Late Summer Meal

Harvested the tomatoes.  I was determined not to let them rot or wither on the vine without being able to eat them.  There's not been enough rain this summer.  The tomatoes seem to be holding up for the most part, and who knows, maybe the lack of water has even concentrated the juices, but my worry is they will start to shrivel.  The leafy herbs have been prone to shriveling.  So some of the pots got hand-watered today.  Maybe they'll need that tomorrow too.  Haven't managed to get a new hose attachment yet to replace the leaky one, but since there is still water in the catch buckets, might as well use those.  But the tomatoes were still hanging on, and, actually, the weight of one cluster seemed to pull the plant lopsided, so definitely harvest time.  (Not sure whether that will allow the smaller ones to get bigger, or allow them to ripen them from the current green.)

So this morning's task was to go grocery shopping and get some mozzarella to make the meal, and to make some upcoming meals (going to try a vegetable gratin, since I have bread crumbs lying around from an old, stale loaf).

Ready for harvest. (Photographed with flash.)

Same tomatoes - natural light; no flash.

More for the harvest.

And more.

The tomato harvest, with some basil.

Final meal - Caprese salad, dressed with some old McDonald's Paul Newman vinaigrette, over a brown rice/quinoa mix, seasoned with Trader Joe's lemon pepper.

Now, it won't stop me from trying to grow more tomatoes next year, but these were not so phenomenal that I notice a different from supermarket-purchased tomatoes.  The mythical home-grown difference did not pan out.  It could be that it's the strain of tomato - I have no idea what these are.  They are the stray ones that took root when I spread compost onto one of last year's tomato planters (none of the "plugs" that I tried actually to cultivate in that planter took) - the "western" designated tomato planter that I mentioned and photographed in an earlier post.  Perfectly lovely and fine, just not phenomenal.  I am waiting for the sweet grape ones that we had last year - those seeds took, and there are little tomatoes forming on the vine in the other planter.  We'll have to wait and see how they turn out.

All in all, not a bad meal.  I had thought I would have it for Sunday lunch.  But the late morning whole wheat everything bagel with sundried tomato cream cheese (so, so much better than the vegetable cream cheese - much more umami; not quite the same as the light lox spread, but totally workable and very tasty in its own way) pretty much lasted me through the afternoon (and then, I suspect, caused me to need a bit of a nap).  So the harvest meal got pushed to dinner.

And during the MTV video music awards, I even managed to make my breakfast overnight oats for the next week.  So hopefully that will give me a good head start.  Maybe it'll even make up for the fact that I did not manage to do any work this weekend....