Astonishingly Foul

If you live in the Hudson Valley, then last week was bad.  Very bad.  From Monday night until Sunday afternoon, the sun did not shine.  It did not appear.  It was nowhere to be found.  In its place was just gray.  Everything was gray.  The sky, the light, the mood, the lawns.  Grayness fell from the sky in the form of an awful slushy mess that the meteorologist kept calling snow, but this was unlike any other snow I've ever encountered.  When the snow was done, then the ice would fall from the sky.  It, too, was gray.  When the ice subsided, the rains came.  Sometimes, the wind would make an appearance just to add to the malaise.   An addition, by the way, that led to downed trees and power lines.

Brian writes a weekly update for our families since the distance between all of us means we are not involved in each other's daily commerce of life.  Here is the lead paragraph from last week's update:

Hello from New York!  I guess the big story from last week was our astonishingly foul weather, with two winter storms.  Even by east coast standards, it was appalling.  We had five full days of nonstop wet heavy snow, with no interruption, just a constant deluge of slushy snow.  Our usual daily routine was to spend about two hours every morning clearing the driveway and our decks, with much of that time spent on the three-foot-high wall of compacted icy snow at the end of the driveway resulting from the town's plowing of the street.  This would be repeated in the late afternoon, for a total of about three or four hours a day of snow management.  We have to use the word "snow" with a bit of caution here, because this was not really snow in the normal sense of the word.  This was some kind of evil, sticky, heavy substance more akin to wet cement than to what you may have experienced as snow.  Although our road crews do an extraordinarily good job here, our streets were ankle deep in slush for most of the week.  Even the dog wasn't too thrilled about walking in it.  On Saturday morning, when the precipitation finally stopped, I measured the accumulation in our front yard at eighteen inches. 

Nothing was spared.  Not even the tall, proud mailbox.

To be fair, one of us did enjoy all that snow:

When weather like this appears as it did last week (and last June) in which the sun decides to go on some sort of extended, and unapproved I might add, vacation, two things occur.  One, I hide under the bed as I am prone to malaise.  In fact, I was so unable to deal with all of the grayness that I threw in the towel and put myself to bed at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday night.  Two, my thoughts turn to the food I associate with warmer weather: strawberries and corn and lettuces and tomatoes.

You can have tomatoes right now, though.  You don't have to wait until July and August.  Really!  Normally, I wouldn't know such a thing.  I would avoid those awful, mealy tomatoes of winter and patiently wait for the gorgeous, ripe, juicy tomatoes of summer.   However, I live with (and love dearly) Brian.  And Brian dearly loves tomatoes (the word addiction has been thrown around).  He has to have them (in much the same way my dad, brother and I consider a day incomplete without a little chocolate).

At first, a compromise was struck.  We would get the little grape tomatoes and put those on our salads in the winter.  However, we grew tired of lettuce in winter, because like the tomatoes, it lacked flavor.  Besides, it makes no sense to pay more for less ripe produce in winter because it has to be shipped from someplace far away, like South America, never mind the environmental concerns of such an endeavor.  We stopped eating salads which meant no reason to eat the grape tomatoes.

Brian is true to his loves and he still wanted his tomatoes.  Then, I happened upon a wonderful recipe for roasted plum tomatoes.  Slow roasting tomatoes increases their flavor and their color such that one might hardly notice, if at all, the tomato started out as a mealy, underripe plum tomato.

In fact, we've grown so fond of roasted tomatoes, we now make this gem of a recipe once per week.  We spread the tomatoes on homemade whole wheat baguettes, we use them in the base of pasta sauces, and we use them on pizzas.

The recipe was shared by Molly Wizenberg who writes the Cooking Life column for Bon Appetit magazine.  She also has a great blog, Orangette, and a delightful book, A Homemade Life, all of which I have enjoyed reading.

In the meantime, if you live with a tomato lover or just need a taste of summer amidst all this winter blah, this is a wonderful recipe.