Life is certainly . . . well . . . messy.

Which is, of course, one of the many things that makes it interesting and, consequently, worth living.

Now, against the backdrop of that simple truth, picture about a million tomatoes thrown hither and yon by a bunch of crazy, screaming Spaniards on a hot day in August . . .

"La Tomatina" is a food fight festival held on the last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Buñol in the Valencia region of Spain. On the 27th of August, tens of thousands of participants hurled more than one hundred metric tons of over-ripe tomatoes at each other. I'm not making this up. ABC and a bunch of other new agencies have reported on it (and Wikipedia discusses it at length), so it must be true.

You can find more pictures here.

Mmmmm...Brushetta

We made our first batch of salsa and very yummy brushetta this weekend. My hubby, Joe, has a very simple delicious recipe:

Yummy Brushetta

sliced italian or french bread--sliced on a diagonal is pretty
3-4 medium to large fresh tomatoes--any variety will do
2-3 sprigs fresh basil
olive oil--extra virgin is best
asiago cheese--shredded plus extra for garnish
chopped sweet onion--optional, to taste
freshly ground black pepper
fresh parlsey for garnish--optional

Chop tomatoes, basil, and onion. Mix gently and place in bowl to chill while preparing bread.

Drizzle olive oil over bread slices, and top with asiago cheese. Broil just a few minutes until cheese melts. Top with freshly ground pepper. Spoon tomatoes and basil onto bread. Garnish with shredded asiago cheese and a sprig of parsley. Serve while bread is still warm. Makes about 4 servings.

Enjoy. This is a wonderful side for grilled chicken, or steak. It also makes a wonderful meal by itself.

This is a very simple, but delicious recipe. It's one of our favorites!!

save the date • September 20th

Hi fellow One Hundred Positives! I have set a date for our end of summer celebration — I hope this date works for everyone. The date is Saturday, September 20, 2008. The One Hundred Positives celebration will be held in along with the closing reception for my work “I will see you in the Garden” in the garden space of moxieDaDa Galley from 1pm until 4 or 5pm-ish. (1416 Arch Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15212) It will be a picnic-style potluck party celebration. I would like all the One Hundred Positives people to included tomatoes in their pot luck contribution — BUT — this is not a requirement! If you’d rather bring cheese and crackers or a large plate of double dark dark chocolate chip cookies — by all means do so. :—))

It will be helpful to me to know what dishes people are planning to bring to this celebration, so that I can fill in with whatever will be needed to make a nice balance of food items — so let me know either by leaving a comment here, emailing, calling, carrier pigeon or in person.

Things I might need — if you can help me out with any of these things I would greatly appreciate it:
1) Portable charcoal grills
2) Tables for food

( I will be sending out an email invitation soon.)

What a difference a month makes.

It's been one month since I last posted...and, man oh man, have those two plants grown! I can't even see the flowers I planted or the silver globes below the tomatoes anymore. Lots of little yellow flowers, lots of baby tomatoes, lots of not-so-baby tomatoes, but I'm still waiting for the first tomato to ripen – but it seems from this link (albeit from a completely different growing zone than us) that I should just appreciate everything a tomato plant does and just be more patient. [twiddling my thumbs]

