I became a newlywed in June, 2001. I got married a little later in my life than did many of my contemporaries and, as a result, I was set in my ways and almost certainly a pain in the ass to live with for that summer. My wife, who is the same age as me, was a once-divorced mother of one, so I spent that summer learning to live with not one person but two, one of them being a nine year-old boy. Also, we’d adopted two dogs from a shelter. Every party living in that house, including the dogs (who had been taken to a no-kill shelter by a family who liked the dogs just fine but couldn’t abide their constant barking), had experience living with someone else. Everyone except me, of course. Sure, I’d had roommates but, as anyone who has ever had a roommate and lived with a romantic partner will tell you, in terms of experience, the two are about as far apart as watching Pop Warner football and interstellar space travel. Other than some shared financial burden, you really don’t have to communicate with a roommate if you don’t want to. And, unless you are a “roommate with benefits,” I suppose the fights lack a certain electricity without the added component of sex.
So, I spent the summer of 2001 learning to live with a wife, a boy and two dogs. This was not an entirely easy transition for me. Living alone as long as I had made me finely attuned to “my stuff,” and how it was to remain untouched by anyone except me. I still struggle with this impulse and my wife will comment about how I am “turning this into a ‘my stuff’ thing” if I am being uncharitable to the 18 year-old man about to head off to Americorps and who has replaced the nine year-old boy who was the ring-bearer at my wedding.
Don’t misunderstand me, I am not the only one who had to make adjustments. In fact, I’m not sure who had to make more or more difficult adjustments; me for the reasons referenced above or my new so-called "blended" family who had to become accustomed to sharing a residence with this possessive, slovenly dude who didn’t necessarily understand what was normal for a nine year-old boy, having not been one in decades and having never lived with one. At the time I was sure that it was me who was more put upon. “Hey, they’d been to my house a kajillion times before I married them (yes, I viewed it as marrying both of them, not just her); they knew what they were getting into. I was ALWAYS in control of the TV when they came over.” Of course, I was wrong. Way wrong. They had to make more and bigger adjustments. They’d already had a life without me. They didn’t need me, but they wanted me. My adjustments involved my own selfishness and how to make sure that particular beast was sated. Their adjustments involved making charitable allowances for me acting the role of selfish jerk. They were the ones who seem to have arrived at the understanding that they’d accepted me in their lives and that I must have been worthy, despite the fact that for a period of time I kept trying to live my life as if I was the only one in it who mattered. Thank god they had the patience to let me work out the kinks in my marriage legs.
Still, when tomato season rolled around, late in the summer of 2001, I was a jittery newlywed. I was happy to be married but wondering why I couldn’t be alone more often. I’d been an incredibly lonely bachelor before I met my (then-future) wife and I certainly wasn’t lonely anymore, but I kept thinking that there must be some way to find a happy medium, some way to enjoy these people who lived in my house (yes, I am ashamed to admit that I occasionally thought of it that way) but still be alone when I wanted and also to maintain dominion over MY stuff.
It was with that backdrop that my wife’s cousin got married. Well, I imagine her cousin probably didn’t think of it that way at all, but that’s how I, narcissistically, thought of it. As my wife and son (I don’t really care for the term stepson and never have although I am forced to use it on occasion) were both students, they were able to travel, with my mother-in-law to the wedding. The wedding was to be held far enough away that it qualified as real travel. As school was not yet in session, they both had the wherewithal to go for a whole week and enjoy the offerings Colorado in August presented. I, however, was employed and, having taken off a fair amount of time for my wedding and honeymoon, couldn’t really make the trip with them. Secretly, I was glad. They’d be gone for a week and I could go back to a short vacation in the bachelor’s dream life mythology I’d mysteriously invented for myself (but never actually experienced) after I got married. No, there wouldn’t be women. But there could be wine and song, couldn’t there? I could stay up late all week if I wanted to. I could watch what I wanted on the television. I could follow the in the footsteps of George Costanza and eat a block of cheese the size of a car battery. I could drink what I wanted at whatever bar I chose every night. I was looking forward to that week, let me tell you. The only things that would need my attention during my family’s absence were the dogs and the garden in the back yard.
The funny thing about gardens in August is that they tend to explode. From May to late July you get a steady but not ridiculous stream of vegetables and you’re okay with it. You make some salads, you sauté something, you eat well. But in July it’s like you have a horn of plenty in your back yard. Every morning you see fully developed cucumbers that you swear weren’t there yesterday. Every evening a bumper crop of tomatoes that were hard green that morning have gotten to the peak of ripeness and beg you to pick them or lose them. I have never understood this phenomenon but it hit me hard the week my family went on vacation.
Suddenly my bachelor’s paradise was ass-over-teakettle. I had to do something with this incredible stream of tomatoes for which I could only blame myself and my inability to stop overplanting. I took boxes of veg to the office but my co-workers were satiated by Tuesday morning. I ate massive salads. I took vegetables to my new neighbors who had welcomed us only a few months before. And still the tomatoes kept coming. What are you supposed to do when you have the house to yourself and want nothing more than to have a steak, a steak sandwich or something involving big meat while you watch kung fu movies? Is it too much to ask that in addition to dominion over my television that nature bend to my will as well?
