Not Your Ordinary Tomato Bush

 Hola! Que tal?

I am almost Etsy'ed out. I have been working every day on the shop and just about everything is up dated and listed. If you have no idea what I am talking about, it is my online glass shop with Etsy.com. If you look half way down the right side of the blog you will see a link to it and you can visit the shop and see all the incredibly beautiful glass I make. I think I am allowed to say that because it is true, it is beautiful, but the glass pretty much does all the work itself. Once I cut it, it is its own artist. I think it makes most of the decisions while it is in the kiln, never consults me at all. Thanks also to all the wonderful people who shop with me, not just online at Etsy, but on the Glasspondstudio facebook page, the glasspondstudio website, through the good2go2mexico blog and here in Alamos. In about two weeks I will begin the Rain Contest, so keep watching for that post to see what the give-away will be this year.

In the meantime, I am also just about tomtoe'd out. If you saw the fall photo of Senor's tomato plant that just happened to come up by itself near the door to the fake kitchen, you saw that it reached around seven feet, and was a brilliant emerald green, studded with fat juicy tomatoes. It is not a tomato bush, it is a tree.

Well, it it is almost seven months later and I am getting pretty sick of tomatoes. The foliage has turned brown, and it has drooped to three feet, but it is still producing tomatoes.

 Senor babies this tree like he has never had a tomato before in his life and that is why I call it his tree. He waters it, he picks it, I am sure he soothes it with words every time he walks by. We have probably had several hundred tomatoes from this one tree. The other day he spent half the morning collecting seeds, washing them, drying them and he plans to plant them in the garden that we do not have.

He says next year that place where it is growing now will be covered in concrete so he needs to be sure he can have it come up elsewhere.

Somehow this is an heirloom tomato plant. It produces huge deep red fruit that is covered in gentle ridges. We never put it there, in fact I hardly recall more than one or two times last year that we even ate heirloom tomatoes and that was probably when a friend brought them in a salad.

Somehow it is also a roma tomato plant and small hard oblong fruit grows on its lush boughs.
It is also a baby tomato plant, producing tiny round red tomatoes that fit deep inside its branches. Those you have to look for but they are there. It is as if someone came to our casa and grafted several different plants and put it in this small tiny patch of dirt that is surrounded by concrete.

It is my job to be creative with the tomatoes. I could write a book now after this many tomatoes. I tried to give a bag to Humberto, a man with ten people living in his casa and he left it behind three times. I have tomatoes, he finally told me. Everyone has tomatoes. Sometimes people leave bags of tomatoes on our gate. They do not leave a note, just bags of tomatoes. Well, I have bags of tomatoes, too.

I cannot throw out a tomato either. I have to use it, I can't be wasteful about it. And I am not composting either. And Cookies does not like them. The birds will not touch them. The ants love them but I am not interested in feeding them. So, Senor and I eat a lot of tomatoes.

Below is our favorite lunch that I am getting very tired of.
tomatoes, onions and mustard on a hamburger bun..............sometimes I add avocado, sometimes I add sliced jicama or capers or olives, maybe a slice of chihuahua cheese or some crumbly panela.............I add cucumbers, roasted peppers, smoked chuleta, nopales......I could go on and on and I will tell you there are at least one hundred and one ways to try and make a tomato and onion sandwich on a hamburger bun not be a tomato and onion sandwich on a hamburger bun.

Most of the time I sprinkle some of my own dry mix that I keep in the molcajete in our fake kitchen. I generally use sea salt, rosemary, oregano, epazote, sage and crushed red pepper. Whatever I add to this sandwich, it is still what it is.

I have wonderful memories of two aunts and their gardens. One had and still has a beautiful garden in Arkansas. The other had a large garden in New Mexico. They both had lots and lots of tomato bushes and when we were kids we played in those bushes while the women were in the kitchen canning tomatoes. I can remember hiding in them, feeling the wind lift their leaves and when they brushed against me, the smell was pure perfume. Even now when I walk by our bush I almost always crush a leaf or two just to smell it.

But I think I have had enough of it.

I have to get over to Pancho's before he takes a siesta. I went and looked and there are seven ripe fat tomatoes on Senor's tree. I swear they were not there yesterday. We are out of hamburger buns and Pancho has them.
Okay, please do not send me tomato recipes in my comment section. I promise you, you may think I have not tried it, but I have.

que le vaya bien, mil gracias and all that jazz....linda lou