Oddities and Obsessions

I think just about everyone loves tomatoes. Every time I mention to someone that I grow tomatoes in my garden they immediately turn a little green with envy. Tomatoes are really a labor of love. Some years the bounty is great and in others you're lucky to pick just a few. Last year there was the blight and this summer it's blossom end rot due to the extreme variations in heat. Luckily my tomatoes haven't been affected by that but since I am growing them organically, I do often find a critter who has made a home inside one of my prized possessions. I guess that just shows I'm not the only one who loves them.

This year I'm growing heirlooms for the first time. I collected seeds from my favorite specimens last year to grow this crop. All plants were babied from seed. They all seem to be doing well, but heirlooms have their own peculiarities including odd shapes, split skins, and areas with russeting or blemishes. Nut I would rather tend to them than grow the supermarket hybrids, which tend to look more like plastic. Though I do like a beefsteak tomato now and then. I don't even bother growing plum tomatoes because I can't get them any better than the canned San Marzano variety from Italy, where the weather and terroir is optimal for growing them. But so far my soil has given me a pretty nice colorful collection.

What exciting news this past week! “The Woolly Rhino – a new species of ancient rhinoceros found in Tibet.” And, it's only 3.7 million years old!

Not that my first thought was how to prepare a Woolly Rhino that has aged for 3½ million years, (obviously one can forego the tenderizer) and if it is that ancient, how long should I cook it. Well, actually it was my first thought, though I hardly think it would be a Paleontologist’s.

Not without guile, I turned to the internet for Woolly Rhino recipes, and – quite naturally since you can find anything on the internet – I found one on CLUTCHFITNESS.COM: where research meets reality! (“a cutting edge power building, body building, fitness and nutrition forum”)

This past January, something hot and sexy began creeping its way through the chilly winter snows in Idyllwild, California. Locals were struck with the highly contagious Caseymania, which is like Beatlemania but without the screaming hysterical teenage girls. Well, not in Idyllwild, at least. But to inhabitants of this tiny mountain town, it was close to the same thing.

The median age of the town’s 4,000 inhabitants is 47.2, so hysterical screaming might have been at a minimum, but instead, this all-American town offered up enduring and low-key pride. Casey Abrams is the town’s boy, they own him, they love him and they support him. Even now that he’s been “voted off”, their hope springs eternal.

“He gets to tour, bound to make upwards of a hundred-fifty thou,” you hear an old-timer say with the cantankerous certainty of a gold prospector. Poor Casey never stood a chance. He had three big strikes against him in the TV-blurred minds of the American Idol voters (them being tweenage girls).

Strike 1: He’s funny-looking.
Strike 2: He’s a ginger.
Strike 3: He’s undeniably talented.

Does Jiminy Cricket sit on your shoulder? He sits on mine – always has. The first time I saw Pinocchio; he jumped right off the screen and onto my shoulder and has been there ever since. If he were simply my conscience, I would consider that a good thing, but he is not my conscience; he is my worst critic!

“You think that photograph is good? Are you an idiot with absolutely no taste? Print that and the world will laugh at you.”

“You prefer A Place in the Sun to Citizen Kane? Are you friggin’ out of your gourd? Tell anyone that and the world will laugh at you.”

“You are wearing what? That? Put that on and the world with laugh at you!”

It never stops. It is most embarrassing, however, when I fix dinner for company. I will get a compliment and before I can smile and say, “Thank you” I blurt out, “I put too much salt in the sauce, I over-browned the meat before I stewed it …” TMI provided by Jiminy.