!!! fellow tomato-ees, check out this site !!!
www.tomatofest.com

A name is not just a name

Before Rose started her tomato projects this year, I must admit I thought of tomatoes as plants. They were plants with wonderful tasty fruits and "itchy" leaves. Nothing else. I enjoyed them, but they were just plants. Now that all of this has taken place, all of that has changed. I am seeing tomato articles and recipes EVERYWHERE! Were they there in past years? I don't know, I didn't take much notice. I also never paid much attention to the names of the tomato varieties we planted. That started to change as I heard Rose talk of different types of plants she should grow this year. The names were interesting. Then I ran across an article in our local newspaper magazine about a guy who stumbled upon heirloom tomatoes 30 years ago from a chance meeting with an old Portuguese farmer. He spoke of sampling "Kellogg's Breakfast", "Brandywine", and "Cherokee Purple", and how these flavors blew him away. The vision of stumbling across this old farmer on a hot, dusty summer day drew me in. This was a website I had to check out. It took me about a month, but finally I typed in that web address. I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Anything and everything about heirloom tomatoes was there. About 600 varieties of tomato seeds for sale? I didn't know that many even existed! I looked farther to see wonderful descriptions and any known history these tiny seeds held. Families send seeds to this guy, Gary Isben, to grow and preserve for future generations to enjoy. You need to check out this site also: http://www.tomatofest.com/ . I started to notice names like: "Indian Moon", "Early Annie","Hillbilly", "Ella's Pink Plum", Elmer's Old German", and "Homer Fike's Yellow Oxheart" . They suddenly were more than just names. Ella and Elmer were instantly a couple. My vision for next year is as follows: Ella and Elmer will stand at the entrance to my garden welcoming visitors, and reminding them to visit again soon! Homer Fike and that old Hillbilly will be fussing further into my garden near my sweet onions and wonderful bell peppers. Tender herbs will grow at "Belle's" feet, being protected from the summer sun under her tall strong leaves, all ripening perfectly to become the world's best salsa. Along a meandering path, will be rambling cucumbers, and my girls giant pumpkins growing strong in the summer sun. My girls will be the ones darting in and out of their sweet corn maze, playing hide and seek. "Ruth's Perfect", and "Pink Accordian", also heirloom tomatoes, will grow in a special place in honor of my Mom and Dad. It may seem odd to plant a "pink" tomato for a dad, but my Dad was from Ireland, and quite the jovial accordian player. It seems like a good fit. "Beam's Yellow Pear" and "Austin's Red Pear" cherry tomatoes, will grow for you, Rose, to create more wonderful edible works of art! This is my vision of the perfect garden. Beautiful, plants grown and enjoyed with love, by people who love each other, all the while having fun on a lazy summer day. Yes, fresh squeezed lemonade will be sipped under the old apple tree!!

always a garden always tomatoes

My family lived in three different houses over the course of my childhood. Each had a wonderful garden planted by our parents. Each garden grew in size from one to the next.

Our first house was on Ballinger Street in Pittsburgh, PA., the house I consider to be my childhood home. I remember when my sister Peggy was born. It was on my sixth birthday. At first I wasn’t exactly thrilled that I would have to share my birthday with someone else for the rest of my life, but now I consider it an honor and something very precious. I remember the tomatoes from my mother’s garden — especially the little red and orange pear shaped tomatoes. I loved to pick these tomatoes as they just looked so beautiful mixed together in a bowl. I remember making ”art“ with them — arranging and re-arranging them up on a flat surface, eating them one by one until my masterpiece was consumed.

Our Dad built our second house on a two-acre wooded piece of land in Nottingham Township, Eighty-Four PA., where the garden quadrupled in size. This house being a custom-build allowed my parents the luxury of redesigning the master bath space changing it into a greenhouse. Over the next six years, our Mom perfected her skills at raising transplants from seed. I don’t have any vivid memories of eating or making art with tomatoes while we lived here, but do I recall the heavenly look on my Mother’s face when she enjoyed her favorite sandwich in the whole world — Miracle Whip and a thick slice of a just-picked Beefsteak tomato on freshly baked bread.

Our next move was to the farm where the garden grew even larger — and then too large. It became more of a dreaded chore than something enjoyable to me. While Peggy considers the farm to be her childhood home, I didn’t. I lived there for a little less than two years and I was completely against the idea of moving to a farm — I wanted to stay at our second house and in the woods that surrounded it. While I appreciated the farm, I just wasn’t cutout to be a farm girl. My memories of tomatoes from this time aren’t really positive. This was the time period in which my mom’s green thumbs were out of control and there were hundreds of tomato plants when in reality we most likely only needed twenty or so.

