I’ve learned a couple lessons this morning about preparation, planning ahead, and reading ALL of the directions before you begin. Once again it is too early to start drinking (surely a holiday weekend relaxes those rules a bit?). I am exhausted and it is only 9:56 a.m.
The morning started with a trip to the farmers market for yet more tomatoes. I know a thing or two about reducing sauces and my paltry basket will not make much. There are no Romas to be had, but I don’t worry about picky details like vegetable husbandry when I’m cooking. I like cooking Italian because it leaves room for experimentation, impulse, and mistakes. It has none of the tedious measurements, ratios, and mathematics required by baking. If baking is a strict German housefrau who will rap your knuckles with a wooden spoon if you step out of line, Italian is your half-crazy middle school art teacher who wears capes and might be a practicing Wiccan.
I know my first step will be peeling the tomatoes – and the best way to do this will use the maximum amount of dishes and pickle your hands for the rest of the day. I set up a pot of boiling water and get ready. Now I check a cookbook where I’ve found a recipe for fresh sauce. It recommends an ice bath, which is a step I forgot about. I haven’t peeled tomatoes in a while. My camera is not working. It’s not working. Still not working. It starts doing something weird. I stop everything and run upstairs to Google the manual. The manual is boring. I press buttons at random. It starts working again for no good reason.
Okay! The water’s reaching a boil. All ready to go!
Hang on. This recipe calls for 30 pounds of tomatoes. Thirty! I certainly do not have thirty pounds. My kitchen might not even hold that many. Do people really cook this way? I turn off the stove, pull out my kitchen scale, and soil more dishes:
Six and a half pounds. Okay fine. I’ll divide all the ingredients by five. I’m already unhappy with the amount of math I’ve had to do today. Labor Day was apparently invented by Texas Instruments to sell more calculators.
All right! The water’s boiling. Let’s get going.
I check the recipe again. Supposedly I should core the tomatoes and cut an “X” into the bottom. Stove off. I watch two online videos demonstrating proper coring techniques. I bet I can get away with not coring. Instead I gouge out the stem part. In some cases this requires chopping the whole top off. My beautiful tomatoes now look victimized. I carve an “X” into the bottoms. Here is a terrible picture of my efforts.
I wash the cutting board and knife, feeling saintly for being so efficient and proactive.
Let me set the scene for a moment. A huge thunderstorm has rolled in. Both my pets are getting nervous and my husband is hanging out with me in the kitchen for absolutely no reason at all that I can see.
Great! Water’s boiling, ice bath is ready – away we go!
I don’t know why the burner looks purple. Magic?
I drop the tomatoes in batches into the boiling water, let them boil for 30 to 60 seconds, and transfer them to the ice bath. They sit for two minutes then get transferred to yet another bowl. Halfway through this process, the power starts flickering in and out. My husband reports that half the house is now dark, but miraculously the stove still has juice, so I continue. I snap at him to please not touch the breaker box until I’m finished, so he starts roughhousing with the dog. In the middle of the kitchen floor. While I’m slopping boiling water around. And the thunder rolls.
Tomatoes boiled and iced, now comes the fun part (if you are a serial killer). Peel all the skin off the tomatoes. This is strangely satisfying in a Silence of the Lambs kind of way. One skin comes off cleanly in one piece and I feel like a rock star. Others stubbornly cling to the tomato and I have to pick at them like a clearance price tag stuck on a gift.
Gross.
I am left with a mountain of dishes and a bowlful of crime scene. I am very thirsty, and not in a Diet Dr. Pepper kind of way. I think that’s enough for now. I cover the tomatoes and cram them into the fridge. I clear away the remaining skin and dump the evidence into the trash can. I slop about half a cup of tomato juice directly into my shoe, which is some sort of magical drip-magnet, having attracted a glass of red wine two weeks ago. I don’t even drink red wine. I do the remaining dishes, wondering idly if you apply for canonization or if the pope just knows somehow. Time for a break.
illdothedisheslater 