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August 19th, 2007
Wow, the tomatoes are a success! I think I’m going to clean out a cabinet in the kitchen and fill it with home-canned goods. Next weekend, hopefully after some good rain and maybe a splash of yummy compost tea, I’ll have the final crop of cukes and do pickles. Bread and butter and then pickle stickles, which are pickles my mom and aunt used to make when we were kids. They’re lime green and I only just found out that’s due to food coloring!
Tony thinks I’m positively crazy, but he’s never had bread and butter pickles or pickle stickles. Of course this is the New York guy who made fun of my tomatoes and in fact called me the tomato nazi (which is funny, but I really don’t like anyone using the word nazi in jest, because I strongly feel it devalues the memory of Holocaust victims and survivors). He just did not believe there was a difference between a tomato from the grocery and a home-grown tomato. Hello? This from an Italian whose grandmother spent all day making sauce (or gravy as they call it, but to me, gravy is made from fried bits, oil and flour and is mainlined where I’m from). Maybe his grandma, being from Brooklyn, never knew a fresh tomato. I’m afraid to ask.
But I finally got him to admit that real tomatoes are nothing like store tomatoes, which I call the horrible red wax balls. I don’t even eat tomatoes unless they’re homegrown. There’s gotta be a better word than nazi. He just came up with it: I am a tomato/peach/strawberry SNOB.
That’s crazy, but it’s true. I won’t eat those three fruits unless they’re homegrown. If they’re from California or Peru, they’re bred to hold up during shipping, they’re picked before they’re ripe and they all taste like wax.
I’m sure he would never eat a can of Chef Boy Ardee ravioli unless it was part of survival training, so we all have our own snobbish ways when it comes to the foods of our own cultures.
My jars have popped, which means my canning tonight was a success!
Possibly Related PostsThis entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Organic Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.