Tomatoes in February

Six days in the downtown of a big city, and I began longing not only for Missouri but for what I realized was my very high-grade diet instead of oil-drenched, over-salted, very tasty, expensive and calorific restaurant food (I rarely dine out) that was turning my blood to peanut butter. Baltimore's famous crab cakes are crabmeat welded with mayonnaise and fried. I've enjoyed them in the past but choked even thinking of them. The breakfast buffet had eggs fried every way but none boiled. The buffet was $20 so I felt it was okay to ask for one. Still wanting normal food, without exercising (having no energy!), I unlocked the hotel's exercise room and swiped an apple from its fruit basket, getting away with this for two days before someone removed the basket.

The plane landed back in St. Louis at 9 p.m. and I, waistband now too tight, prayed to get to the grocery store before closing for fresh produce: tangerines, apples, bananas, broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, escarole, yogurt, almond milk and tofu--grateful I live where I could buy all these in one place for the price of one restaurant meal in Baltimore and more grateful I can pay. After spending that much money on six days of restaurants I will never again skinflint myself and be alarmed by $35 a week on groceries for home consumption. Heirloom tomatoes were $3.99 a lb but I had been dreaming of a perfect tomato sandwich, technically available only in July and August unless I store-bought heirloom tomatoes. Besides, they were pretty. Home at last, I didn't allow myself to sleep until I'd set up a whole-wheat bread, carrot salad, and a pot of escarole soup. The next morning the bread was ready and was made into said tomato sandwich with onion. OMG, I was so happy to be home.

Seduced by Pink Light

These warm and cloudy days create a world of pink light between 5:15 and 6:15 p.m. "Pink light" is a woo-woo thing you imagine when you want to send people long-distance love and protection. Always enraptured and outdoors to see it, I was seduced into thinking about spring and summer. Before I knew it, I was:

1. finding the gardening gloves and the trowel.
2. raking and weeding, and saying hello to worms.
3. fertilizing and then paving a small area with old shingles to smother the grass and weeds to prepare the earth for planting.
4. at Lowe's buying seeds (hard to find!) for collards and turnips, two hardy vegetables that my bunnies and deer won't eat. And buying a garden hose.
5. contemplating the Totally Tomatoes catalog and circling about 20 different tomatoes I want to grow, to be narrowed down to two with three plants each. (Totally Tomatoes sells both seeds and plants.)

This is either patently insane behavior or it's human. Thanks to the wildlife, of the tomatoes borne on these plants I will probably actually get to eat only one or two. I'm not a gardener. I'm kind of a make-believe gardener. That is okay. It's the journey, not the destination. . .

The Pantry and Its Discontents

Always wanted one and can't believe I haven't shown it to you in all these years: the pantry. It's a miserable little closet vacuumed out now and then, scrubbed and dusted I think only once in 15 years and I made somebody else do it, and only items in glass, armor-like plastic, or metal are shelved there because paper towels and napkins, and even newspaper used as shelf liners got shredded into mouse nests. (Never, ever say to me, "Poor little mousie.") There's also some extra flour in big tough plastic 5-gallon jugs that used to hold Demetrius's protein powder, but I bet you are looking at my liquor shelf.

In early 2012 I drank my first martini in Florida sitting at a bar packed with people age 80 and older at happy hour, and I told the lady next to me it was my first martini and she yelled, "Hey, it's her first martini!" and everybody hooted and hollered and toasted me like it was 1929, and I was so thrilled with how drunk I got that when I returned to Missourah I threw a martini party. I taped some martini recipes down on the table, bought an aluminum shaker and went to a liquor superstore, my first, to hunt all the ingredients--I'd heard of vermouth but didn't know exactly what it was, nor "simple syrup" either--got olives, lemons, tons of ice and had the party, and haven't made myself a martini since.

Then I bought some Missourah bourbon after I got a free sample that really sent my head to Mars. I read about how fun it was to drink bourbon with a boyfriend but my boyfriend at the time did not drink hard stuff and to this day I have the two bourbon-type glasses I stole from his kitchen thinking how romantic it would be to drink bourbon with him, and haven't had another drop. I also keep a half-bottle of Johnny Walker Red somebody gave me to take home after a party, Sobieski Polish vodka, Ketel One for the vodka martinis I never make, some flavored vodkas (because I drank them in Poland; lemon vodka in my freezer; a whole bottle of Polish caramel vodka I bought in Chicago; what was I thinking?), Serbian slivovitz (plum brandy; equivalent of moonshine; I am the only one of my friends able to drink it) and J&B, my favorite scotch because of how it takes the edge off and makes me hear violins, and I keep saying "tomorrow I'll have a drink and watch a movie," but I never do have that drink because I don't sleep well after evening drinks and tomorrow, always, I have to get up early, exercise, work and so on. And I drink best with others.

What are the all the beans and tomatoes for? Emergencies. Also have stuff in there I don't know what to do with, like a jar of red Russian caviar. Maybe I'll open it and see what happens.

