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As for this entry, this is it. So do not bother to
My brother calls tomatoes "The Devil's Apples" and refuses to eat them. However, he will eat tomatoes in fresh salsa form presumably because lime juice has holy-water-like properties (if you get some in your eyes and it stings it is because you are evil).
I love, love, LOVE tomatoes. I eat at least a pound a week during the summer. At my last eye exam the optometrist was surprised to find that my vision had improved, and I'm sure it's because of the deal I made with that chap with the goatee at the crossroads at midnight for some of his magic app—I mean, all that Vitamin A.
Unfortunately his magic hasn't worked on the "apples" themselves in the several years I've been growing them. No blue ribbons at the county fair for me. I lack the dedication to gently nurture the plants with optimal light, a balanced fertilizer regimen and leaf massages or motivational posters or whatever it is you do to tomatoes to get them to win prizes. I just plant the seeds and hope for the best.
Prior to my adventures in tomato farming, my previous vegetable gardening experience was pumpkins that I grew in kindergarten. Even then, my main contribution to the enterprise was planting the seeds in an egg carton. I'm pretty sure my parents did all the real work, including surreptitiously unloading dozens of unwanted pumpkins on neighbors' doorsteps that autumn.
So I was winging it with the tomatoes. For starters, I wasn't sure that seeds could be depended upon to sprout, so I planted about fifty, just to be sure. I also assumed that the earlier I started, the better, so I planted them in January.
They all sprouted.
It would have been a shame to waste those little green miracles, so I transplanted 36 of the seedlings into peat pots. I had heard that fertilizer was key to tomato growing so I mixed an organic, tomato-specific meal into their soil. Then we hung out. The local frost-free season begins in late May, so the seedlings had to linger inside like sullen teenagers, getting gangly and pasty as the days lengthened and the sunlight moved out of my apartment and onto the balcony. They also began to smell like sullen teenagers' sweat socks, if those socks were filled with wet dog food. The organic meal fertilizer was probably intended for outdoor use.
Yes, I said "apartment". I didn't know where the 36 seedlings were going to go. I had to find homes for them. Perhaps I could be a Johnny Devilsappleseed, spreading tomato seedling joy to friends and family. So I asked them. I got four mildly enthusiastic takers. Few of my friends have the keen (reckless) gardening aspirations that I do, apparently.
Then I suffered my first farming setback. A new potted plant came into my home from the florist, bringing with it a plague of spider mites. I wasn't keen to spend much more time and effort on the ungrateful smelly horde of orphans so I put them all in the shower and blasted them with water. They were okay with that, but then the sock-scented fertilizer began to actually look like socks, turning the soil white and fuzzy. So the majority of that first crop, so full of promise, ended up in the dumpster.
I saved four seedlings—two cherry and two Roma. They overcame the spider mites (mostly) and the sweat sock mold and fared not too badly, considering my ongoing ignorance of blue ribbon secrets and random, vigorous (mostly to get rid of it) applications of fertilizer. They put on a LOT of greenery as a result, growing about seven feet tall, dominating my balcony and startling visitors. Actual fruit production was less startling. I got a fair number of cherry tomatoes, but only six roma.
In the following years I tried again and again to grow tomatoes, mainly for the pleasure of seeing tiny green things sprout in the late, dark days of winter (I had learned at least one lesson and planted the seeds in early March). The cherry tomatoes produced well, but it's difficult to chop cherry tomatoes up for salsa. The romas remained lackluster, producing about four mealy little excuses for tomatoes per plant, often suffering from blossom-end rot. Their shame was hidden in chili.
This spring tragedy struck: I put my seedlings out on the balcony still in their little plastic greenhouse so that they could get better sunlight. Then I forgot about them. They cooked. It was too late to re-start many of the seedlings, including tomatoes, so I conceded defeat and bought greenhouse-grown seedlings: two "Patio" variety tomato plants that were a few inches high and already had a much sturdier stalk and more flowers than I could ever hope for from my window-grown plants. I did start one cherry tomato plant from seed again since they grow so quickly. The fourth pot was given up to an eggplant.
Now I don't have an alarming tomato shrubbery crowding my balcony, but I do have a lot of tomatoes. I may never grow tomatoes from seed again. $2 for a packet of seeds from which I grow two scrawny plants (or fifty) versus $4 for two sturdy plants that have already given me more tomatoes than I harvested in all previous seasons combined... there is no contest. I have other seeds I can watch sprout in the late, dark days of winter. I want my Devil's Apples!
* * * *
Bruschetta con pomodoro
(all amounts are to taste)
four luscious, vine-ripened tomatoes (or more)
Some basil leaves, say a good three leafy sprigs, or 1/4cup... or more
1 clove garlic (go light on the garlic at first because it easily becomes overwhelming. Increase if you really think it needs it. Some recipes recommend merely rubbing the mixing bowl with the cut side of a garlic clove)
salt
fresh ground black pepper
olive oil
baguette or other crusty white bread
Parmesan/Romano, grated (optional)
Dice the tomatoes finely and place in non-reactive mixing bowl. Tear the basil finely (or be lazy and chop it like I do. There's supposed to be some problem with using a knife on basil, but I can't taste it). Mince the garlic and add. Season with salt and a generous amount of freshly ground pepper to taste. Stir together. Let stand, refrigerated (or eat immediately, like I do).
