cook: daily tomato consumption

I’d been longing throughout June and early July for my favorite summer lunch, a tomato sandwich because of such teasers from the New York Times and America's Test Kitchen.

 

In the meantime I bought crab meat and made another favorite sandwich, a California crab melt. What makes it Californian you ask? Why the Dungeness crab, the San Francisco sourdough and the avocado, of course. I make the grilled Swiss cheese sandwich first and then split it open to sprinkle chopped scallions and layer in the crab salad (crab folded in with just Kewpie mayo and coarsely ground black pepper, and I wish now I had thought to sprinkle a little hot sauce or Sriracha) and sliced avocado. I love the contrast between hot sandwich and cool salad.                 

However, we now have tomatoes. Patrick may have finally outwitted the rats by sprinkling cayenne powder all over his tomato plants because he's been harvesting for a week and a half. And these tomatoes are ugly. Ugly delicious that is.        

I made Caprese lunches of my favorite Cherokee Purple and Berkeley Tie-Dye Green and vegetable sides of just sliced tomatoes sprinkled with sea salt and chopped basil.

And when the harvests kept getting more prolific, we shared with our neighbors.

I had to also make a run to the supermarket just to buy bacon for Saturday supper. I left Patrick in charge of cooking the bacon. I told him, you don't have to stand at the frying pan. Just lay the strips over this accordion pleated aluminum foil and put into the hot oven. Next time I won't even bother making those foil folds. Bacon can get just as crispy, laying in its own grease.

I then came home after a cocktail party to construct the sandwiches from sourdough bread and generous slathers of Miracle Whip for him (plus sprinkles of black pepper to distinguish his dressing from mine), Best Foods for me.

Next chopped lettuce and sliced tomatoes, generously sprinkled with salt.

And you'll just have to guess the rest because the BLTs were delicious. And I was too famished to even photograph my sandwich before consuming. BLTs are a requisite summer supper into early fall, but only if the tomatoes are garden grown, which is why we don't even bother in the winter and spring.