What Really Happened (or, The Dirty Truth Behind Those Cheery Instagram Pics)
When I walk through a farmer’s market and see someone hawking a homemade consumable like soup, jelly, soap, peanut brittle, etc., I often have this rather romantic vision of myself in the kitchen, crafting one of my specialties (bacon pecorino dog biscuits, anyone?) in bulk, and selling my cleverly packaged goods at Eastern Market. My daydreams include media mentions on some local websites and regular customers who loved being the ones who “discovered” some great new stall at the market.
Today, I have disabused myself of this foolish notion.
After giving up hope that the last of his tomatoes would ripen, my father-in-law dumped a sack of green tomatoes on my porch last year. I hate to waste food, so I scoured the internet until I found this recipe for Green Tomato Salsa Verde. I had just enough tomatoes to make one batch, and it was hella delish.
Fast forward, one year later.
I told my FIL that I’d be happy to take any green tomatoes off of his hands and make salsa again. Unbeknownst to me, he decided to become a larger scale backyard farmer and planted more tomatoes than he did last year. This is how I ended up the recipient of 12 pounds of green tomatoes. TWELVE FUCKING POUNDS.
How could I be so sure? I got out my little kitchen scale and weighed the tomatoes in batches. However, the only thing that would hold the tomatoes on the scale while making it easy to zero the scale was Lou Lou’s stainless dog bowls. Before you get grossed out, these bowls are washed in the dishwasher on the sanitize cycle after every single use. Nobody gets food poisoning on my watch.
The next thing I had to do was some math, which can be a hit-or-miss enterprise with me. I checked some websites that had advice for multiplying recipes and after some calculator and pencil work, I had the ratios worked out and a grocery list written up.
The first doubts crept into my mind when I was at the grocery store. As I loaded up a sack of yellow onions, I thought that they would be a bitch to chop. When I was stuffing fistful after fistful of peppers into a sack, the man next to me gave me a really weird look and slowly edged away. Add in a sack of lemons, two bunches of cilantro and enough garlic to take on all the vampires in Bon Temps, Louisiana, and I was good to go.
Once home with my Safeway bounty (gas points, bitches!), I spread it out on the counter, mentally calculated how much chopping a pile that big entailed, and promptly opened a bottle of wine. Tomorrow is another day, after all. Cheers, Scarlett.
This morning when I saw that one of the tomatoes had taken on a slightly orange tinge, I knew today had to be the day. I spent my time running Lou Lou at the cemetery planning my sequence of execution. Once back home, I got everything all mise en place-d and started chopping.
I started with the tomatoes. Easy enough, right? Core and quarter, into the pot. Happy tomatoes. My hands started getting tired about the time that I questioned if my most gigantor pot would be big enough for all the ingredients. Recalling that no one on the Food Network was ever a quitter, I pushed on. What would Anne Burrell say when I saw her at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival next year?
Next up, onions. Six of them, rough chop. The first two were OK, but by the time I was sliding the last of them into the pot, I had tears streaming down my face and I was gasping for air. I spent the next several minutes in the bathroom trying to get my nasolacrimal ducts under control.
Once I could see again, what I saw was a big glossy pile of anaheim, jalapeno, serrano and habanero peppers. I swear I think I heard them laughing at me. I girded my loins, donned some latex gloves, and got down to business. Again, my eyes watered until I could barely see and I started choke-coughing, but the worst was that my nose started running. And gushing. If you have ever gotten pepper juice or oil on a mucous membrane, you know why I kept going and didn’t deglove to blow my nose. I wiped my nose on my shoulder and chopped as fast as I could without asking for a trip to the emergency room to sew one of my fingers back on. While all this was happening, I thought I felt the pepper fumes dissolving my eyelashes and eyebrows. It was during the pepper phase that Lou Lou decided she had heard enough of the strange noises and cussing, so she slinked upstairs to her crate. I should have gone with her.
This is when I begin to understand the depth of my folly. I have no business attempting to cook in bulk and I’m sure as hell not going to be the newest darling of Eastern Market. But…I’m only halfway done. I still need to zest and juice some lemons, pick and chop two cups of cilantro and get out the stick blender. Time to take a break. I changed t-shirts, pausing to admire the amount of snot I had produced and took a scroll through Twitter and Facebook. I read a post about how the impending government shutdown could affect certain programs and felt guilty enough about wasting food to get back to work.
I learned a few things in the second half of Game Salsa. 1. It takes a lot of zesting to get three teaspoons of zest and zesting is a precarious endeavor. Too fast and sloppy means you have zested some of your fingers in with the lemon, so you need to zest with utmost care. 2. You should rinse cilantro way, way, way before it needs to be used so it is relatively dry. Wet cilantro has amazing static cling-like properties that amplifies the amount of time needed to produce two cups of leaves. 3. I should have stopped to eat lunch.
Once I got everything into the pot, it was time for the stick blender. I need lessons or something, because my cabinets are dotted with green goo and my face is stinging in several places due to my lack of stick blender skills that sends salsa airborne. Despite the loss of product to the cabinets, counters and my body, it was finally time to let the salsa simmer and clean up the mess. Oh, and take a Pepcid while I’m at it. Taste testing salsa should never be done on an empty stomach.
Adversity teaches you a lot, and today I learned that I don’t have the right stuff to be the next culinary it-girl featured in the Food section of the WaPo. I have the wrong stuff. Wrong as in I don’t like anything enough to torture myself like that again. Wrong in that too much chopping almost drove me to day drink ON A MONDAY. Wrong as in nothing is worth chemically burning off your eyelashes that are the product of hundreds of dollars worth of Latisse. Wrong stuff, I have.
Please tell me I’m not the only person who has a bad case of the “Regretsy’s” after a big project turned into a pain in the ass. Has this happened to you?