The 64 dollar tomato

 

There is a book that kicked around our library system over the past couple of decades called "The 64 Dollar Tomato". I never managed to read it, though I may have brought it home once or twice over the years with good intentions. The conceit it seems to be based on is an appealing and familiar one: That a simple hobby like gardening can come with so many costs, failures, and expenses that, well, growing one's own tomato can end up shockingly expensive.

I kept thinking about that book as I worked on the video below.

One of the video generators I circle around to periodically had a new feature I've been waiting for, so I spent money on some credits that allow me to generate AI... stuff.

Some of it worked just how I wanted!

But a lot of it didn't! And I went through most of my credits at a feverish clip that made me grumble quietly to myself:

"The 64 Dollar Tomato!"

But the movie is pretty neat. I think I'd make more things like this, especially the trippy bugheart section, if I had the credits. 

But I don't.

So I hope you enjoy my 64 dollar movie. Well, not a movie, more like a clerkmanifesto TV commercial. Which actually makes it a pretty good deal for the price. Which, if a homegrown tomato is good enough, can be true for it too.

Not a recipe: Tomato Sauce

For the tomato lovers among us it is generally appreciated that a tomato is easily enjoyed raw, whole, and as is. There is no concern given to the seed or the skin. They are perfectly fine for eating. And while intriguing additions of olive oil, salt, basil, and bufala mozzarella can certainly delight, they are all augmentations, never edits.

But notable in every recipe I've seen regarding saucing tomatoes, one is emphatically instructed to remove the skins and the pulpy seeds.


I say not.


Oh these recipe writers, Italians, and culinary traditions are certainly correct. I won't dispute that. Their progenitors are all more proper, wiser, and better cooks than me. Their recipes are absolutely right and true and brave and thank you for your service, but

No.

Not for me.

I really like tomato seeds. I like their soft crunch. I like boiling them down in olive oil and all their prodigious juices. I like their density and gravity and the way the rest of the luscious sauce fries into and sticks to them.

I don't have a garden, but the CSA my lovely wife and I subscribed to this year has provided such a wealth of tomatoes that eventually there was nothing for it but to sauce them.

Big pot. Pour in an unnerving amount of olive oil. Chopped up garlic, get it cooking. Salt. Lime juice. Honey, balsamic, fresh basil. And then chop up all the tomatoes, coarsely indeed, and cook.

Cook cook cook cook cook cook!

And simmer. Stew, bubble, heat, and seethe. And simmer and boil.

Until three long hours later:

Simmer some more!

This is my sauce.


I rarely get to make it, only when by chance I am bursting with tomatoes. 

There are worse things to be bursting with.

It isn't quite like regular tomato sauces, it's chewy. It's tangy and sweet. It's unorthodox. And I know it wouldn't be proper of me to recommend it.

So I won't.

I'll just sit here quietly and think about eating it on some pasta.

But it was nice of you to listen.

We could be in Eden

I'm not actually going to be blaming trees here. And I don't have anything against those perfectly pretty, modestly sized trees full of small red fruits. "Are they cherries?" I think, as I approach them, growing as they are all along sections of the river paths, festooning the landscaped lawns of the University. No, they aren't cherries. They just look a bit like cherry trees from a dozen yards out.

But that then begs the question "Why aren't they cherries?"

WHY AREN'T THEY CHERRIES!

I quite like cherries, and they grow here, right on the trees. They look pretty doing it too, prettier even than all these trees growing everywhere, the ones with the red berries that aren't cherries and that you can't eat. In my neighborhood I walk by a couple of real cherry trees, twelve feet tall, draped so prettily with fruit, all yellows moving into deep reds as they ripen. How tempting to pick them, but these are private cherries, so I remain hungry. One of my library co-workers has cherry trees and in the last few years has brought me a bucket or two at the start of summer. Much as the story about favoritism goes with parents and children, I too endeavor not to have favorite co-workers, but when my gardening co-worker shows up and says "There's a bucket of cherries for you in the break room." my resolve is sorely tested.

