Summer Sauce

The house smells strongly of tomato sauce today. I went out into the garden after breakfast and filled the basket with members of my favorite, the nightshade family: banana peppers, eggplant, Roma tomatoes. I brought in my first garlic harvest, too: five tiny garlic heads, hardly bigger than the parent garlic cloves I had pushed into the dirt around the new rosebushes. Garlic is supposed to protect roses, and it did, but at its own expense: the roses grew and prospered, the garlic failed to thrive.

In the kitchen I chopped a (store-bought) onion while I heated olive oil in my four-gallon pot. While the onion was sauteeing I cleaned the baby garlics and threw those in. I chopped and seeded the banana peppers, which I grow because they are more resistant to pests than the sweet kind, yet not as hellishly hot as the hot kind. I threw in a couple of eggplants, too (I never get a lot of eggplants at one time), and then the tomatoes.

I only grow Roma tomatoes, because they are good for eating fresh and making sauce, and are pretty immune to tomato ills. Still, this is the first time in a couple of years that I've had enough ripe tomatoes at one time to make sauce. Last year, although my Romas weren't touched by the blight that affected the entire East coast, they weren't productive enough for me to do anything but dry them in the dehydrator.

A few of the tomatoes I picked today were afflicted with blossom-end rot, which betrays my distaste for regular watering. But most of them were fine, and I sliced off the stem ends to feed to the hens later, and chopped them into threes and threw them in the pot. I added salt and pepper and a handful of last year's oregano that failed to survive this winter. I turned down the heat and went on with my day.

Tonight I will pour the cooked-down sauce into the blender--that's my way of dealing with tomato skins--and pour it into quart-sized plastic jars, label it and put it in the freezer, and feel like a squirrel that's stored away one more nut against the coming winter.

Little Salads

I generally don't much care for salads. I hardly ever order salad in a restaurant, and at home we don't usually eat it--except now, when we have it every day.

The salads we have in early spring consist of what a friend used to call "veal vegetables," infant greens as young and tender as little calves who...well, we don't want to think too much about little calves. Two minutes before we sit down to eat dinner, I go to the garden with my aluminum mixing bowl and start picking. I don't even have to carry scissors--the greens are so tender that I can sever them with my fingernails.

There are two kinds of lettuce in the garden--one deep red, with curly edges, and one with smooth, flat, rounded leaves, whose green is faintly speckled with red. There are tender spinach leaves, a few (I never get a good crop of these) leaves of arugula, and baby chard with rainbow-colored stems. In the kitchen, I fill the bowl with water and swish the leaves around a couple of times--unlike the supermarket sellers of Arizona romaine, I don't have toxins to worry about. Then I throw the greens into the salad spinner and give it a couple of turns. Before filling our bowls, I tear the lettuce into bite-size pieces with my fingers. Everything else is small enough to fit comfortably into the mouth.

My American spouse slathers something from a bottle onto this gift of the gods. My Mediterranean genes, on the other hand, allow me only a scant sprinkle of olive oil and a little salt on my salad. I don't even do vinegar. Why mess with perfection?

This blessed routine will continue until the weather gets hot, the lettuce bolts and is fed to the hens, and the mature spinach is harvested for the freezer. At about that time, the tomatoes will begin to ripen. And our green spring salads will be replaced by the red salads of summer and early fall.

Notice that our salads are either green (mostly lettuce with a sprinkling of other veggies) or red (tomatoes). To my mind, the archetypal combination of lettuce and tomatoes is a sin against Nature, since lettuce grows in cool weather, tomatoes in hot. For them to occur simultaneously, something had to be speeded up (the tomatoes), or slowed down (the lettuce) in some kind of artificial environment.

If I were braver, I would bung some dandelion greens into the spring mix. If picked early enough, dandelions are supposed to be an excellent tonic, and not bitter. Every year, while doing the first garden weeding, I dust off a young dandelion leaf and eat it. It may just be me, but every year it tastes way too bitter for a salad. The most success I've had with dandelions is in making dandelion wine.