The Apostrophe Blog
A September Sunday of rain on the long holiday weekend. Harvesting the San Marzano tomatoes at our community garden plot after giving a tour of the garden to passersby—a Portlander and her visiting friends from near Munich, Germany where they are part of a “social garden”—sounded a lot like what we are doing here. Home to a later afternoon of processing the bounty—sliced into chunks, simmered, the skins removed via what we call a “spider”—photo below.
Then more cooking—for hours it seems!—until, after all that, we have six more pints of tomato elixir to freeze in glass jars. To thaw and turn into a sauce using Marcella Hazan’s classic recipe, which is always guaranteed to make summer-tomato poetry of a meal in the gloom of a Pacific Northwest winter eve. We are christening this batch “Burning Mud Tomato Sauce” because Burning Man meets mud on the Nevada playa this past weekend. This heads into the freezer to join the nine pints we made from a harvest on the day of the infamous Atlanta, Georgia mugshot. That batch’s name? “215 My Ass Tomato Sauce.”
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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