But there are never enough cherries. And when I walk by the open medians and grassy fields of public land, all tended and cared for by city and University workers, I can't help but note that here are perfect places for cherry trees. Decorative, fruit giving, shade throwing, glamorous cherry trees. Surely they couldn't be much harder to grow than all these other inedible fruit trees they've got growing. I want cherries. And while we're at it what's with all these stupid lawns they're mowing and watering all the time, the great banks of boring petunias they plant every Spring? Do they think I look at all that and find it pretty? No. I look at all that and think "Those could be fields of strawberries, and why not grow tomatoes all along the sunny side of this bike path."

But no. That is not the world I live in. I wait on the kindness of my co-workers, and I am forced to garden on my own. It's okay. I like the garden, aside from all the weeding. Nevertheless, on the whole, I'd prefer to just go for walks, picking ripe fruits as I go.

A good reason for gardening

My wife and I spent much of this weekend putting in our garden at the community garden where we have a plot. I don't know what I'm doing and more or less refuse to figure it out. This year we covered everything in half a foot of straw. That's a lot of straw. Our plot is beautifully, if incongruently, golden. I mostly planted tomatoes, from plants I bought at the garden store. All things being equal I should be waiting another week or so for planting tomatoes here in chilly Minnesota, but when have things ever been equal? I'm still eagerly awaiting the day things are equal. I am frankly irritated at how much they simply aren't equal.

As the summer goes on my tomatoes will mostly grow heavy with fruit, ranging from exquisitely sweet to bland and nearly inedible as is, and 50 percent of everything else I grow will sort of work out. 

I expect little, hope for a lot, and split the difference.

We have two rhubarb plants in our garden. One was in the plot, in the Northwest corner, there when we inherited it, and it's huge. The other we accepted as a gift and planted before we understood just how huge the other one was. My wife was cutting stalks of rhubarb from the big plant today to put in the Community Garden's cooler for food shelf pick up. I looked at the endless rhubarb and thought "I guess if that's food maybe I should do something with it." So I cut a bunch of stalks for myself and brought them home. Oh, there's plenty to go around. But it will be at least a month before there's anything else to eat from the garden, maybe two, so I better get what I can when I can.

Now rhubarb is strange, mostly because it's a vegetable that's entirely like a fruit. It's the reddish stalk of its giant leaves we eat. When one cuts it down to edible components it is vaguely similar to celery, except red. But look who I'm describing rhubarb to! You've probably been messing with rhubarb your whole life. You're probably a rhubarb expert. Nevertheless today I have a rhubarb recipe so complex, so mindbending, that you will likely never have imagined such a thing.

Rhubarb Recipe

Ingredients:

Cut up rhubarb
Some honey
Water
Pinch of salt (because I'm fancy like that)

Instructions:

Put them in a pot and cook them.


This is the very recipe I made tonight. I ended up with a sauce, a rhubarb sauce. I don't know what to do with it exactly, but it was unbelievably delicious. No, I mean that literally, as in not believable. I tasted it and was so surprised at how good it was that I kept trying to work out how I was wrong and how it wasn't really that good. Un believable. But I'm pretty sure it really was that good.

Wait here. I have it in a jar in the refrigerator. I will go taste it again.

Hmm. A bit sludgy looking. I take a spoonful and put it in my mouth. There is a hint of the vegetal at first, then sweet sour bursts into and across my tongue, strawberries, and something more subtle, the ghost of some wonderful flavor, the secret hidden flavor of rhubarb, unfindable but taunting my taste buds and leading them on a merry chase. Exhausted my tastebuds fall back and reside.  A quiet subsidence follows. My mouth grows calm. 

Interestingly there is no taste of honey in it at all.  The honey was surrounded by the strength of the rhubarb and worked all its magic from behind. All aftertaste of the sour sweet rhubarb is clean, a counter intuitive purity. 