Fast forward to today. I visited the farm just recently were Peggy is growing eight tomato plants (and other great stuff, too) — and what a beautiful job she is doing. She has created a manageable sized garden in the space that always represented a space out of control and something unpleasant to me. My sister has given me a wonderful gift. For the first time in my life, I see this place, this beautiful farm, as my home. I can’t thank you enough Peg. :—))

Love Story

This love story goes back many years before I was born. It is about my Mom and her love of nature and of the outdoors. She started to garden, looking through catalogs at a young age, and planted her tomato garden in Morningside, high atop Marietta Street. She used to say on a clear summer night she could hear the lions roar at the Zoo. What a perfect environment for her plants in the middle of the city! She always dreamed of living on a farm, to grow her garden and raise a couple of dairy cows. Fast forward now to 1975, when she announced with excitement, that we were moving to a beautiful farm in the country! The huge tomato garden soon arrived with enough Roma tomatoes to provide a winters worth of spaghetti sauce, puree, and whole tomatoes. These were the bread and butter of off season meals. Not to mention, delicious. Her favorites, however were probally Better Boy, Early Girl, and Brandywine. She planted cherry tomatoes, for me in part, because I was the garden "grazer"--one for the bucket, one for me! These were especially good right off the vine. Also with our huge gardens, came Dorothy, Mom's very stubborn, but very loved Jersy milk cow, who provided fresh milk, and enough thick cream to start a gourmet butter business. Mom canned, dried, and froze every veggie imaginable, with great success. She would point out to me, the beauty of every fruit; the color, aroma, firmness of each variety. She took pride in this. It was very important for her to be able to give her family this special gift, even if we didn't understand it at the time. She wasn't always able to express what she felt, but if you read between the lines, you could hear it and feel it. It gave her a purpose, to be able to give to us something that was so dear to her. Since my Mom passed away last year, I have been very fortunate to be able to garden at our family farm, planting tomatoes, along with peppers, onions, and herbs for my husbands delicious homemade salsa! This will be his first year to use all truly fresh ingredients! Plants that we will have planted and cared for together, just like my Mom did so many years before, to provide a special treat for our family. It is only as an adult, with my own beautiful children, that I can fully understand and appreciate the love and effort Mom put into her gardening. It was for her, but more for us. Thanks Mom. Love Peggy

2% of One Hundred Positives

My landlords live in the front portion of the building I'm renting.
They adopted 2 of the One Hundred Positives.
They gave me one.
I had one.
That makes two.
1+1 = 2
It's still pretty fair since three of us have three tomato plants.
Right?
Right.
I'm glad the guilt has been lifted off my shoulders.

I live in a wee apartment with a backyard that is as large as my apartment (~300 sq ft).
This is the first time since my childhood home I've had grass...
100 sq ft of grass (cut with a push-mower, of course)
150 sq ft of brick patio
50 sq ft of garden beds
6 sq ft of tomato plants

The tomato plants are both doing quite well.
Here's a poor photo on them taken with my cell phone – my digital camera is broken.
They have been in the ground for one month.
The plant on the right almost bit it in a brief hailstorm last month,
but I quickly staked it, and she seems to be doing fine.
One of the plants has three teeny-tiny yellow pear tomatoes on it.
I'm quite excited since yellow pear is my favorite variety.
The color, the flavor, the shape, the low acid – what's not to love?

The Omen

I just went to check on my tomato plant, and there was a black cat! It was about 10 feet away, and it was very pretty and fluffy...is this bad luck for the tomato plant? As for the plant, it looks about the same as it did when I transplanted it, though I don't see any bumps anymore, so that's good. It feels like it was a month ago that I put it in the ground, so I expected it to have grown a lot...but as it's only been a week, there's not much difference.

Also, I learned that Phipps Conservatory has a "Tomato and Garlic Festival" on Sunday, August 17th, for those of you who like tomatoes.

ladies and gentlemen — we have a tomato

The first tomato! Yay! It was my goal to raise only one tomato plant this year, but there were a few extras from the One Hundred Positives giveaway and I found room for them. So now I am raising five. This one, a Viva Italia, is a plum tomato (the same variety as Kristen’s) and is perfect for things like sauce and yes, ketchup!

I think a challenge is in order. Who can, if anyone can, make a better ketchup than Heinz?

