Idiomatic

I’m still behind the eight ball, busy as a bee and have too much on my plate. I’m snowed under, swamped and have too many irons in the fire!

I’m also at a loss for (good) words (or maybe I’ve used them all up at work)!

!!!

Well lookit that! I can grow tomatoes!

We just got back from a whirlwind 18-hour trip to Wolfeboro, N.H. (More on that later. What a trip!) and this is what we found waiting for us.

My mind reels … Pasta? Salad? BLTs? Eat them one-by-one out of hand?

Click through to see who’s who. And feel free to share your tomato triumphs and ideas in the comments.

And for more on the tomato chronicles click here and here.

Gardening For Pretty

My mom came over to the house on Saturday (the rest of the family, too).

We ate ribs and cake and salad, drank wine and talked and talked and talked. We celebrated my step-sister’s birthday, my nephew’s birthday, my birthday and an early Father’s Day. It was fun.

And as I was showing everyone around the garden, I realized that this year I’m gardening for pretty.

The Walking Onion

I just had to share with you this crazy onion.

It, an Egyptian Walking Onion, was one of the first things I bought for the garden nearly two years ago now when we bought the house. I plopped it into one of the previously-overgrown garden plots, not really realizing that walking meant “walking” and that the onion would try to skip its way across the garden.

Early this spring I dug it and all its little bulbils out of that plot and plopped them into a new spot, outside the garden where they can run free. I think they like the feel of freedom, because they’re going wild.  And I just can’t stop looking at those scapes; they’re simultaneously amazing and creepy.

But mostly I can’t wait for the aerial onions, which toe a fine line between shallots and garlic and make some of the best vinaigrette we’ve ever had.

And then there’s Tom Thumb, a tiny little pea that’s just perfect for growing in containers (I’m lookin’ at you Hungry Bruno).  Tom obviously wants to be the star of the class, because there he sits, on the upper deck in his little pot, waving his first teeny tiny pea around like he thinks he’s me in 6th grade Science class.

Lucky for Tom, I love a show-off.

A Leite Dinner

I’ve been thinking a lot about my colleague‘s recent conversion to what he calls “mostly veganism.”

Now, before we go quibbling about his choice of terminology I should tell you that this gentleman is an older, highly conservative Republican, red meat-eating, god-fearing capitalist and that he came to this state not out of any sense of environmental obligation but rather through sports physiology.

But, no matter the route, the destination is the same: A diet that is better for him and for the world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about vegetables too and how much I miss them and can’t wait to start pulling them out of our garden again.  This is the season that tries my soul.  I want to eat lots of unhealthy things like beef and pork and cheese and Christina’s Mama’s lemon sour cream pie, while I know I should be eating vegetables and grains and fish.  I want to be planting plants and digging around in the dirt but rather I’m stomping through slush and standing by the sink and staring at the fluffy, puffed-up birds while clutching a cup of tea, absorbing every last hint of warmth from it.

It’s a hard season to eat, and despite the insistence by the journalist and author Tom Standage at the AMNH’s recent lecture on curry economics that at some point getting your food from half-way around the world costs less in terms of carbon than raising it locally in a greenhouse, I still find eating at this time of year difficult.

It was all these complex thoughts that were rattling around inside my head as I was thumbing through David Leite‘s excellent cookbook The New Portuguese Table.  It was a Christmas gift from Isaac’s  mom and had sat sadly neglected on the ottoman since its unwrapping.  But on Saturday morning I was finally able to give it a good look.  And boy is it a beauty. So many wonderful recipes for interesting meats and creative ways to cook fish, but I was looking for simple, vegetable-centric ones.