Text 7167, 58 rader
Skriven 2006-11-02 08:49:10 av DAVE SACERDOTE (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av JIM WELLER
Ärende: A Plethora of Tastes
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JW> I once had some dried blueberries that were mystically 
JW> delicious. I came across them at a small roadside stand 
JW> along the Alaska Highway. They had been smoke dried and 
JW> then turned into a tart, spicy and smokey relish that was 
JW> marvelous with poultry. I was never able to reproduce
JW> the taste or the texture myself and the next year when 
JW> I returned the stand was gone. And [eerie music] nobody 
JW> around had ever seen or heard of it; it might as well have 
JW> been from Brigadoon. [/eerie music]

One weekend when Lynn was small, Maryanne and I were driving
along the Connecticut coast.  It was one of those unusual
early April days where the sun is bright and the air is warm
and smells like wet loam.  We were on a back road going through
the town of Niantic when we passed a small roadside setup with a 
huge, handlettered sign that said "FRESH TOMATOES."  We were
curious as hell since April is way too early even for hothouse
tomatoes around here, so I turned the car around and we pulled 
over.  

There was a 6-foot table set up with baskets of the most
gorgeous ripe tomatoes I'd ever seen, and a bowl filled
with tomato chunks - free samples.  An elderly woman and her
son were seated behind the table.  We tasted the samples and
they were like mouthfuls of summer!  They were heavy and
meaty, with hardly any seeds, and the flavor was so good,
it was as though they had taken perfect August tomatoes 
and held them in a stasis field. We bought a big sack of 
them, even though they were something like $3 a pound, because 
they were so incredible.

We chatted for a while with the folks selling the tomatoes.  They
said they lived down the road we were on, in a house that had been
in the family for generations, and had a greenhouse out back where
they grew nursery stock for their garden.  They decided to try
and grown some hydroponic hothouse tomatoes over the winter, and
were bedding the plants in seaweed they raked up along the
beach.  Said the minerals in the seaweed were the secret of the
tomatoes.

Maryanne and I have searched every year since for those folks
and their tomatoes.  We've never found them again - and like
your blueberry stand, no one in the area had ever seen or heard
of the people we bought them from.

I think we bought our stuff from the same stand, Jim.  It moves
around the world; Blueberries in the Arctic, tomatoes in 
Connecticut, it might be a bookstore in a NY back alley some
day, or a little pawn shop in Ontario where the owner talks you
out of hocking your watch and sells you, on the cheap, a ring that 
you bring home and show your wife and it's the one she lost 
ten years before she met you and never thought she'd see again.


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Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, 
minutus carborata descendum pantorum
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