Transplant

I had this crazy idea that my tomato plant would survive a summer in a pot. The pot was one that I got in college for a plant that lived with me from freshman year until almost two years after I graduated. It was a tough little plant that survived several christmas breaks alone in NYC, in a dark bathtub with a paper towel siphoning water into it's pot. It also took many trips back and fourth to Pittsburgh in the summers. Anyway, I thought I'd try to use this pot for my tomato plant, but I think my tomato grew way too fast for it. Yesterday I noticed little yellow bumps all over the stem of the plant, and I was worried that it caught some disease. But today, I looked more closely, and I think those bumps are more roots growing out, since the bottom ones are now growing so much that they are reaching down into the soil. So I decided my tomato needed transplanting. I took Rose's advice, and planted the plant deep, so most of the little bumps are beneath the soil. My tomato got a new home on the side of my deck, and even got a stake to support it. Hopefully he'll fair better this way, although I am concerned about animals bothering him now. I guess only time will tell.

in the Garden

The installation at moxieDaDa is growing and falling apart nicely. There are blossoms on two of the tomato plants — #4 and #7. A crop of tomatoes looks promising, that is if the resident groundhog doesn’t discover them. (I haven’t seen him lately — perhaps he’s moved on...)

I’ve added a few elements to the space — of course I won’t tell you what they are — you’ll need to spend a little time in the garden to discover them.

moxieDaDa Gallery / 1416 Arch Street / Pittsburgh, PA 15212

Rutabaga Ruth also has blossoms and she’s getting tall.

Miss you with a smile...

My little girls and I planted two of Rose's tomato plants in our little kitchen garden by the porch. In the past I've made a point to plant oregano, basil, peppers and tomatoes in this spot in honor of my little brother, Steve, who passed a away four years ago. It seems very fitting for my two little girls to plant these positive tomatoes here in honor of their crazy, kick-ass guardian angel, especially because he loved to cook Italian food. Steve was a positive spirit that, even at the very end of his life, left you with a smile. Maybe eating these tomatoes will make you smile, too. We can't wait for the tomato party!

Ketchup, please

When Rose first told me about her project involving 100 tomato plants, my initial reaction was "yuck! tomatoes!" I hate tomatoes. I hate them so much, I don't even like tomato sauce. It's not the flavor of tomato that bothers me, it's the texture. The skin and the seeds and the slimy-ness. Yuck! It's gross just thinking about it. I know it doesn't make much sense, but I like other foods with similar textures, like plums and nectarines are slimy and have similar skin. And I don't mind raspberry seeds or pomegranate seeds. But something about those tomatoes, I just can't bear it.

Being from Pittsburgh, home of Heinz, I do love ketchup. It doesn't have the seeds or the skin. I put ketchup on everything. All of the traditional things, hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries. I don't like mustard, so I've got to have the red stuff. When I was younger, and sometimes still, I'd put ketchup on steak. Most people think I'm ruining the steak, but maybe the steak is ruining my ketchup! I also would put ketchup on tacos. I didn't like how spicy taco sauce was, but ketchup was perfect. As I grew up, my tastes changed and I do use the traditional taco sauce now. However, recently, I had run out of it, and put ketchup on a taco, and I'll admit, it was pretty nasty. But if I were stuck on a deserted island, ketchup would definitely be the condiment I'd take with me.

And it has to be Heinz. To anyone in Pittsburgh, Hunts is blasphemy. I've lived in New York, and people there don't believe me when I tell them there's a difference between Hunts and Heinz, but seriously, there is. Also, when I lived in London, many of the pubs served strange brands of ketchup, and I couldn't even eat it. It was always disappointing to eat "chips" with just salt, but I really had no choice. The rare days you'd find a place with Heinz was a day to celebrate. The rumors are true, a lot of the food is bad in England, and it starts and ends with the ketchup.

My niece is almost 2 years old, and already she can tell you the importance of ketchup. Okay, maybe she just thinks it's fun to dip all of her food in sauce, but still, she puts ketchup on everything. She recently dipped pineapple in ketchup and ate it, and seemed to like it. At this point, she pretty much won't eat anything without "dippy". She'll chant "dippy" until you give her something, anything, to dip into. Sometimes she won't even eat her food, but she'll just use it as a scoop to eat the dip.

But getting back to tomatoes. Besides ketchup, the only other exception I'll enjoy is tomato soup, but only if it's strained completely smooth. I especially like it with basil. (The best way to make a can of tomato soup is to add a can of milk instead of water, and then add some basil...instant improvement on canned soup).

