tomatoes | Gladsome Lights

Two years ago when it was tomato-planting time, we knew that later in the summer several grandchildren would be in the garden and swimming in the pool. I planted a “Grape” tomato bush thinking that it would be fun for the kids to pluck the 1-2″ fruits for snacks.

It turned out to be quite a resource to have right in the back yard, miniature tomatoes that were nearly all perfect, and all very sweet and flavorful. They appeared in large clusters and ripened quickly. Not only that, they came off their stems with the slightest nudge, and a clean break. Any meal I prepared seemed to benefit from a few of these pretties on the side of the plate or filling a bowl of their own.

The top pic is of the “Grapes” in 2007. The grandchildren didn’t particularly like to eat them. But Grandma ate tons–well, maybe just bushels. And I planted another “Grape” last year with equal success and savor.

This spring there were no Grapes to be found. Oh, there are various cherry-type tomatoes that grow in clusters like grape clusters. But on all the long wooden shelves at the best nursery (I finally made the drive after several nearby were found lacking) no one could help me find the plants with that proper name and the oblong shape of a Thompson Seedless grape. The kind that make the fruits we buy in little cartons at Costco, and again this year they are for sale there.

I found many interesting tiny-tomato plants, but was so disappointed I couldn’t think straight to decide which one would be the sorry substitute. So Ibought three. They are Juliet F1, Sun Gold, and Green Grape.

On the right are some Sun Golds just getting ripe last month. They are tangerine-colored.

It has turned out to be fun indeed to have three colors of little love-apples. Sun Golds are definitely the most flavorful. Juliet F1 is so big, it’s on its way to being a Roma. No great flavor there. The Green Grape has been o.k….it’s just hard to know when it’s ripe! The fruits get a bit yellowish, and then you know.

We also have some large tomato varieties this summer, Early Girl and Mule Team. The mules are a very slow train, just now starting to pink up. And the Early Girl plant is a runt, with few baby girl fruits. Our reputation as awesome tomato farmers has gone down the drain the last couple of years.

This week we got some hot weather! Yay! Down with fog, Up with sunshine! That means plenty of cherry tomatoes, and a hankering for salads. So I made a tomato-basil salad tonight.

Started with the tomatoes, as many as B. and I could eat, because this salad won’t keep. As soon as I cut the green ones in two I began to be fond of them just for their looks.

Early in its growth I just pinch the flowers off the basil every week or so, to make it get bushy. Tonight I pruned it above new buds, and then used scissors to get the leaves off, before chopping. If I were making pesto I wouldn’t be concerned about getting a bit of stem and flower. I didn’t know how much to put in–maybe it ended up being about 3 tablespoons?

Some goat cheese went in, in little gobs or crumbles, whatever form I could manage. They all sort of melted into the tomato juice in the end.

And I toasted some pine nuts to put on top. Didn’t use half of these in the end, so I put most of them away in a jar in the fridge.

The biggest challenge for me posting pictures of food on my blog is finding a place to stage the picture. The kitchen is a complete mess, and the table has the wrong color of placemats on it. The living room is too dark….At least tonight, I could be glad it was salads I was photographing (ah, yes, I made another one I’ll tell you about later) so a hot dinner didn’t get cold while I scurried around trying to set up a nice environment for my creations.

Husband B. really liked the salad, and so did I. He sprinkled a vinaigrette dressing on his but I take mine neat.

The last few days have found one or both of us down with the flu. I resisted until yesterday, after I returned from an early-morning gardening session at church, where I had accidentally broken off a rosebud. This morning it greeted me thus. I’m very thankful for it, a little present to cheer me up as I am missing a wedding and the chance to visit with friends and family from out of town.

Last evening was my worst sickly period, and the thought of cooking dinner made me cry. So I sat on the patio and read The Folding Cliffs. What strange interaction followed, and gave me creative energy to go into the kitchen and make dinner, I can’t really understand, and I won’t try to go into it here–but I managed to make another meal with what was on hand, and this time it was burritos with scrambled egg filling, spiced with chili and cumin, onions and garlic and sweet red pepper and cilantro. Cheese, too. And love and thankfulness and peace. That was the miracle that came from On High, via a fellow human using the written word with care.

And some fresh roundish fruits we called tomatoes, one each left in produce bags from two shopping expeditions. I had bought one, Mr. Glad the other. One from Mexico–not surprising–and the other from….Canada! What? The information on the sticker was so alarming to me, my mind ran away and I forgot to take a picture for proof that the world had turned upside-down, not least geographically.

I didn’t add chile-type “heat” to the filling I made, so we added it at the table in the form of sauce from a bottle. And this is the perfect time to display photos I took some time ago and have been waiting for a chance to use.

Whether or not something requiring spicing-up is going to be on the table that night, when my husband and I are in a certain local market, we like to peruse this library of hot sauces, right next to bags of hot chiles, in case you want to make your own, perhaps.

But we rarely have any of these playfully fiery brews around to use on our own Tex-Mex food, as we long ago developed a taste for Crystal Louisiana Hot Sauce, when as head cook I didn’t always distinguish one culinary region from another. And Crystal is cheap.

At the end of our meal, there were a few chunks of the reddish fruit left in their blue bowl. My man asked what to do with them, and I said, “Throw them out. I don’t ever want to buy a tomato out of season again.” You see, I had also been reading about M.F.K. Fisher and realizing that these sorry, pale things with nary a drop of flavor or juice do not express me. Ha ha.

I’d like to return my kitchen to the days memorialized in this photo, when we had our fill of dead ripe tomatoes in the summer and fall, and the rest of the year made do with canned or dried or frozen.

In the coming months I’ll write more about tomatoes– growing, picking, buying, cooking. As to eating them fresh, I think it’s best, for now, merely to anticipate.