Life has been a rat race lately—one place after another. It’s next to impossible to pin me down for any length of time. Between washing windows, scraping paint, the usual loads of laundry, all this summer heat makes me want to do is sit down and read a book in a rocker. Sure, I wouldn’t turn down a glass of something cool and refreshing, but it’s becoming a chore even to fix that between cutting all this grass.
Still, I must eat at some point. Throughout the years, I’ve experimented with a number of “no bake” recipes when it comes to having a sweet fix. Think, icebox cakes, ice cream sandwiches from store-bought cookies, refrigerated confections that leave you parked in front of the Frigidaire. Of course there’s also the standby pimiento cheese or the innumerable cold “salads” that are nonetheless cooling down our plates.
For weeks now, I’ve been watching our garden come along with the greatest anticipation. I may have already mentioned that I planted twice the amount of tomatoes I’d normally plant, just for insurance purposes. My morning ritual has become slipping on a single garden glove and meticulously checking the leaves of each tomato plant for any sign of hornworms, squashing whatever culprit I may find. Then, I water. Ideally, twice a day.
Gardens demand such routine, such tending, but I find it a well worth escape from the endless supply of housework and yard work.
With all the rain, my peppers have been pitiful, but my squash and tomatoes seem to be thriving for the most part. Seeing what space is left out there now, I’ve realized there’s much more room to really pack the garden with all kinds of vegetables that I could’ve been bringing in by now.
Nonetheless, we’ve been receiving the first tomatoes of the summer. A blessed sight! For me now, summer doesn’t really begin until I’ve sunk my teeth into a tomato. Where spring is marked by flowers and pollen, summer is measured in tomatoes and figs.
I remember my great grandparents were religious about putting giant drums of tomatoes out, lining their carport every spring. By the time all the grandkids and great grandkids would be over swimming in the pool, we’d be picking tomatoes for sandwiches and burgers.
My painting teacher, Miss Carlton, would tell me how she’d guess which plant would give her the first tomato of the summer. Once that first tomato would start growing, she’d watch it patiently until it was just ripe.
“Then I go out there with a little salt and pepper and eat it right off the vine. Like a little piggy,” she’d tell me, with a childlike grin.
Tomatoes are a summer staple as far as the South in concerned. It’s around summertime that the beloved vinegar-based tomato, onion, and cucumber salad starts popping up in refrigerators. For those who need an excuse to break out their Sevres soup bowls and Conning coin silver spoons, there’s Gazpacho, which always elicits some oh’s and ah’s at a luncheon. I mean, you might as well call it a luncheon if you’re going to go through all that fuss.
Yet, there’s a beauty in the simplicity of a traditional tomato sandwich. Not to mention, it’s a perfectly blank canvas to play around with.
The ideal tomato sandwich is white bread, mayonnaise, a thick slice (or two) of a hearty tomato, and maybe some salt and pepper. Yet, you’d be surprised the variations of this exact sandwich I’ve had over the years. It depends on the variety of tomato, how thick the slice is, if the bread is toasted or not.
Some sandwiches I’ve had only add salt, others a pinch of sugar to cut the acidity, and some with nothing but some mayonnaise and a tomato. You can have a tomato sandwich at one house, then go next door and experience a completely different one.
Of course, you can add some thick-sliced bacon and some lettuce for the classic BLT, or as I did this week and toss a little homemade Durkee’s and a couple slices of bacon on top of the whole shebang.
The truth is, if the tomato is good enough it doesn’t need much help to make it shine. Personally, if I’m going to just make the most sacrilegious iteration of a tomato sandwich, here’s its anatomy: toasted Wonder bread, whisper thin slices of a Beefsteak tomato, Miracle Whip, and the usual salt and pepper.
Maybe that doesn’t have the shock factor it once did, but it doesn’t negate that Miracle Whip definitely belongs among the options for a perfect tomato sandwich.
My friend Kendall spent all Spring telling me how she wanted to get into growing tomatoes, but she usually hitches her wagon to her grandmother whose been growing them for decades now. All I told her was if she was gonna start with anything it should be tomatoes. They’ve got about as much cache as a basket of figs, in my book.
There’s no two things I look forward to more in the summertime than the tomatoes and the figs. Just about everything else is icing.
Although I’m a bit worried now about my peppers. Did you know if you plant a hot pepper next to a sweet one, it’ll just make the sweet one hot, too? Well, now I know that after I’ve planted all my lunchbox peppers next to my Tabasco peppers.
One of these days I’ll rid myself of the Tabasco pepper tradition, where I try to have one plant in the garden every year. You only need so much vinegar sauce, but you’d be surprised how quickly I’ll plow through some greens in the cold months.
So, unfortunately, this week’s column isn’t so much a recipe as much as it is an ode to what feels like the true beginning of summer. Besides, I’m saving all my cooking energy for the Fourth of July, which inevitably demands many foods be prepared for proper enjoyment.
I’ve even threatened to make a “mock” apple pie this year from Ritz crackers, because I’m just that kind of person. We’ll see if I even have room for that after whatever else we have in store for the weekend.
I told myself when I bought my hand-crank ice cream maker last year that I’d be spoiling us with some vanilla custard ice cream and sliced peaches. One of these days, I’ll learn to write down all these promises to myself so they can quit sneaking up on me.
If anyone has a line on some good peaches, this writer would be beyond grateful. As I’ve been saying, “Sometimes peaches, sometimes rain.”
Does it make sense? Well, given my current search for the perfect peaches, it certainly does to me. Yet, I have a way of just making my own meanings.
Now stop listening to me and go check your tomatoes!
