20 dollars and a dream

I have been dreaming of tomatoes lately. In my dreams I wake up to a garden full of giant, beautifully ripe red and orange and pink tomatoes. These tomatoes hang on vines that are perfectly groomed, with little drops of dew clinging to the leaves and nary a blotch to ruin this perfection. But then I wake up and am greeted by the overgrown, not so groomed green tomato wasteland that is our garden. The orange globes have cross pollinated in an odd way with the cherry tomatoes; leaving these long vines of small red orange useless except for salads bastard children. The plum tomatoes, which I have been anxiously waiting on are all still green and hard.

And the squash has wrapped itself around the pink heirloom tomatoes leaving it starved for sunlight and producing little. And at the rate the squash is producing I am going to have to commute to harvest.

So I ventured to the Farmer's Market where for $20 I obtained 20 lbs of plum tomatoes. And for $2.43 I obtained roughly a bazillion hot peppers and one lb of green beans...The tomatoes are going to be skinned and chopped and canned whole because its too gosh darned hot to slave over sauce (and also because I am running low on pint jars which is what the recipe books call for, but I ask you who only uses a pint of sauce when making pasta et al?) The beans are going to be dilly'ed and the peppers are going to be dried for use later, or maybe I'll pickle them too.

We had our first pickles the other day. I had made a bunch of bread and butter slices, and one batch wasn't big enough to can up, so into the fridge they went. We served them at Jude's birthday bbq; prompting the neighbor kids to say "what do you mean you made pickles? you can't make pickles, they come from the store...."