Summer

These tomatoes are so ripe and perfect, it’s like cutting into butter.  Less than an hour off the vine, a serendipity from a friend who told me that her neighbor had told them to come and pick all they wanted, because he couldn’t use them all.  I don’t know all the varieties, but I have cherry tomatoes that are purple, red oblong ones that aren’t any bigger than my thumb, those that look like Romas, and those that are short and squat.  They’re still warm.  All I want to do is slice them, spread the slices out like a fan on my plate, sprinkle them with coarse salt, and introduce them to my fork.

These are so perfectly ripe that they nearly disintegrate once I salt them.  The juice is so deep on the plate that I probably should have used a bowl.  I want to save the juice for the end, but there’s so much of it that I have to slurp it before the tomatoes themselves are gone.  Drinking the tomato juice myself is both supreme pleasure and a reminder of loss, since when I was growing up, my sprite of a grandfather always got to drink the juice off the plate.  Nobody else.   It never occurred to any of us to ask, because it was always his. In the last few years of his life, his Parkinsons made the little tradition hard to watch—and then he stopped drinking it altogether because of the shakes.  Now he’s gone, nearly four years ago, and I learn that my grandmother never liked tomatoes.

Fall

Last week, I brought home a peck of canning tomatoes from the farmer’s market. My friend John’s family sells them and he always gives me a discount.  When I got home, I pulled out my stock pot, my canning tongs and funnel, my old cake pan that I use for boiling jars, the jars, the lids, and the rings.  I put an old beach towel on my kitchen table to protect it.  I placed the cake pan over two burners, filled it with water and the lids, the rings, and the jars—pints today—and turned both burners on high.  I filled a saucepan with water to boil—so I could skin the tomatoes—and then pulled a couple of bowls out of the cupboard.  One for garbage, one for the skinned tomatoes, and one for the hot tomatoes to cool after I’d dunked them in the boiling water.

In my preparations, I also pull out my canning journal, which has my notes from doing this last year.  It’s how I remember how many tomatoes I got last year and whether that was enough or not enough. I don’t like the oven canning method of tomatoes that my sister recommended, so I’m not going to do that again. Most importantly, it really takes three years to get the canning mentality right. In the first year, you don’t can enough to get you through the winter, so it’s quickly gone. In the second year, you can enough, but you’re worried about running out, so you hoard it and you’re left with shelves of food by the next summer. By the third year, you’ve got both the proportions right and you’ve gotten over the hoarding. The food is there to eat, after all.  And I write it down, so I remember for the next year.

Winter

In the last couple of days, I’ve made a serious dent in my tomato stores. I’d been wanting my mother’s cream of tomato soup recipe for months before she sent it to me and the recipe she sent me had where she’d gotten it written at the top:  “Laporte Home Ec, October 1984” and that brought back all those fuzzy pre-age-five memories that never get any clearer, winter memories of playing in the snow that was taller than I was. It was one of those winter soups that always made things a little bit warmer, simply because of the summer ingredients that we’d gardened and carefully preserved for an occasion just like this. Summer came back in a rush as I pulled a quart of tomatoes I’d canned months ago off the pantry shelf in the back of my house. And I pulled a plastic bag of frozen roasted tomatoes out of the freezer as well.  I realized that next year, these oven-roasted tomatoes will be something I will dedicate more energy to.  Life’s just more fun with them.

Spring

It’s the ten year anniversary of my first introduction to Galway, Ireland.  Every spring makes me a little nostalgic, mostly because of the rain, but this spring is different.  Spring is full of Irish flavor for me, Irish white cheddar, Irish soda bread, Irish butter. I’ve never been able to find good Irish bacon here, but every once in a while, I’ll buy some tomatoes and fry up some eggs and consider that my version of an Irish breakfast. Tomatoes are a staple breakfast item in Ireland.  Sometimes the quarter of tomato is cooked for just a minute under a hot broiler or it’s served cold and raw—either is fine with me.  It’s a bit of bright sweet to balance the rich salt of the eggs and Irish bacon, soft to the contrast to the toast.  Then I’ll make myself a pot of tea strong enough for a mouse to trot across, then doctor it up with some cream and sugar in honor of those months of Irish tea, and sit down to a plate full of memories.

Photography by Amanda McGuire