Tomatoes

Hey everyone! Its your friendly neighborhood blogger with another recipe and poem ^_^. My friend Sierra requested the poem 'Tomatoes' by Stephen Dobys, and let me tell you...this poem is definitely quite unique. Despite its overall creepy tone, once you get past the lurid imagery and dramatics, you'll find that this poem is somehow oddly relatable. (P.S. I know it might seem long, but trust me, its worthwhile.) (P.P.S. here's a sneak peek of the recipe)

Tomatoes

By Stephen Dobys

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic

surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty

and has the usual desire to stay pretty.

Once she is healed, she takes her new face

out on the streets of Rio. A young man

with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.

The body is shipped back to New York,

but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son

is sent for. He is told that his mother

is one of these ten different women.

Each has been shot. Such is modern life.

He studies them all but can’t find her.

With her new face, she has become a stranger.

Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.

He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?

He presses their hands to his cheek.

Which ones consoled him? He even tries

climbing onto their laps to see which

feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.

Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?

They all are, says the young man, let me

take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,

then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.

The young man has the ten women shipped home,

then cremates them all together. You’ve seen

how some people have a little urn on the mantel?

This man has a huge silver garbage can.

In the spring, he drags the garbage can

out to the garden and begins working the teeth,

the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.

Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.

They grow straight from seed, so fast and big

that the young man is amazed. He takes the first

ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,

he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness

he finds the consoling touch of her hands.

Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself

on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,

the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial

starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

Now I personally always associate tomatoes with Italian food, and I thought what better recipe to share than a classic tomato sauce on spaghetti. Once you start making homemade tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes, I can guarantee you will never go back to the jarred kind!

You will need:

• 10 fresh roma tomatoes
• 8 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
• 4 cloves of garlic (crush and chopped)
• 1 tsp. crushed red pepper
• 1 tsp. dried basil
• 1 tsp. dried oregano
• 1 tsp. dried parsley
• Add enough salt to your taste (not sure how much I put in!)
• 1/2 a large onion diced finely
• ground meat of your choice to your taste (optional, but I love turkey sausage!)

1. Boil your fresh tomatoes (after making slits in the skin) for a good minute. Take them off heat and immediately plunge them into ice cold water. Allow them to cool, then peel the skin and dice them.

2. In a skillet, heat up your olive oil. Add in your chopped garlic and sautee them for a few minutes. Add in the chopped onion and sautee them alongside your garlic, roughly 3 minutes. 

3. Into the same skillet, add in your diced and peeled tomatoes. Let this cook for about 5 minutes before you add in all your spices. After you have added all your spices in, feel free to add in some extra olive oil too.

4. Serve over spaghetti noodles (or any pasta of your choice!). This sauce stores well in the fridge for a week or so.