I have heard of rhubarb before, a crude Midwestern country fair food only to be combined with other, better foods. So all this in my experience can't be right. And yet there it is, in my refrigerator. All humble magic. Waiting.

The early tomato report

We are bringing you live reporting from my 18 tomato plants in the Dowling Community Gardens. We at clerkmanifesto have been tirelessly updating our tomato plant status on an hourly basis for 78 consecutive days now, producing 1,872 tomato update reports.

So you should have a pretty good idea of what's going on with my tomatoes.

You probably even have a favorite tomato plant that you like to read about, perhaps "Big Red" or "The Mighty Lucy". You've been with me through thick and thin on this one, through paste and cherry, green and orange and fire engine red. Knowing that you are out there following along has meant the world to me.

Wait, what? You haven't received any of my tomato updates?

Well that doesn't sound right. Let me look.

I'm pretty sure that...

Oh no!

I didn't notice this little "send" button! All these time sensitive tomato reports are just sitting here! You missed the night I sat cowering amongst my tomatoes as violent lightning struck and I tried to shield the plants from 60 mph straight line winds. You missed the morning in May when a late frost blackened the lower leaves of my first plants. You missed my candlelight vigil as the first Sungold made its 14 hour march to ripeness and the thrilling account of my first tasting.

I'm not saying it's your fault by any means. I'm just saying there was a lot of tomato plant excitement that it now turns out you missed this summer. Although, fairly speaking, what you mostly missed looked much like this:

2:00 p.m.:

Partly cloudy. Big Red getting the most sun today on the NE quadrant. Several plants seem slightly bigger from the 1:00 p.m. report, but I may be imagining it. If no rain comes tonight will have to water by hand tomorrow evening.

Or this:

4:00 a.m.:

Desperately tired with alarm going off every hour so that I can report. Quite dark tonight still. Cannot really see the tomatoes, though that shape I vaguely see is maybe "Little Sweet Greenman". I can sort of make out its distinctive wandering Southern branch. Excited about sunrise to see if tomatoes have developed under its flowers. Too dark now. Much much too dark.


Ah well, 1,872 posts down the drain. but then, maybe the important thing was just being there.

The tyrrany of questions

In the last days of work, before vacation came, I was walking to work. The air was good and all the ultra violet flowers were experimenting with their colors. The houses and trees were cottages and forests and I felt free and happy. But I knew that feeling would be gone in a minute or two and I wanted to hold on to it.

Some things you can't hold. 

I didn't have a good day.

I don't know what we walk through in this life that we can go from walking in a glorious children's picture book, a fairy tale, only to climb up a hill that ends at its beginning and turns to machine. We go into the pitch black, through grief, into exhaustion, and then we forget how to walk and find ourselves kicking ourselves as we do it. Then we are into the meadow again, with the deer and the antelope, a breeze, and maybe a hand to hold.

Here then is my post it note from that walk that day. I like to have the answers, don't I? I am all over the answers here, but answers have a curious way of slipping back into questions. It is as if questions are the native form of all answers. What a way to make a world.

But I'll endeavor not to complain about that today

My post it note was just this question:

How do we not hold onto life too hard, but still squeeze the juice from it?

Garden gravity

I had finished my morning cappuccino and was ready to head to work. I was only a few precious minutes late, which is pretty good for me. My journey includes walking, then biking, then driving. I headed up the street on foot. There was no time and no reason to go to my community garden plot. It was northeast when I needed to travel northwest. I had watered everything the day before and the afternoon was supposed to rain anyway. We had done our fair share of weeding over the past few days, and thinning, and visiting with the garden frog, and so all was in tip top shape. If I pointlessly wandered over to the garden, that didn't need me anyway, I would be late. I would be forced to puff away mightily on the heavy city bike I use, and, exhausting myself, covering myself in sweatiness, I would arrive at the library so late that I would have to sneak in to work through the floorboards or something, if we had floorboards, which we don't. Plus, whenever I go to the garden I somehow manage to cover myself head to toe in dirt, like Pigpen. I don't like showing up at work too often looking like Pigpen and bathed in sweat. I don't want to develop a reputation. So, in every way, it was definitely for the best that I not go to the garden.

