my favorite fregetable

My friend, Hannah, brought me these delicious tomatoes* from her parents’ garden in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

To prepare them for their destiny, I cut most in half, and left a few whole  for aesthetics. This process also proved to be a great litmus test for whether or not some were overripe.

Here is A Tale of Two Salads.

Part I: Insalata Caprese Success

Caprese is fancy, Italian, delicious, and foolproof. This was the first time I’d made it with small tomatoes and small cheeses. Just in case you’ve never tried, here’s how it goes:

• cherry tomatoes cut in half, salted and peppered
• mozzarella ciliegine  (meaning, the little kind) cut in half
• combine, add more S & P (I use sea salt and fresh ground black pepper)
• fresh basil tear it up, throw it in, mix it up
• balsamic vinegar sprinkle it on last minute

SO GOOD. Traditional caprese has olive oil instead of bals vin, I think.

I do realize that tomatoes are categorized as fruit, but that doesn’t set well with me. Does that mean that when you eat a pizza, it has a fruit sauce on it? Like jelly? See, it just doesn’t work.

Another thing about tomatoes, and this is really very super TRULY IMPORTANT. Don’t refrigerate them. You lose a lot of the flavor that way.

Part II: Tomato/Cucumber Salad FAIL

I appreciate that some of my favorite things are so simple, like these salads. However, I can’t tell you that this salad is also foolproof. It should be easy, right? Tomato, cucumber, red onion, garlic, S & P, a little sugar. Then you can either do a lime juice/cilantro combo, or a lemon juice/tarragon combo, or a sherry vinegar/parsley combo. My brother recently talked me through all the right steps to make this delicious, and my first attempt with lime and cilantro yielded righteous results. The second should’ve been, at least, just as good. Right? RIGHT?

Wrong. During the construction phase, my tired, tired brain temporarily replaced the word tarragon with thyme. I was about to cook some brussel sprouts, too, and the thyme was right there, and I just totally fouled it all up. I’ve been eating the results as I type this and my tongue is tingling, zinging actually, in a rather unpleasant way. Thyme absolutely does not work in this salad.

As I reflect on my attempts at the making of edible things, quite a few other failures come to mind. Following are a few highlights:

• I baked my first cake when I was four. It was a heart-shaped chocolate cake surprise for my dad. My mom gave me a slightly wet dish towel to use when pulling the cake out of the oven; thus, I burned my hand and dropped the cake on the floor.
• When I was maybe ten years old, I made this GIANT marble cake with buttercream icing for a church potluck. You ice the cake with a tip that makes the icing come out in all these little strings, and then I don’t remember how we made the “meatballs,” but you get the point that it’s a spaghetti and meatballs cake. I left the sugar out of the cake part. Uh huh. So I iced it anyway, served it as it was, and hoped no one would notice.
• Just a few years ago, while broiling a hamburger, my house inexplicably filled with smoke. I opened the broiler and nothing was on fire–oh wait. Once I had the sense to check the main part of the oven, I saw my leather mary-janes  roasting, smoking, and dripping away. I’d forgotten I set them in there a few days before so they’d dry out from a dash in the rain. The burger was like, rubber smoke flavored. The oven was never quite the same, emitting the same rubber smoke odor with each use. And I ruined an $80 pair of shoes.
• About a year ago, when doubling my favorite brownie recipe so as to feed an army of brownie-hungry zombies**, I absentmindedly doubled everything but the sugar, so they rose a bunch more than they should, looking and tasting like slightly bitter chocolate cakes. I bought a tub of icing, citing that trick from when I was ten, and proceeded to let people think they were fancy, bitter-chocolate cupcakes, just slightly beyond their palates.
• Also at the approximate age of four, I asked my mom for some orange juice and was denied, with the lame excuse that there was no more. Sooner than later, I spied with my little eye, an orange juice container on the stovetop. Quickly, because my mom had already said no and I knew I was doing wrong, I stretched my chubby arms straight up to the carton and tipped it toward my face. I enjoyed not only a mouthful, but a face and dress full of warm bacon grease. Yummy. Kids, you should listen to your parents.

Ok, that last story’s not even really about cooking, but I had to include it because it’s another example of me being “graceless” in the kitchen. Plus, I find it to be totally hilarious.

And you know what? I treasure my screw up stories. It was unfun to eat that thyme/tom/cuc salad. It was even less fun to kinda sorta admit what I had done to my genius chef brother. But I’ve created a pretty lasting taste memory of uncooked thyme.

I’m not really winding down to the punchy last line or twist like I thought I would here. I guess my point is one we already know. Success is great for recipes,  but failure is great for stories.

*also pictured: my reflection

**some details may have been embellished to keep things interesting

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