836. Judgmental Tomatoes

The Husband has a garden, which he tends to with consistency.  It’s raining, he’s out there.  It’s 95 degrees, he’s out there.  First thing in the morning, garden.  Late afternoon, after work?  Yep.  Let’s just say if that garden were a pool, he would be Michael Phelps.  The Husband is the Michael Phelps of the gardening world. 

So it should come as no surprise that we have beautiful vegetables to eat every night.  We have carrots, cucumbers, squash.  And there are lots of tomatoes. 

I have never been a huge fan of tomatoes.  Oh, sure, a small one sliced up in a salad is okay, or perhaps one on a burger.  But it is not like I seek them out. 

The problem with The Husband’s tomatoes (besides the sheer fact that there are so many of them) is the taste.  The Husband is a big believer in “Natural is better.”  This translates into no pesticides. 

I, myself, was pretty much raised on pesticides.  When confronted with a small, juicy, ripe red tomato, I really don’t know how to respond.  I tentatively take a bite or two, you know, to be polite.  But then the flavor punches me in the tongue.  The flavor grips the back of my throat and screams.  What it is screaming is, “This is what a real tomato tastes like!” 

You know where this is going.  The tomato just tastes, well, too tomatoey.  I like my tomatoes to be artificially big, a little bit green, and taste like plastic.  It’s what I am used to.  Pop-Tarts taste normal to me.  Corn dogs seem organic.  I could eat Cool-Whip three meals a day.   

What this all means is one thing:  we have tomatoes sitting out all over our counter, rotting.  The Husband tries to deal with this surplus of tomatoes by canning them.  However, he is only able to use up 150 tomatoes this way, leaving at least another 50 or so for me.  I don’t even want one, let alone 50. 

The Husband will not let me give them away, which is so weird.  He freely gives away peppers and pumpkins and potatoes.  But he is very attached to these tomatoes and he tells me he is going to eat them. 

So they sit on the counter and rot.  I move them from a big plate to a smaller plate as one by one they commit tomato suicide (tomato-cide?)  I feel like they are sitting their, shaking their little tomato heads at me and sighing.  They think I am a bad person, a non-tomato person. 

Here is a picture of how many we have left now. 

 

And then here is a picture of the kind of vegetables I prefer to grow. 

That’s right, brownie bites.  I make them from scratch in a mini-muffin pan.  Then we introduce the brownie bites to their long-lost cousins who live in the refrigerator. 

Hello, Caramel!  How do you do? 

And here comes Mr. Whipped Cream to join us! 

Sorry, tomatoes.  I want to love you, I do.  But my heart belongs to that fifth food group:  junk food.      

MOV