'Tis the Season(ing)...

I recently made a tomato-basil-mozzarella salad. I bought the fresh mozzarella at the grocery store. The fresh basil was picked from pots growing in our family room, sitting in the sun coming through the south-facing sliding glass door. The tomatoes were the last of my summer crop of small grape tomatoes.

Yes...garden grown tomatoes, the first week of December...

Notice I didn't use the word “fresh” to describe the tomatoes, though perhaps I accurately could have. I had picked all my garden-grown tomatoes the second week of October in anticipation of a heavy frost. The large ripe red tomatoes I washed, cored and froze, to be used over the coming months in sauces, soups and stews. But what to do with the gadzillion green grape tomatoes that were still on the large vining plants? I picked them all, put them in paper towel-lined baking pans and left them on the kitchen counter to slowly ripen over the next few weeks. As they turned red, I washed them, threw them into salads or just popped them in my mouth for a snack. By the time early December rolled around, a good month and a half after picking them in the garden, there were still enough edible red tomatoes left to make a post-Thanksgiving tomato-basil-mozzarella salad. They did not have the rich vine-ripened sun-kissed tomatoey taste of the same tomato picked in August, but they still tasted of summer - in December.

The Genovese basil plants had been started from seed indoors in the spring, put in large pots on the deck in June where they grew huge tasty leaves. I cut them back in September, moved the pots to a sunny place inside where they will continue to produce new leaves until I start new plants this coming spring and declare the old ones officially dead. Like the counter-ripened tomatoes, the indoor basil is not as lush and flavorful as it was sitting out on the deck in the summer, but it, too, still tastes of summer in December, as it will taste of summer in January's pesto and February's Margherita pizza.

There are pots of rosemary, parsley, marjoram and lemon verbena in the sunny bay window, tender perennial herbs that spend the summer in pots on the deck but are always glad to come in the house to survive the winter. These taste the same indoors in December as they did outdoors in July. But it's those summer tastes of tomato and of basil that provide a surprising and even disconcerting flavor in the midst of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday eating season. As the darkest days of winter approach, it's kind of nice to have the taste of the memories of the previous summer as well as the foreshadowing taste of the growing season to come...

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

                                                                            - Miles Kington