We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Bowl
Excuse me the title, but when Acadia showcased her Queen Monster Tomato my mind had yet to make the leap from Shark Week and bigger boats to farming and jumbo tomatoes.
And when I say we’re gonna need a bigger bowl…
I mean with all hands on deck and tomato juice flying and canning jars bubbling away and our floor running red with the carnage of so much flesh being torn limb from oops, sorry. Darn shark week muddling my metaphors.
Argggh, who needs sharks? I’ve got a couple of scurvy lasses willing to flash their knives in the name of preserving food.
And while all hands were on deck for slicing dicing squeezing and chopping,
a funny thing happened to me. In the midst of all this my pulse, racing with the pressure of back to school and outgrown sneakers and unfamiliar schedules and shark attacks, started to beat just a bit smoother. And my brow, furrowed with the worries brought on by a new middle-schooler and a calendar to be updated with activities galore, relaxed back into my forehead.
So what does one do with an abundance of relaxed emotions and a couple of backyard apple trees that chose this year to produce hundreds of glamour-shot worthy beauties?
Easy. One leaps deftly from canning tomatoes to grinding out applesauce. And once again our workers sliced and diced and ground away
all in the name of putting up enough sustenance to keep us well throughout the harsh winter to come. Oh the joy of walking past the crumbling destruction that is our flooded basement and into the storage closet that now houses this bounty —
(Note to the nay-sayers: Yes, one can survive on tomatoes, applesauce and jam alone. But just in case, say hello to our back-up plan: Operation Vegetarian Katniss.