198 animal, vegetable, miracle
and three occurred at all. Tomatoes (like children) never achieve the vil-
lainous status of squash—they’re too good to wear out their welcome, and
if they nearly do, our in-town friends are always happy to take them. Fresh
garden tomatoes are so unbelievably tasty, they ruin us utterly and forever
on the insipid imports available in the grocery. In defiance of my child-
hood training, I cannot clean my salad plate in a restaurant when it con-
tains one of those anemic wedges that taste like slightly sour water with a
mealy texture. I’m amazed those things keep moving through the market,
but the world apparently has tomato- eaters for whom “kinda reddish” is
qualification enough. A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through
experience.
Drowning in good tomatoes is the exclusive privilege of the gardener
and farm- market shopper. The domain of excess is rarely the lot of coun-
try people, so we’ll take this one when we get it. From winter I always look
back on a season of bountiful garden tomatoes and never regret having
eaten a single one.
/
At what point did we realize we were headed for a family tomato har-
vest of 20 percent of a ton? We had a clue when they began to occupy ev-
ery horizontal surface in our kitchen. By mid- August tomatoes covered
the countertops end to end, from the front edge to the backsplash. No
place to set down a dirty dish, forget it, and no place to wash it, either.
The sink stayed full of red orbs bobbing in their wash water. The stovetop
stayed covered with baking sheets of halved tomatoes waiting for their
turn in the oven. The cutting board stayed full, the knives kept slicing.
August is all about the tomatoes, every year. That’s nothing new. For a
serious gardener, the end of summer is when you walk into the kitchen
and see red. We roast them in a slow oven, especially the sweet orange
Jaune Flammes, which are just the right size to slice in half, sprinkle with
salt and thyme, and bake for several hours until they resemble cow fl ops
(the recipe says “shoes,” if you prefer). Their slow- roasted, caramelized
flavor is great in pizzas and panini, so we freeze hundreds of them in plas-
tic bags. We also slice and slide them into the drawers of the food dryer,
which runs 24–7. (“Sun- dried” sounds classy, but Virginia’s sun can’t