Slice the baguette into little slices. Arrange them on a tray. Spray or brush lightly with olive oil. Toast under the broiler or in a toaster oven until golden. Top with a little grated Parmesan or Romano (optional) and then a generous spoonful of the tomato mixture on top of that.
Buon appetito!
I've been back from San Diego Comic Con for a week now but I'm still in recovery. Comic Con delivers an unending barrage of information that must be processed even if it shouldn't be, like the chocolates piling up on Lucille Ball's conveyor belt at the candy factory that she has to stuff in her face just to get rid of them. As I browse people's Flickr galleries I see things that I know I walked right past, even leaned against, but I don't recall actually seeing. Other memories have come drifting back to surprise me. Some may come floating to the surface of my brain years from now when I am aged and be taken as signs of dementia.
"Oh yeah, those plush germs were just past the giant nipple fountain."
I have a totally unproven theory that the memory is like the inconveniently-sized storage room/closet in my apartment which isn't even a metre wide but is about three metres deep with shelves at the back and a clothes rail across the front. This means that you have to put things into it very carefully in order to maintain access to things at the back. Sometimes I get busy and/or lazy and an unsorted drift of shoes, backpacks, canned soup, recyclables and climbing equipment accumulates in the front, blocking access the items that I infrequently use, yet are sometimes important, like, say, the camping equipment tucked at the back. I can try to clamber over the drift and risk bashing my ankle on a buried tool box, or I can pull it all out and sort it properly but that takes time.
After only a few days at Comic-Con, the front part of my mental memory closet was piled high with cocktail-shaker-shaped alien collectible dolls, leather Spartan pants, Lego wookiees, the Batmobile, an Art Nouveau bull-fighting poster, Joe Turkell kissing Rutger Hauer on the set of Bladerunner, and Claire Wendling sketches of wrestling lions so that I couldn't get at the name "Ron Howard".
My friends and I had just finished dinner on Thursday night and I had a point I had to make that wasn't important enough for me to remember now*, but I needed the name "Ron Howard" in order to make it. However, it wasn't there. I could see his "What, me worry?" freckled face peering at me from under his ball cap, hidden behind all that junk in my brain. I could hear his warm, folksy voice saying the name "George Michael", but I couldn't hear him saying his own name. I was so frustrated, all I could do was blurt out random related phrases accentuated with lots of arm-flailing and hope my friends would help me yank his name out.
"That guy! On that show! The fifties... with the diner!"
"Happy Days?"
"YES!"
"Henry Winkler?"
"NO! ARG! The other one!"
"Potsie?"
"NO! That other show! With the family! Builds houses! Uh... dad lives in the attic! Banana stand!"
"Arrested Development?"
"YES!!! The guy who talks over it... the narrator!"
"Ron Howard?"
"YES!!"
I wondered if maybe I was having a stroke. I could smell toast, but we had just come out of an Italian restaurant.
More on Comic Con in a bit...
*Now I remember: It was a remark about Ron Howard being an unfortunate yes-man for the first movie in the trilogy by... that guy... who makes the movies in space... with the droids...
One of the reasons I've avoided blogging is because I knew that the updates would be infrequent! I've been busy and also, I haven't had a lot to report, in spite of all that busyness. However, I just finished building a website for friend and fellow artist Robin Arseneault.
Check it out!
Working with her art was a nice change from the technical illustration and interactive forms that I usually do. As you can see from Robin's work, she uses a lot of text and letterforms, so rather than try to find a typeface to represent her, I asked if she would like to make the titles herself. So she cut the titles out of construction paper, scanned them and then I did fun things with them in Photoshop.
The site was was built with a little program called RapidWeaver (with assistance from Dreamweaver) so that it would be relatively easy for Robin to maintain. Unfortunately it wasn't relatively easy to get RapidWeaver to do the things I wanted it to do. There was a lot of painful trial and error and the final result isn't a truly portable RapidWeaver "theme" (three themes, actually) but it works for this project. RapidWeaver is great for building simple sites, but it's tricky to get it to do anything outside of its standard architecture. But heck, it's $50, and it's really good at putting together photo albums which is a useful feature for artists, so I think it was worth all the trouble in the end. If you don't know much about building websites yourself and you don't mind the look of the themes that come bundled with RapidWeaver (you can buy third party themes as well) I recommend it. It may also be useful if you have HTML and CSS knowledge and you'd like to have a go at bashing a custom theme out. It will take bashing though. The RapidWeaver support forums are helpful as was this manual made by a RapidWeaver theme developer.
If you get frustrated, just tap your troubles away!
Another plug: Jeremy Tankard has spiffed up his website. He has a sweet little children's book (I have had a sneak preview) coming in April through Scholastic called Grumpy Bird. Jeremy does magical things with a few strokes of ink and collage. Go, look!
Yay, Jeremy!