Food Porn, Summer Edition

I didn't really need a basket of umber-colored heirloom cherry tomatoes because at home I had big red and yellow ones from the honor produce stand, but there they were looking just like the 'maters on the cover of this month's issue of Food and Wine, which features a positively wanton summer salad of peaches, heirloom tomatoes, and feta, and before I knew it I'd also bought four pounds of peaches and a half pound of Bulgarian feta, but I digress; the absolute first thing to make and eat when back from the farmer's market is a fresh-tomato sandwich.

The proper tomato sandwich is made with white bread. Some insist on Pepperidge Farm's; my bread machine makes mine. Slather mayonnaise on both bread slices; pave those with ripe tomato slices piled half an inch high, then salt and pepper them. Lay some fresh basil leaves down if you have them. Close the sandwich and mash it down a bit so the juices flow. And what happens next is just private.

Fall Color

The red and green this year of the drought will have to be on your plate. The recipe for this luscious avocado, tomato and zucchini pizza is at The Piehole Midwest where due credit is given to the creator of this raw-vegetable dish you can serve and eat in any one of six ways: as salad, as salsa, as pizza topping (with mozzarella), in tacos.. .and two other ways I can't think of (I've been meaning to look up the early symptoms of Alzheimer's). Excellent because 1) there's no cooking, just dicing; and 2) the tomatoes don't have to be perfect. Peel a late zucchini, and most of the time it's still just fine to use.

I'll Show You Happiness

It struck me as I set up to make a tomato sandwich: "I am happy. This is happiness."

What's not to love? It's Saturday. There's a fresh loaf of white bread and two perfectly ripe huge tomatoes, and two Vidalia onions. I've got kitchen tools, spatulas, whisks, strainers, measuring cups,and I love each one in a different way and totally, and nobody will ever know how much. By the tomatoes is a can of Ann Page nutmeg, souvenir from the days of A&P grocery stores; I've got 1950s copper-toned canisters for sugar and rice. My mom had the same set in silver tone. It's sunny outside. It's morning. I've got a propane stove that works, and a knife. God knows there have been times when I needed a knife and didn't have one. There's mayo in the fridge, basil the best herb in the world is growing in a pot outside and going into the sandwich. Nobody's yelling at me or nagging me. I ain't dead yet. I have health insurance and a CCW. Yeah, there's quite a few miles on me, no spring chicken, but nothing is hurting me. I have inspirations. I have friends and one of 'em was game enough to accompany me to a night of cage fights and another of 'em is planning a canoe trip for us, and I'm going to an antique tractor pull and have my own car to get there. I just paid my monthly bills. I found Chock Full o' Nuts Organic Coffee online and ordered a case. Tomorrow I'm on the road to see my special person; later in the month I'll fly to visit my mom for her birthday. It's not always so, but right now I know how lucky I am and I'm grateful.

Everything's Good This Time of Year

Please stop in at your local farmer's market or fruit and vegetable stand because this time of year you cannot go wrong. If it grows in your locale, it's at its peak. So what if it's 100 degrees. I sorted through the Missouri tomatoes for the squat-looking Big Beefs and Brandywines, bought the sweetest local corn (had it for lunch along with my own baked steak fries; now that's divine) and local nectarines, a local eggplant with such lovely purple cheeks I want to kiss it, some zucchini and green beans, and I admired the plums, famously sweet Vidalia onions ("You only cry when they are gone"), brand-new baby potatoes both red and Yukon, and the avalanche of melons.

Andy's is in House Springs, also called House Sprangs, and operates 11 hours a day in summer, like many such businesses. I asked the beautiful lady who waited on me (pictured) if she was the owner. She said she was the Owner's Wof.

This is my idea of heaven.

On Your Honor

You are on your honor when you select, weigh, bag, and pay for your own tomatoes at this unattended (sometimes) tomato stand off Hwy FF. The sign points the way, and that's .75 per lb.

Tomato Sisters

Just an example, to share with you, of the beauty and symmetry of nature and growing things: Three tomatoes (cultivar: Balcony) on their vine.

Demetrius the Gardener: 1948-2009

A brilliant and strictly principled organic gardener, Demetrius was talented with all plants and devoted to vegetables. He dug a pit 25 feet by 25 out of hard clay and filled it with soil and it became his garden. He grew exquisite tomatoes, beans, zucchini, Charentais cantaloupes, pattypan squash, lettuces, and red potatoes; also onions, garlic, turnips and -- pictured, he's harvesting -- kale. Fresh kale grew deep into the the winter in the hotbeds he built. When he saw his first tomato seedlings every April, you would have thought he was a new father admiring his babies.

Demetrius used to lecture and chide the bunnies who were calmly and in plain sight chomping on his vegetables. The bunnies didn't listen, although he had important stuff to say. So he planted white clover between the vegetable rows, and it worked; the bunnies ate the clover and left the rest alone. But we never did figure out how to keep the turtles from eating the cantaloupes. He loved the seasons and solstices and bees and cycles of life and often remarked on the natural world: "The design is perfect."

He always tried to get a position as a gardener but his true love was farming. The tomatoes on the plate I'm holding in my own photo are the fruits of his labor. Goodbye, friend since 1997; a difficult and sometimes tortured man, Demetrius. He took that name because it means "priest of Demeter" and a gardener is a priest of the earth.