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Archive for July, 2010

Tomato Envy

I’m finally getting tomatoes in my CSA box–they seem exceptionally late this year. Another farmer occasionally sets up shop out of the back of his pickup truck in the same parking lot where I pick up my goods every week, and I’m more likely than not to add some extras to my produce selection from his offerings. This week, he had a truck bed filled with $3 baskets of ripe, juicy tomatoes.

It’s been positively extravagant having so many homegrown, delicious tomatoes at the ready. I’ve had a sandwich. I’ve made a tomato-filled salad. I’ve served sliced tomatoes with dinner, garnished only with a sprinkling of salt and pepper.

Tomatoes aren’t a rarity, but good ones definitely are. I rarely buy grocery-store tomatoes any time of the year–they have no taste compared to the homegrown delicacies I grew up with at my grandparents’ farm.

I figure I only have three or four weeks of tomato season left, if that much. It’s fleeting, but it’s worth waiting for.

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I can’t believe I ignored eggplant until this summer.

This weekend’s creation was much simpler than Eggplant Parmesan, taking probably a third of the time to make and leaving me with no baked-on cheese to scrub away. I was worried that my half-Italian, tomato-living husband wasn’t going to touch the weird-looking Eggplant Pasta Sauce that I put on the table, but he gave it high accolades.

A word of warning: Mashed eggplant is a gray, oil-looking mess, but the sun-dried tomatoes and garlic give it a complex flavor that will overcome your initial impressions.

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Fine. I’m rough on sunglasses. I drop them, lose them and leave them on the edge of the kitchen counter, allowing cats to do gravity experiments on them.

My go-to plan for sunglasses has always been to simply keep a couple of cheap pairs lying around. My husband, who has had the same unharmed expensive sunglasses for more than five years, encouraged me to buy a nicer pair last year. Meaning a pair that cost more than (gasp) $30.

True to form, I dropped them, lost them and left them on the edge of the counter.

Some things you accept about yourself. Me, I’ve accepted that I go through a couple of $10 shades from Target every year. Really, there are worse personality traits.

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We finally made it to Lake Guntersville to see the bats emerging from Sauta Cave at dusk last weekend. We missed the group “batyaking” trip due to the husband working overtime, but since we had been waiting for nearly a year to see these bats (they only do their massive-flight thing during the summer), we dutifully loaded our kayak onto the truck and headed to the Guntersville Dam, where we schlepped the boat down a rocky pathway to the water.

Immediately, I realized why the batyakers make their trip in a big group on a Friday night: We were the only kayakers in a huge gathering of power boats ending their Saturday boating (on a holiday weekend, no less) with a trip to the bat cave.

And how much do I love saying “bat cave”?

The power boaters were the most polite boaters I’ve ever encountered, however, so we really had no worries mingling among them. The trip from the launching point at the dam to the bat cave (heh) took about 15 minutes at full kayaking speed; we got there at about 7:50 p.m.

We didn’t see any bats until around 8:15, when we started noticing them swooping around the boats like little X-wing fighters. No pics, because it was nearly dark when they emerged and they moved so fast that I didn’t even know where to aim the camera.

After about 30 minutes of action, the bats seemed to be finished, or maybe it was so dark we just couldn’t see them anymore. We kayaked back to the launching point in the dark, which was kind of scary yet awesome, and reloaded the kayak.

This is definitely must-see entertainment for North Alabamians with a canoe, kayak or other boat.

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