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The Red Queen! (and a little butter)

Let's start with three little jokes; Mama Tomato, Papa Tomato and Baby Tomato are walking down the street.  The Baby tomato falls behind and Papa steps on him and says - Ketchup! (Thank you Quinton Tarantino)  You heard of a Libertarian salad?  It's just lettuce alone!  OK, OK I'm on a roll.  The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza place and says - "Make me one with everything!"
  The music today is a little scattered with jazz, blues, & swing elements. I started with The Mighty Blue Kings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xas9GtPyAk&list=PLDiUGVS0lOvTYk9U_zZ4Of570wlnRnplu  Cadillac Boogie. I've got a couple on the stack I don't know Art Hodes & The Bob Gillis Group The cover art and playlist look good but we'll see.  I'm finishing it up with a local group The Hot Tomatoes Dance Orchestra. I've heard cooking should be like jazz, improvisational, and baking like science. So like a good soup it's got some stuff I know I'll like and some stuff that - well, we'll see. In looking up "Cooking is like Jazz" I came across what looks to be an interesting blog. I'll have to explore it further but not today. https://medium.com/the-future-market/cooking-jazz-not-classical-490eb9b77d8 
  Nope not today, gotta tell you all I picked my first tomato for a salad last night.  There are honestly other things in my garden that are more important but tomatoes are kinda like garden royalty.  Standing under my nectarine tree with juice running down my arm. That's a moment.  A mid winter butternut squash roasted to perfection with butter and maybe some garlic and pepper. Yeah, that's a moment.  But the first tomato is like a visit from the Queen.  You know she's coming and think the excitement is silly and everything but it's still a moment, and your not giving your spot up to anyone to watch the parade.  First tomato is mine period! - OK maybe Deb - If she's nice!
  The tomato was off one of the Siberians Travis gave me seeds for.  For the record it was the Pink Bull.  He had said when he saw them at his in-laws in Siberia they were softball sized but cautioned that was with 20 hours of sunlight.  Mine are running a little under maybe more like large baseballs.  The flavor was subtle, meaty with few seeds (which will make seed saving tough). There's a whole stack of them ripening up so I guess the Queen brought the whole royal family.  (perhaps, these being Russian that should be Czarina - 'course that ended up in well, ketchup;~).
  The down side was the lettuce that hasn't bolted is bitter. (I assume heat does that not sunlight. If anyone knows drop me a line.) So I had to buy lettuce to make it an official salad.  I'm happy to munch tomatoes with basil and mozzarella all summer long but the first tomato has to be on a salad.  I have rules. I'm a Libertarian not an anarchist! 
  The big experiment this year is I'm being a bit lazy with pruning and trellising the tomatoes. In years past I've dutifully pinched suckers and tied up the main stem along a hefty pole.  When done, again, dutifully they look quite nice like you see on a Martha Stewart type website. It's a pain tho'.  Not the actual work it's kinda nice to commune with the tomatoes.  It's the dutiful part. Miss a day or heaven forbid a week and you have these 6 foot high staked, tied, and pinched plants with this weirdness at the top. Keeping the queens looking good can be quite consuming and I'm not sure of the benefit. I didn't go completely free range. When I put the plants in I hedged my bet by putting them in cages with a stout pole in case things went terribly wrong. (once a plant explodes with growth you really can't put a cage around it) The cages seem, so far, to have given the plants enough support and the poles are keeping the cages anchored. They are sprawling a bit so In the future I'll have to remember to plant the basil farther away but that's doable. I'm not sure and don't really know if I'll know how much it effects production but so far I'm skeptically happy with the scheme.
  In other news, The peas did better than I expected having been beaten down by the hail.  They finished with some nice pods for the salad and a few meals worth of pretty good sweet peas. The peas I grow are primarily an edible snow pea pod type. When I started growing them years ago I felt I couldn't justify growing 'just peas' which are cheap.  Pea pods tho' are like gold if you price 'em in the grocery store.
  These days I'm much less concerned about some rationalization about the economic value of my garden.  If anyone asks I just say I garden because it keeps me out of the gangs.   I saw a TED talk on Youtube that was based on the premise that gardening is a radical political act. I would agree.  Gardening is a gateway drug to a whole host of life choices.  Gardening isn't the only passion that can get you to a "oneness with the universe", or however you describe it. It is merely the one that caught my sails at just the right time. You need that in life or you will end up in a gang. I won't offer you a link for that TED talk but instead give you a link with a similar premise.  This one, I just liked that the guy had gone beyond the premise to add a bit of showmanship - you'll see.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymc8U6ceAvk
  Peas come in three types. Canned peas which I've loved since I was a kid.  With butter and salt Mmmm! Frozen peas which I 'discovered' later in life and really thought were just almost a different vegetable.  With butter and salt Mmmm! Peas from my garden steaming in a pot on the stove, with me tasting every minute to see if they're done Mmmm.  With butter and salt, whoa baby!
  I feel like I'm giving the garden report on some weird GNN news station. "Today The Donald Tomatoes did something horrible and in other news - It's garlic pulling time." I mean I'd watch the show or perhaps a local segment between weather and sports.  Or it could be The Bob Gillis Group is doing some weird jazz that is throwing me subliminally.  I've got a cure for that - disc skip!  It will go in the donate to the library pile - sorry Bob.
  There is actually quite a bit I want to tell you about going on in the garden.  Heck mushrooms are back popping up like well, mushrooms. Raw they are good but not great on a salad. So I've been trying different ways to cook them.  I seem to come back to smoking hot butter in a frying pan with a little anise seed and pepper. In - flip over - done, real quick.
  Natalie told me about a meeting of the local mycorrhizal society. I had wanted to learn more about mushrooms.  Let me rephrase that. I wanted to have someone point out mushrooms in my garden and at our cabin that were edible and say "cook this with a little butter delicious!". The group didn't bring out a nine foot mushroom statue strip naked and begin chanting. I would have enjoyed that.  They were deep end nerdy instead. It was kinda like sitting in on a high level college class on a subject you know nothing about.  The speaker clearly knew his stuff but he ended each variety of this or that mushroom species with "we really need to do a lot more work on this". Lacking nudity and chanting I started to visualize him before the college Board of Trustees arguing for abolishing the football team so that we could finally do some important work on this.
  I think that's about as close to a political thread as I will wind around to pulling today.  We are a rich country. We can argue about the root source of that wealth but I would hope the math stays math.  The National debt is just under $20,000,000,000,000 http://www.usdebtclock.org/. We can take peoples wealth and do many things with 'our' wealth but we cannot do everything.   Puerto Rico and Illinois tried and are the first of many to hit a math wall.  Where do you run to when the pile up becomes massive.  Perhaps we don't need to fund more mushroom research.  Just saying.  Doug A. 

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