I went to the garden anyway.

The little tomato plants need me.

Gardening's humility

With great power comes great responsibility. With great responsibility comes...

Worry.

This summer I have a garden. I am a gardener. No, not a very good one, but a very emotional one. I garden as if an incredibly delicate bird has been put in my care, one on the brink of death, and I have no idea how to care for the bird. So mostly I fret and project hope and try to induce it to sip pureed worms. There's some weeding too, er, forget the bird now, we're back to the garden. Sunday evening I bought a variety of tomato plants because all my tomato seeds failed, but the night was projected to be cold, too cold for it to be wise to plant them. So I took the little tomato plants to my living room and watched them a lot. They didn't go anywhere. They are not ambulatory, which is an interesting feature of plants that non gardeners may not know. In the morning I took them outside. Here at work today I think of them. Do they have enough water? Are they getting enough sun? I bet they miss me. I miss them.

Walking to work, on the river, I passed a house I adore, all dense dark brick and with a cozy yard swollen with sweet flowers. It's a dream of a house, facing the Mississippi River, solid as can be. I thought "I wish we lived in this house and didn't have to work and I could garden all day." Hands in the dirt, playing with the magic of time and nature and food. A gardener attains a piece of the power over life and death.

So here I am, a gardener-god, but I feel nothing but humility. This could be because I am not very good at gardening. Still, I am an excellent writer, and yet I'm terribly humble about that too. Yes, sure, you may be thinking that a person who talks about being the greatest writer on the Internet, a prophet of the gods setting down a religious masterpiece for the ages, and the finest, only blogger in the world, can hardly claim to be humble. And I agree I am prone to exclamations of my own exalted greatness, but when I engage in those, when I am telling you that I am a terrible genius, I do feel rather humble. The sentence I am using to say it all is a gift. It may grow or it may not, and even I know, most of them die whether I want them to or not.

Gardening and me

It has turned out to be impossible for a man with my brownish-gray-green thumb to grow a proper garden in my yard. The skies of summer are soon heavily sketched over with a sprawling foliage of an oddly unbalanced oak tree and a towering pine tree that has waxed fat off of our sewage line. Every couple of years we have a sewer man come grind out our sewer pipe, driving a massive whirring blade through gluttonous pine tree roots. The pine tree is unphased by this, and it is now over 400 feet tall. At this point, gardening-wise, I mostly grow fruiting things that thrive yet bear no fruit (no raspberries, no grapes, and no apples). Most of our hostas do well and our creeping charlie is blossoming in purple even as I write this.

But a few blocks over from the house of my wife and I is the second oldest victory garden in the nation. We learned this fact at our orientation, an orientation we attended because we have obtained a plot there. The oldest Victory Garden in the nation is somewhere on the east coast. Our orientation host cast aspersions on this garden in the east, though I can't remember what those aspersions were. The upshot was that while our Victory/Community Garden isn't technically the oldest in the nation, by any of the really important standards it pretty much is.

We have already put a good deal of preparatory work into our sunny patch of land in this historic garden. And as composts and weedings and early seeds make their way into our plot I am finding much of my characteristic emotional relationship to the world expressed in my feelings of hope, anticipation, and despair surrounding the prospects of this garden.

I am fully convinced that our garden plot is going to provide so many glorious, sweet, and strangely wonderful heirloom tomatoes, peas, herbs, melons, onions, raspberries, and greens of all kinds that I will hardly know what to do with them all.

And I am equally sure that no seed will sprout, nothing will grow, and everything that does grow will wither and blacken on the eve of bearing fruit.

All my prodigious life experience tells me that something in between these two will happen.

But what is that to my feelings, which, while utterly blind as prophets, are nevertheless free of all time and faultless.

Inherent contradiction be damned, you will watch those feelings all come true, right here, should you dare to stay for the summer.