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It starts slowly and then all at once and now you have 43 pounds of tomatoes. Five days ago, you had nothing. You forgot you planted tomatoes, and now you are responsible for this, this. They are riotously delicious; picked off the vine, they are one of the best bites you will take all year. The clock is ticking. Something must be done.
When presented with a metric preposterousness of tomato, one immediately thinks of sauce. The San Marzano plant yields nothing, of course. These are sungolds, weird purple fellas, salad-grade tomatoes. You could make jerusalem salad with all of them, but that doesn’t keep well. Caprese? Same problem. So therefore sauce.
All tomatoes can be sauced, it’s just that some of them have a higher water content and so take longer. Time makes most things better in a kitchen, and it’s not something you have much of, so you sigh and have some friends over and talk about the universe while you stir a cauldron.
There is an element of the world’s smallest violin for the tomato crisis. Each plant cost $6, and you bought five of them. You have considerably more than $30 worth of tomatoes now. This is what abundance does to us. Still, clock. One must spring into action, make the time, or it is all lost, which is a considerably worse fate. They’re good, weird heirloom tomatoes! Why bother planting some boring-ass beefsteak when you can find the wildest purple thing for a pittance more?
Tomatoes are so variant in what they can be and do. We forget this, don’t we? Think of a tomato and the emoji pops into your head: red, baseball sized, spherical. Yet you know this is not always the case, and our enduring impression of a tomato is entirely the result of human intervention. You can do whatever you want with a tomato, really, including breed it within an inch of its life to taste like something totally new.
And so, as mentioned, sauce. You will never be able to make this particular sauce again. You know this. You do it anyway, throw it in quart containers for your friends, freeze it all, and hand them off as they roll through your house. Multiple people call it the best pasta sauce of their lives. One person professes to having cried. This is what a solved problem looks like.