A friend and I have an ongoing, er, discussion about the relative merits of summer. He hates heat and baseball, and basically believes that the only things that redeem summer as a season are pool/lake activities, and tomatoes. While I disagree, and enjoy both baseball and all but the most humid and energy-zapping of the hot days, I do agree that a homegrown tomato is one of the few things that can make heat indices of more than 100 bearable.
I have complained all summer thus far about how my dad’s plants were generating only green tomatoes, but in the last couple of weeks they have started to ripen. Since I was gone last weekend, I had to wait until I went to my parents’ on Sunday to truly indulge, and, oh my, it was worth the wait. We had BLTs for breakfast. I make no bones about the fact that my love of bacon is one of the things that would never allow me to whole-heartedly embrace a vegetarian lifestyle, and yesterday’s sandwiches were perfect, with delicious bacon from Fritz’s in Kansas City, bread that was mushy from the thick tomato slices, and a pool of juice on the plate when I was finished.
My dad and I made salsa, a new recipe for me, and got 12 pints canned and put away for later in the year. This batch was not very spicy, owing mainly to the fact that my father’s tomatoes tend to be extremely sweet. (Along the same lines, he has not grown onions in years because it is impossible for him to produce one that is even edible; every onion he has ever grown is so strong that even the slightest sniff would have you in tears. And yes, I know, soil and all of that, but the onions he grew in the IndepMo when I was a child, and the onions he grew later when they moved out to “the country” all had the same problems. So we just chalk it up to something about his personality: onions, bad; tomatoes, wonderful.) We’re going to try again next week with more jalapeños and see if we can get it tricked up a little bit.
The other garden product I got to indulge in yesterday was watermelon. He was cutting one up for him and my mom to eat, and sliced off a chunk for me as big as two fists. I ate it with my hands, standing at the counter, flicking seeds into the bowl and generally making a mess with juice running down my chin and fingers. Absolutely wonderful.
The garden is ugly now-days, as you can see from the August pictures. The cucumber plants are dying off, and even the sunflowers seem to have given up the ghost. My tendency to cook and write about food is not going so well either, as I am today starting on at least a week of South Beach, just to see what happens. It’s amazing what creatures of habit we are; the Mizzou alumni picnic is Friday, and I swear that I have gone three of the last four years and been on South Beach every time. What is it about this time of year? So in case I don’t cook anything of note again this week, here is my delicious, wonderful lunch from today, and I’ll probably see you when I fall off the wagon.
It might not look as great as I made it out to be, but those are heirloom tomatoes that are a green and red zebra stripe. They’re the ones on the left in the picture above.
Meanwhile, it’s Music Monday.