McDowell and Neff have been working weekends and an evening or two during the week to make plenty of salsa for their first official venture.
Browning Orchard in Fleming County is listed as an official Farm Bureau site so McDowell Farms Salsa will make its debut at the annual Apple Festival Sept. 20 and 21.
“The festival actually begins on Friday, Sept. 19, but since we have to work, we’ll only be there on Saturday and Sunday,” said McDowell.
Even though going from making a few jars of salsa to marketing it to sell has been a quick process, it has been a learning process.
Using a small “Quick Chopper” made chopping enough tomatoes, peppers and onions to make multiple batches of salsa quite a pain.
“It would take forever to do the chopping part,” said McDowell.
They called on another Germantown resident, Dan Adams, to help them come up with a better way to do it.
Adams, owner of C. Worth Superstore in Lexington which sells restaurant equipment and supplies, actually came to the McDowell home and watched them make a batch of salsa. Right away Adams suggested something that resembles an alien spacecraft. The bright orange Dyna-Cube made in France does the trick, but now they have another problem.
Their chopping time has been cut considerably but with the large pot they use, they can still only cook one batch at a time on the stovetop in the McDowell kitchen.
But just like the chopping problem, the cooking-one-batch-at-a-time problem is about to be fixed.
By next summer, McDowell and Neff plan to have a new kitchen-processing-storing-shipping facility built on the McDowell Farm so they can commercially make and sell their product.
Adams is in the process of designing the new kitchen for them on paper, and they hope to begin construction soon so the inside can be completed over the winter.
Initially, they plan to continue to plant, harvest, process and sell their mild, medium and hot salsa themselves. But with plans already in their heads to expand their line to include chow-chow, which is a cabbage and pepper relish, and pepper jelly, additional staff will more than likely be needed in the future.
The vision goes well into the future. Neff says she can even visualize large trucks with their logo on the side delivering products to be sold nationwide. She also pictures her father, Carl McCormick, at the wheel of one of the trucks, helping his daughters in any way he can.
But right now they’re concentrating on the Browning Orchard Festival, filling orders that come their way, and planning their new facility.
While her sister’s vision for the future is certainly not out of their reach, McDowell’s vision is for the new kitchen where the larger picture will all begin.
Amidst all the new equipment will be two things that will forever remind them of their beginning.
As she holds their first chopper, stained red by the thousands of tomatoes that have passed through it, she says it will be on a shelf where they can see it everyday.
The other item is more personal.
As a tribute to their late mother, who taught them how to grow vegetables in the garden and the value and pure joy from canning the harvest, they plan to remember her in a special way.
“The first thing that goes into the new kitchen will be a picture of our mother,” said McDowell.
For additional information about McDowell Farms Salsa, contact them at 606-728-2433.
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