So, my week in bachelor’s paradise was spent “putting up” (as my grandmother called it) tomatoes. I’d seen my mother do this when I was a kid and I called her for advice. Canning didn’t seem all that difficult. I read The Joy of Cooking, an older edition as the current ones have taken out most everything to do with canning and preserving, and I went to the hardware store and bought a pressure canner, jars, lids, everything I’d need to create glistening jars of tomatoes to keep in my basement for the upcoming winter. Some bachelor I turned out to be. From steak and hunks of cheese to a task considered (wrongly) by many to be the most housewifely of all. My wife thinks I am a Depression-era housewife in the body of a Gen-X man in terms of my refusal to throw anything away and I have to say she has a point. I hate throwing stuff away and there was no way I was going to lose those tomatoes. So, I started canning. And I kept canning. And I developed a real sense of purpose while I was doing it. The thing is, canning is pretty boring. It’s also hot and sweaty. Add in the real but minuscule danger of botulism and you start wanting to do other stuff with those tomatoes. So, I looked up a recipe for ketchup which I then tweaked the hell out of. That was the best ketchup I have ever had. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I could duplicate it here as it was a mad scientist dash through my spice rack and hours and hours of constant low-level simmering and stirring because the tomatoes I used weren’t plum tomatoes with relatively low moisture, but were a mix of beefsteak, Brandywines, cherries and whatever else the garden was yielding. I have tried to duplicate that ketchup and have come close, but I haven’t nailed it and so I’m not going to try and tell you how to make it.
What I will share with you, though, is my discovery that week of roasted tomato soup. I recall thinking of this recipe that hot sweaty week when I figured “what the hell, this kitchen can’t get any hotter. Why not use the oven?” I’d seen something similar on a television show for a tomato sauce and adapted that technique here. Roasting tomatoes drives off a lot of the water and concentrates and caramelizes the tomatoes, making a soup with an especially vivid tomato punch. And even though I had at least one steak that week, this soup was the best thing I ate.
Roasted Tomato Soup
Take your tomatoes and core them. This will work with any amount of tomatoes and you need only adjust the proportions of your other flavors to get them how you like. Cut them at least in half cross-wise and gently squeeze out the seeds and pulp. Some people say that the best, most essential flavor of the tomato is in those seed pods and they have a point, but I don’t like the seeds in the finished soup. Leave them in if you want. If your tomatoes are especially large, you might want to cut them into quarters. Put them in a bowl and toss them with olive oil to coat and sprinkle the liberally with salt (about 1 teaspoon per pound of tomatoes) and put them all in a roasting pan or rimmed cookie sheet. Now take one or two whole heads of garlic (use more if you like a lot of garlic, use less if you don’t) and cut them in half. Rub the cut garlic side with olive oil as well and put that in the pan. Now, take some fresh basil (left on the stalk if possible) and bury that basil underneath the tomatoes (the idea is to keep the basil from drying out or burning but still leaving its flavor with the tomatoes). If you have some parsley or other soft herbs, you can treat it the same as the basil if you like. Now, put the pan in a moderate-to-hot (I usually go 350 but 400 would work too) oven and walk away for at least an hour. Depending on the juiciness of your tomatoes, an hour may not be enough. You don’t want to dry out the tomatoes completely but you want to drive off a lot of excess water and concentrate the tomato flavor. Ideally, you don’t want a lot of free liquid in the bottom of your pan but when the tomatoes still look juicy but a bit caramelized around the edges, that’s when I take them out.
From here, how you may your soup into actual soup is up to you. I have used a food mill and I find that it does a great job of removing the skins and any seeds you may have missed (as well as making the soup the perfect consistency), but my food mill is a pain in the ass to use and it isn’t usually my go-to option. You can use an immersion blender, but I have a little trouble getting the skins fine enough that I don’t notice them. I usually use a blender of a food processor with this but the down side, especially to the blender, is that it whips a lot of air into the soup and it takes away that deep, candy-colored red of the soup into something a step closer to the canned cream of tomato soup I was given with grilled cheese sandwiches as a child. If you want to remove the air, put your soup into a saucepan and add a little water to loosen it and then gently simmer until the water you added is boiled off and the soup has returned to its previous sin-colored red. Anyway, make sure you put in all the tomatoes and squeeze the roasted garlic into your instrument if pureeing. I usually leave the basil out because its flavor has leached into the tomatoes, but you can toss it in as well. If you use a food processor, it’s very easy to get this soup completely smooth, but I actually prefer that it have a little texture. Make it how you like it. After you have pureed your soup through your means of choice, into a bowl with it and generously drizzle with your best olive oil. If you want, take some fresh basil and finely chop it into super thins shreds (what chefs and “foodies” call a chiffonade) and sprinkle them on top.
Afterword
About half way through Tomato-nee-Bachelor Week I was sitting down and enjoying a bowl of this tomato soup. I was sweaty and my back hurt from all the time I had been spending on my feet. Precious little kung fu had been watched. I had MY stereo playing MY music at full blast when something amusing occurred to me. I have no idea what it was. I’m the type of guy who tends to recall my own jokes (which is not a nice thing to admit or one of my better qualities, but it’s true), but that one has escaped me because very quickly after I made that joke to an empty house (MY empty house), no one was around to laugh at it. And I was just a little saddened by that fact. When Amy and Will came home a few days later, I was very happy to see them. And I still am happy to see them every day. I still get little blips of solitude, but the desire to act like a jackass has largely disappeared over the years and I find myself gladdened by that news and by the knowledge that it was those two (and my daughter, born three years into our marriage) that have made me worry much less about my stuff.
Originally Published in Open Salon
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