There is only one season of the year more joyous than this. The time of year when sweet corn and tomatoes can go from stalk and vine to tongue, teeth and gullet should be celebrated with more vigor than all but one other multi-dayed season.
Our fresh-picked garden vegetable time brings ultimate satisfaction to growers and devourers. Taste buds enlarge awaiting the succulence as we boil or nuke our sweet corn. In the half-dozen minutes this takes our patience is thoroughly tested.
With tomatoes, patience doesn’t enter the picture. You pick ’em and eat ’em. Oh, some people like to add a shake of salt, but both corn and the red things are good without cupboard flavoring.
Once the tomatoes are in our house, there is a different, more socially acceptable way of presenting them. I used to peel tomatoes for sandwiches and table serving. This year I’ve decided peeling takes too much of the ‘best part? (all flesh part) of a tomato.
And for the sandwich and serving I prefer Miracle Whip salad dressing as an additive. However, if you haven’t tried it, make darn sure you do not get Miracle Whip Light.
Its texture is revolting.
I must have bought a jar when the ‘Light? movement or craze fogged my thinking. Just one spreading for my first bacon-tomato sandwich of this glorious season was enough to cause me to pitch the nearly full jar.
This stuff is cloddy. Who wants to try to spread lumpy dressing? It won’t lay flat and smooth like the Miracle Whip we loved before producers thought they had to have a way to lure would-be dieters by putting ‘light? on labels.
To make that first bacon-tomato sandwich of this tasteful season worse I took some experts? advice and nuked my bacon. Bad move.
We’ve had this tilted microwaveable bacon rack for years. I’d forgotten I hated it when I laid on six slices. Eight minutes later it was stuck to the rack and not crisp.
Norine Valentine thought she was doing me a favor a few weeks ago when she sent me a micro-waveable rack, on which bacon strips were looped over an arm, thus letting the dripping to fall in a pool. Anyone want a once-used microwaveable plastic tree?
No more experimenting!
Fry the bacon in its own grease, toast the white bread, lather on the Miracle Whip, crisscross crisp bacon strips over just picked tomato slices and don’t call me until I’m done.
That’s it. Breakfast and lunch accounted for. Don’t tell me about cholesterol. I take Lipitor.
I always fry two pounds of bacon at a time, thus having some ready when the grandkids show up. When Trevor, 6, comes in the house he doesn’t say, ‘Hello, Grandpa,? he says, ‘Got any bacon, Grandpa??
One day Savannah, 9, brought a friend over to swim. Afterwards the two had some bacon. The girl went home delighted, telling her mother about the great after-swim snack she had.
If our government served toasted white bread bacon and tomato sandwiches at their antinuclear talks with Iran, at Korean negotiations and to religious groups fighting in Iraq, peace would follow.
I suppose it wouldn’t work at Israeli-Palestinian talks.
So, this season riseth early and start the day with an ear of corn and a tomato splathered with Miracle Whip salad dresssing. See if everything doesn’t go better with your refreshed outlook.
If you don’t happen to have any tomatoes, call my wrecker-man, Jeff, and maybe he’ll bring you some as he did me at a recent calling.
Keep celebrating the season!