Tomato Riches

This week is going to be a week that is all about tomatoes.

That sounds like an odd thing to say and, really, when I reread it, it is an odd thing to say. However, it’s perfectly true.

You see, on Saturday, before we went to the Herb Festival, my mother and I stopped by her local farmer’s market. Last time I went, I scored a deal on a bushel of tomatillos. I turned those into a large batch of salsa verde which is now residing in my freezer.

Well, this time, the same kind farmer who sold me my bushel of tomatillos offered me a deal on his tomatoes. I had every intention of buying some of his tomatoes because I’m still waiting for what’s left of my heirlooms to ripen as well as all my other tomatoes. He had lovely heirlooms and I planned on getting a few.

Well, he offered to sell me the entire flat of tomatoes for the low price of $6. This ended up being approximately 10 lbs of tomatoes. No, I’m not kidding.

Of course, I said yes. I would have been an idiot not to take him up on his offer. In Jungle Jim’s, a pound of heirlooms typically runs about $4.99/lb so you can see why I was so excited to get my tomatoes.

I carried the tray to my car with my mother’s help. It was quite heavy. It was also quite a lot of tomatoes. I gave my mother a couple and that left me with approximately 9 lbs. Since she’s going off to the UK this week and my dad isn’t much on heirloom tomatoes, I couldn’t persuade her to take any more.

Which means I am going to have a very tomato-y week. I did make one batch of marinara with them which I plan to freeze and enjoy during the winter months. I’m also planning on making some pico de gallo as well as a tomato tart. Tonight, I’m going to try an heirloom tomato and mint salad.

It’s a good way to find creative uses for tomatoes. My goal this summer is to make sure I have some food squirreled away for the winter that makes me feel a little taste of summer when I go to eat it during the cold months. It’ll be nice to open a Ball freezer jar of marinara sauce when it’s defrosted and know that the tomatoes were fresh when it was made and the basil and oregano came straight from the garden. As much as I like the winter, as a veggie lover, I miss the freshness of summer. Sure, thanks to modern technology and preservation methods, you can still buy tomatoes in February in any grocery store. However, they simply don’t taste the same. They don’t have nearly as much flavour and end up being a poor substitute for a tomato fresh picked from the garden.

So, I hope that I’m going to counter that by utilizing my large amount of tomatoes. I find them far more versatile than the tomatillo bushel I had a few weeks ago. It’s far more exciting to have tomatoes. I know that sounds like a weird thing to say but I will admit, vegetables make me very happy. Again, this is a strange thing to admit but it’s the truth. Vegetables force me to get creative with my cooking. I find little more fun than taking my burlap tote to the farmer’s market and filling it to the brim with beets, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, corn and beans. The great thing is that I always end up using every vegetable I buy. I’m not a vegetarian by any means but I could probably live as one if I had to someday.

I realize that my fascination and love for veggies is a little bit of a peculiar thing to blog about. However, it’s Monday and the alternative is for me to blog about how I don’t like Mondays and I find that I do that a little too often. Thus, tomatoes and vegetables seem like a nice alternative. And yes, I realize that technically tomatoes are fruits not vegetables but I find when people point that out, it’s annoying. To me, a fruit is something you can bake in a pie for dessert. You certainly can make a tomato pie or tart but that’s not dessert, that’s an entrée. You should be able to make ice-cream from fruit to be enjoyed on a hot day from an ice-cream cone. I’m sure some gourmet has made tomato ice-cream but, really, would you want to eat tomato ice cream on the beach?

I know there’s some scientific, herbolistic reason that tomatoes are considered fruits but I think those scientists and herbologists should run the “Ice Cream Equation” by each other next time they designate if something is a fruit or vegetable. Would you go to the store to buy a pint of tomato ice cream? No? Then TOMATOES SHOULDN’T BE FRUIT.

Sorry. I digressed. I actually didn’t realize I felt quite as strongly about the fruit/vegetable classification system. Apparently I do.

Back to my original point: In short, I have to say, there are far, far worse things to deal with than having a large array of tomatoes to use. I’m quite sure I will find a way to use them all up one way or another.