That's it. Ketchup and Soup. I don't like tomato sauce of any kind, marinara, meat sauce, red sauce, none of it. It's all gross. Yes, this also means I don't like pizza. And I'm a quarter Italian! I'll eat it when it's unavoidable, but I'll work around the sauce as much as I can. Some pizza is better than others, but overall, I'd prefer white. Or, the new trend is buffalo chicken pizza or bbq pizza, and that is fantastic.

So Rose gave me a tomato plant. And, I'm a bit disdainful about the plant, because I hate tomatoes. But, like any good mother, I'll do everything I can to bring out the best qualities of my tomatoes....and their best qualities are found in ketchup. So, that's my goal, to turn my little tomato plant into enough tomatoes to make ketchup. I've never made ketchup before, and I don't know anyone who ever has (why would you when Heinz is around?), but I'm gonna try. If nothing else, I know I can turn it into dippy for my niece. I just hope she doesn't refine her palate before then.

strange place for a tomato

This guy is growing in a tiny crack beneath an ATM machine. I can’t imagine that this one will survive... I’ll keep you posted.

plant the plant deep

I can still hear my Mother saying “Tomato plants will develop roots all along their stem where the stem is under the soil line. To give your tomato plant the best start, plant the plant deep.”

In the photo above, an Amish Paste tomato plant had grown too tall and leggy. Because of this, it’s stem was weak and couldn’t support the weight of the plant. The plant received damage in the form of an almost severed stem. While other types of plants wouldn’t be able to survive this kind of damage, the tomato can.

I pinched off the lowest branch and planted this tomato deep in the ground, bringing the soil line almost up to the next set of branches. All is well now and I am dreaming of the sauces I will make in September.

meet rutabaga ruth

Rutabaga Ruth is the name I have given to the tomato plant that I will care for and write about over the course of this summer. She is a Ponderosa Pink variety and is reportedly low in acid.

The name Rutabaga Ruth comes from a yellowed newspaper clipping I found in the front of my Mom’s favorite cookbook.

one hundred positives

My Mother was a wonderful gardener. She could grow anything. Me on the other hand... well, let’s just say I’m better at other things.

My Mom loved tomato plants and the endless varieties that were available. In the winter she spent hours examining what seemed like hundreds of seed catalogs, comparing variety options and prices. She had a hard time weeding her order down to a dozen or so different varieties of tomatoes. She made many wish lists before she placed her order with the seed company that would give her the best value and variety for her money.

When the seeds finally arrived, she was like a child on Christmas morning. There was something so absolutely beautiful about the look of complete joy in her eyes as she pulled the seed packs out of their wrapping.

She carried this same joy with her as she sowed the seeds into the separate rows of a starter tray. I swear that she had 10 green thumbs as every seed would burst forth with life in the specified time of germination listed on the seed pack. She always marveled at how such a tiny seed could produce life.

When the sprouts were large enough to be transplanted, each received it’s own white foam cup and popsicle stick marked with it’s variety and days until maturity information. There was one problem. Usually 20 or more seeds came in a pack and my Mom always ordered at least 12 different varieties of tomatoes, and every seed seemed to germinate, and every sprout received it’s own cup... so, you do the math. And that’s the total for just the tomato plants. She also planted many varieties of peppers, celery and eggplant (to name a few). Oh yeah, and then there were flowers...

This brings me to today and why this blog exists. My Mother suffered from major depression. Her illness clouded her sense of reasoning and reality. After the tomato plants were planted in their little white cups she transferred the responsibility of the care of these plants to her eight children. Now that would have been fine if each child was to be responsible for two or three plants, but 30 plants was a bit too much even for a child that enjoyed gardening. Her illness also twisted her thinking in that she couldn’t give the extra tomato plants away to other people because she feared these people wouldn’t return or recycle the empty cups or that they wouldn’t take proper care of the plants. So the majority of the plants never were transplanted into the ground where they could grow to maturity. Instead most of them perished in their little white cups.

I have always known that if my Mom didn’t suffer from major depression, she would have received great joy in the giving of her extra tomato plants to those who could use them. It is in her memory that I have planted 100 tomato plants in little white cups and it is in her honor that I give these 100 tomato plants to 100 people.