Soft Summer Bloom

A neighbor’s away on vacation this week and has told several of us to help ourselves to whatever is ripe in their garden while they’re gone–I walked over this morning to check for a couple of tomatoes and possible a cantaloupe.

I waited too long to check, the cantaloupes were gone and the tomatoes looked picked over. I did find, hidden under a fallen vine, a couple of ripe tomatoes.

While growing up my family always had a large (huge) garden and lived off its produce most of the year–fresh vegetables in the late spring, summer and fall with canned and frozen ones during the winter months.

Then, I didn’t appreciate fresh vegetables as much as I do now. To get me to eat tomatoes Mom would place a thick slice in a homemade biscuit. There was no getting around it, I had to eat it before I was allowed to leave the table (that was the age of parents actually disciplining and making their children do stuff.) At the time it seemed to me I had to eat a tomato biscuit almost every summer meal.

They must have had a delayed reaction–these days a fresh slice of tomato on a good biscuit is one of my favorite things in the summer. Go figure?

Summer memories. :-)

11 Comments

  1. Hmmm. I’ve never heard of tomato and biscuit sandwiches. :-) I am partial, however, to tomatoes, cheese, and Miracle Whip on a sandwich! Yummy! No meat needed!

  2. Paul, I don’t need any of that other stuff if I’ve got a dead ripe and juicy garden tomato and a fresh biscuit! ;-)

  3. Well, for me, a sandwich just ain’t a sandwich without cheese! I have a theory that I was born in Wisconsin, in the back of a cheese factory, but my birth certificate shows Ohio. :-)

  4. Oh, my how I miss tomatoes. (One of the many things on my list of delicious foods that is now poison to my system .) A ripe tomato fresh from the garden is one of the tastiest things on the planet. But, I have to say, a fresh biscuit just out of the oven is another of the great taste treats around. What a combination.

    Hmm. We all knew there were some facts about Paul’s past that just didn’t add up. We are finally getting some of the real scoop.

  5. Way to go, Earl, now I’m hungry! And, there is nothing wrong with picking them off the vine, biting into one and squirting juice everywhere. Thanks, for the flashbacks!

  6. @Anita: So, you think Paul has one of those “cheesehead” hats?

    @Monte: There’s such a difference between garden vine ripened tomatoes and those you usually get in the grocery store. Make mine still a little warm from the days sun!

  7. It’s like me and fish, when I was a kid I ate it every second day. Can’t say I loved it, although some fish was really tasty even those days. I remember that my father always nearly cried over the fresh fish we could get in the grocery stores in Stockholm, where we lived most of the year. After a day in the air, the fish didn’t appear what it used to be. I didn’t bother, we got meat instead, which was much more exciting in my world. Nowadays, fresh fish makes me cry, of opposite reasons to my father. Yet one of all those human nature mysteries.

  8. I remember throwing up one summer when my dad made me eat a big slice of garden tomato. Nowadays I love them. I think our taste buds really do change over the years.

    Cheese or no cheese, it all sounds delicious!

  9. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those hats is in his basement or attic somewhere. That cheese thing, you know.

  10. @Anita: About those cheese hats! I’ll never tell!!!

  11. Transparent, Paul. Good detective work on Earl’s part I would say.