My theory is this, to paraphrase Dale Carnegie: When life gives you a giant box of tomatoes, make marinara. Or Salsa. Or salad. Or a tart.

Happy Tuesday!

A Summer Vacation in a Weekend...

This has been a really nice weekend. I tend to think almost every weekend is nice merely because it's a weekend but this was a particularly good weekend.

I headed to my parents' on Friday and got to spend a nice evening with them. The pups explored my parents garden which is significantly larger than ours while I had a great time just relaxing with my parents. After a not-so-great week at work, it's nice to relax without having to think too much about work.

Saturday, my sister, mum and I hit the local farmer's markets. I'm a bit addicted to farmers markets in the summer. I came home with a huge bag of goodies including tomatoes, eggplant, corn, swiss chard, beets and an entire bushel of tomatillos. I'm not actually sure what I plan on doing with all those tomatillos, to be honest. I didn't even want that many. However, last year, I bought some tomatillos off my favourite farmer at the market. Then, on my next visit, he ended up giving me all of the tomatatillos that he had left because he was going on vacation and needed to get rid of them. I think I got a bushel for about $4. I made a lot of salsa verde. Well, this year, the farmer remembered me and was excited to tell me he had another bushel of tomatatillos for me and I could have them for $4. He's so nice and so low-priced that I ended up taking the tomatillos off him because he really seemed to want me to have the tomatatillos.

If anyone has any idea what I can do with a giant bag of tomatatillos aside from salsa verde, please let me know.

After the farmer's market, I got to have lunch with Saz who was in town visiting her parents. We had a lovely time just catching up and hanging out with her family and friends at their annual church campout. I only stayed a couple of hours but got to play "Cash SUV" which is the same concept as the TV show "Cash Cab" only Saz's dad drove us around the State Park in an SUV while Saz and I attempted to answer the trivia questions. We determined that neither of us had science or maths as our strong suit though we did well on the literature and history stuff. It was a lot of fun.

My final activity on Saturday was dinner and a movie with my parents. My dad really wanted to see "Cowboys and Aliens". I don't know why. Well, I do...my dad loves cowboys and he loves aliens. I believe they made the movie for people like my dad. It was somewhat entertaining but I can almost hear the filmmakers saying to one another "Let's put cowboys and aliens in the same movie! Brilliant!" Unfortunately, that's pretty much as far as they got with their creativity because the reason for the aliens and cowboys being in the same movie was pretty lame. I won't spoil it but it's pretty anticlimactic. I think the movie could have been a lot funnier but then again, I said that about "Sherlock Holmes" and they're making a sequel to that so maybe I'm in the minority.

Nevertheless, not-terrible movie aside, it was a lot of fun to hang out with my parents. I like being an adult and getting to take them out to dinner and stuff. I figure for the amount of years that they paid for my food, it's nice to treat them now and it makes me feel like a grownup.

The rest of the weekend has been low key. I'm having my first yard sale next weekend so mum and I did some searching for treasures to sell. I'm bound and determined to be one of the good sellers in my neighbourhood- my sale is part of the annual Neighbourhood Garage Sale. I'm pricing stuff super low because I figure even if I make $1 on something, it's $1 more than I got by letting the stuff sit around my house. Most of what I'm selling are things that just don't fit me anymore- as I've grown up and developed more of my own style, I have a lot of things that just aren't me anymore, whether it's clothes, bags, interior decor or books.

All in all, it's been a good weekend. Sookie and Rory are pleased to be home- they don't like the car ride much from home to my parents and vice-versa but they like the destinations. They're currently passed out on the couch since they haven't slept much today- at my parents', there are far too many new smells to explore to get much rest.

Even though tomorrow's Monday, I'm going to start the week with a smile knowing that the weekend has been relaxing and for once, I managed to escape thinking about work as much as usual. I find that sometimes, when you have a real vacation of several days, you end up being more tired than if you at work. And then there are other times where you have just the couple of days of a weekend and you manage to feel like you actually had a lovely long vacation in just those two days. I feel like that tonight and I will say, it's a nice feeling. It's a good way to kick off a new week.

