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| This summer is looking good. |
You know what's amazing? Fresh herbs are amazing. Fresh cucumbers are amazing. Those peppers? Are sweet like candy. I wish I had space on that balcony for an enormous greenhouse of my own, but in lieu of that, I guess a weekly trip to the Farmer's Market isn't such a hardship.
The thing is, I'm fairly convinced that most people don't know what a tomato is supposed to taste like. Even if you attempt to buy them during their actual growing season, the tomatoes you pick up at the grocery store are almost certainly being shipped from elsewhere by truck, and it just makes good business sense to pick them when they're hard enough to survive the trip without bruising. A simple chemical wash will turn them the nice red we've come to expect, without having to wait for pesky things like natural ripening. The resulting thing is an insult to the name 'tomato' and should be eaten by no one with taste buds.
And even buying from the Farmer's Market, there is something off. The taste is much closer to the taste that I remember, but there's always something missing, and I figured out what it was this weekend, as I was potting those herbs for my balcony. It's the smell of the greenhouse, warm and damp and earthy; tomato vines and pepper plants and trailing cucumbers, the blooms dried and clinging to the forming fruits; air clingy and thick and beautiful with the smell of "good, clean dirt," as my father says.
Every time I buy tomatoes, I smell them first. That smell is there, but faint and weak and it disappears by the time I get home. Frankly, I find the smell of a tomato vine as intoxicating as the smell of any flower.
Of course, none of those smells compare with the smell of the sprig of sweet basil I'm playing with as I write this...Excuse me, I have to go make something delicious...
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| Raw materials |
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| Raw materials recombined into awesomeness |
