Tomato dream
by ophelielechat
You know when you wake up, and know you had a dream, but can’t remember it? I was reading through my blog reader this morning, when I saw a post about canning, and realized that I had a long, elaborate dream about tomato season.
I have a tomato plant on my balcony, growing in a huge container with some basil. Caprese salad in the making! The plant is flowering, but there aren’t any bees around this year, so I don’t know how successful my efforts will be. My pepper plants have been flowering and dying.
Anyway, my dream was about the huge boxes of tomatoes you can get from the market for about ten dollars. Ten dollars! In the winter, that will buy you three under-ripe, tasteless tomatoes at the grocery store. At the end of the summer, though, you can get a huge box of tomatoes.
Then comes the preparation — boiling the tomatoes for a minute, just long enough so that the skin separates from the fruit. Dunking them in an ice bath. Peeling the skin off. Slicing. Removing the seeds and the juice. Simmering the tomatoes, getting rid of as much water as possible. I just make tomato sauce, no extra seasoning. Pouring the sauce in sterilized Mason jars, adding some lemon juice. Boiling the cans in a huge kettle for 45 minutes. Doing that over and over for an entire weekend, and, at the end, in the middle of a tomato-stained kitchen, a few dozen jars of tomato sauce. Is it worth the trouble?
In the middle of winter, when the only fresh vegetables at the store have more passport stamps than I do, I understand that yes, it was totally worth it. I’m dreaming of harvest season, I’m dreaming of a large garden with bees and a compost pile, with carrots you can pull from the ground, clean off with the garden hose, and eat without peeling. That’s what I want. At work, we’re all working towards a dream — it’s what keeps us motivated when we’re tired. One of us wants a boat, another wants to travel. I want a garden.
Comments
Discovered your blog through your twitter. I enjoy the personal development stuff. Anyway, tomato sauce is absolutely worth it. Every fall, my family goes out to pick the tomatoes at a farm on the south shore, collecting maybe 10 bushels in under an hour, and a week later, waking up at dawn (because my grandmother insists on starting early) to go through the whole process you described (up to canning) before lunch time. We don’t sterilize the Mason jars anymore, though, as the tomato sauce is so scaldingly hot that it serves the same purpose. (We also skip the ice bath, because the women in our family seem to have hands of steel.