Happy Monday and I hope you had a good weekend too!

Reflections of a Weekend....

I'm having trouble waking up today; my commute to work was one of those drives that seems like it takes forever. My mind feels sluggish; I'm hoping the cup of coffee I currently smell will wake me up a little otherwise it's going to be a very slow Monday.

It would be hard for it not to be a slow Monday. The weekend, as always, flew by. It was a really fun and busy weekend for me. I spent most of the time with my mother. We went to the farmer's market, to garage sales, to the grocery store, walking around the garden...they're all my favourite things to do with mum. Better yet, as I knew she would, she put me straight about my writing and helped me come up with an idea.

More importantly, she reminded me how to come up with ideas. Lately, I've been trying too hard. When I first started to write, I used to just sit down and wait for the words to creep up on me and leak out of me onto the computer screen. I felt as though I were just a filter for the characters waiting to be discovered. Lately, I feel as though I've been holding on too tightly, trying to push my characters and make them something they're not. It's taken the joy out of the writing because I'm holding myself to a ridiculously high standard which I'm not even sure I'm capable of reaching.

So, instead of doing that, I'm going to just...write. I have my idea now; it's going to have the elements of darkness I can't quite shed in my writing because I just find them so fascinating. Yet it'll also be different because I think it's time I did something new.

Aside from talk about my writing and spend time with my mother, I did get to see my sister, my niece and my brother-in-law. That's always fun. My niece is three and very much a princess. She even has the tiara. I was fortunate enough to be generously loaned her other tiara and so I spent the duration of my time with her adorned not only with my lovely purple crown but also an array of purple jewelry. My niece wore all pink; she's very much into pink. It was a lot of fun.

The thing I like most about weekends like the one I just had are the fact that they truly are weekends. I get to escape from everything that's routine, everything I do by rote on a daily basis and just...relax. I get to escape from work; there's no reason to really talk about it much with my family and there's not much to do on weekends so it really does feel like a mini holiday. I also got to escape from the Super Rapid Growing Lawn that exists at my house.

I've discovered my hlawn is abnormal. While all the other houses on the street seem to have nice normal lawns, mine seems to grow exponentially by the day. One day, I cut it so it's about an inch long, within three days, it's back to the length it was before I cut it. It's the most baffling thing. I'm thinking this autumn, I shall invest some free time in making some rather nice flower beds and planting some trees where the lawn currently resides. Anything to eliminate some of the grass. I keep hoping for one of those seemingly mythical teenage boys to walk by so I can get him to cut my grass for a low fee. This is what all my friends tell me to do: Find a neighbour kid to cut it.

The thing is, the neighbour kids all seem to be about seven or eight. I'm not so sure I really want one of them cutting my grass. The mower might be a bit tricky and, also, I'd worry about that whole child-labour thing. I have contemplated getting a lawn chair and sitting out on my street, waiting for a teenager to pass by so I can get him to cut my grass but I'm not sure it works like that. Though sitting out on my drive, watching the neighbourhood activity, does seem like the thing to do. In the evening, the older folk often pull out their lawn chairs and settle themselves down on their front stoops, watching the street's activity. The interesting thing is that they sit in pairs, husband and wife, just watching, side by side. They don't face one another as though having a conversation, they clearly are set up to be pure spectators.

I suppose it's definitely more interesting than television sometimes though so far, I haven't really seem much happen on the street. Cars drive by and people mow their lawns but that's about the extent of it.

Then again, perhaps if I did sit out, I'd figure out what the spectator-activity was really all about. Perhaps every now and again, a flock of teenage boys who love nothing more than to cut grass pass by and everyone in the neighbourhood gets to grab one to have their own personal lawn mowing boy.

I'm not so sure though. The most I ever see is a very active old man running by in spandex and a sweat band. That's one of those things I'm not sure I'd want to see too often though he does seem to do it daily. It's the spandex...it's just one of those sights that kind of stays with you.

So, my grass continues to grow and I continually wonder how to get one of those personal lawn-mowing boys. In the meantime, I'll do my own mowing. And try to time it so I don't see Mr. Spandex jogging by.

Happy Monday.