The first tomato salad.


But not the last! The yellow pears are coming in fast and furious now so every night sees us with some kind of salad on the table. This one had a bit of plum tomato, mozzarella and green bell pepper dressed in black pepper, salt, olive oil, red wine vinegar and basil. Last night's had no pepper, but more red tomato and an addition of very finely diced red onion. What tonight's will bring remains to be seen. Brainiac thinks I ought to save some for pickling. Perhaps.

I don't think I'm ready for canning the tomatoes just yet. I like to save that until I simply cannot fathom eating another fresh off the vine, which probably won't happen for another two weeks or so. Then I will start to can as a defense mechanism.

In the meantime I've got a loaf of white bread in the oven. I'm so not a good bread baker, but I gladly suffer through for a tomato, mayo and basil sandwich. One a year is usually enough. And then there are tians, fresh tomato pastas, tomato pies (there's a great sounding tomato pie in one of Laurie Colwin's books that I've meant to make for years), tomatoes just eated with a sprinkling of salt, fresh salsas and so much more.

In addition to tomatoes I seek out other signs of long, hot summers.



I'm kind of suprised this and its twin bloomed. We bought them at the very tail end of last summer from a local nursery's scratch-n-dent shelf. They looked wretched all winter and through the spring but I think the payoff is worth a bit of unsightly foliage.

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Has it really been a week since my last post? I'd been thinking it's just a couple days. What have I done with this week? There was the visit to the pool, Entropy Girl being stung by an unidentified insect, company for dinner. These things must have comprised the week because I'm coming up with nothing else.

The garden situation has stabilized somewhat. Judicious applications of a calcium ammendment seems to have mitigated the blossom end rot problem so I'm now getting more and better tomatoes, both of the roma and amish paste varieties. Beefsteaks aren't behind and some kind of unknown yellow pear variety is doing well, too.

I'm also getting a good deal of summer squash. I'm going to have to cancel my long-planned zucchini post (if you were waiting with breath held for it, see Meg who will hook you up - I'm making her slaw tomorrow) because all of the zucchinis died, each and every one. In their place grew up vigorous yellow squashes which I have decided to treat as though there were zucchini. I had always thought of summer squash and zucchini to be kind of flip sides of the same coin, produce aisle twins sold separately more for aesthetic reasons than anything else. So color me suprised to fine that one can thrive in the same garden where one utterly perishes.

Let's see...what else? Oh, yes, bell peppers doing marginally well. I've harvested three so far and it looks like there may be more yet. The corn is corning and the horseradish is settling in nicely. This weekend I'm going to clear out the lettuce bed and prepare for more radishes and something else, but I haven't decided what yet.

In other news, I also unboxed my sewing machine to get to work on a Christmas gift for my aunt. I really, really needed to have some kind of forward motion on something and decided to spend some time on this countryish-looking stuffed snowman. While I had the machine accessible I also fixed two pairs of the Boy Wonder's pajamas, on which the elastic had completely given way (such is the nature of hand-me-downs). I managed to turn down the existing waistband and thread new elastic through, delighting him thoroughly. He had watched every step of the process, actually sitting still at the kitchen table while I worked and asking all kinds of questions ("Why is the round thing going so fast? Where does the needle go when it goes down like that? Can I touch the thread while you sew?").

I feel good to have just punted already. Sure, we're trying to sell the house but somewhere we've forgotten that we still are living in it. It's not some kind of diorama play-acting the part of a family home, it actually is a family home and if that means the needlepoint is left on the ottoman before a showing, so be it.

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