Golden, and (still) there for the picking.

I can't let go. These days, I'm always looking for them; tomatoes, I mean. I'm pinching back the tomato blossoms in the garden, hoping the tomatoes that have already formed will actually have time to ripen in this new season of reduced sunlight and deepening chill. Bite a garden tomato and you bite into summer. And I can't let go of summer. Not willingly, anyway. The chopped gorgeousness above consists of Délice d'Or, but for yellow you can find your fill with creamy-gold Ivory Egg, the orange-sized Valencias, a handful of Remy Jaune, tiny and sweet as candy (and a more yellowy version of the cherry tomatoes I picked in the top image), pointy pepper-seeming Roman Candle, the faithful Marmande Jaune, the Téton de Vénus jaune (Venus' Breast) and let's not forget the sumptuous, pink-streaked beefsteak, Mortgage Lifter Yellow. It is the prose of the warmer days; don't tempt me to go on--there are well over 12,000 known varieties of tomatoes in nearly all the colors. These are the yellow ones I know and love, in part for their sunny appearance, in part for their sweet nature. Yellow tomatoes are generally less acid, and more on the fruity side. You will love them fresh, but try chopping them up finely and simmering them ever so briefly as Heidi does, and you have a pure-tasting sauce fit for the gods. Rather than going with fresh as she did, I added oven-roasted garlic instead (there's always an oil-topped jar of that in the fridge), to play up that intense tomato sweetness. The sauce is superb served unadulterated over quenelles lyonnaise (an airy, eggy, oval dumpling). Any permutation of pasta will do, of course. If you happen to have other vegetables on hand as I did, then throw in something sautéed, such as eggplant, add a sprinkling of torn fresh basil and just-grated Parmesan. Like me, take the photo before adding the last two ingredients, so you can still see those goldenrod bits of tomato. Actually, I can confirm this sauce is gorgeous in spoonfuls direct from the saucepan.If you did something truly wonderful in a long-ago previous life, you might just know a local producer of Ananas (i.e. Pineapple) tomatoes. This variety redefines tomato-ness. It can grow to a kilo (that's one, single tomato). There are very few seeds, and it's a highly aromatic sort, with a dense, magnificently juicy flesh. And oh, that fine, fine yellow-orange sweetness. So here's my recipe for this, perhaps my very favorite variety of tomato.

Allow the tomatoes to ripen fully someplace warm and bright in your kitchen. You'll know they're ready when hazy streaks of red appear at the flowering ends, and all traces of green are gone. Slice, sprinkle a minute amount of fleur de sel, and drizzle with the grassiest, brightest olive oil you can get your hands on. Afterward, if you're feeling nostalgic for that extraordinary last mouthful, read Pablo Neruda for solace: you aren't alone in loving tomatoes.

Ode To Tomatoes

- Pablo Neruda

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

(Thank you, Jennifer.)

'Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?'

The sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone—
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance—
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed—
or have you too
turned from this world—

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

- Mary Oliver

p.s.: by the roadside, red poppies, known here as coquelicots, after the sound of a rooster's crowing, as it resembles a coxcomb, bobbing and swaying in the high grass.

p.m.

Being a creature of the night is to be off, by a slim matter of hours, a drop in the grand-scheme bucket, but forever off. I am (at the least) never quite fully in gear when the functioning world is engaged, and remain espresso-fueled to keep up. My switch to on-ness is incremental, predictable. As evening deepens into something that seems a bit more permanent, there is always this: the smooth pressing down of the foot on the accelerator of my being. If you know what I am getting at, perhaps now is a time to stand, take one step forward and carefully enunciate who you are. My name is...and I am a night-owl.

The house exhales at night, and so do I.

Silence
- Billy Collins

Now it is time to say what you have to say.
The room is quiet.
The whirring fan has been unplugged,
and the girl who was tapping
a pencil on her desktop has been removed.

So tell us what is on your mind.
We want to hear the sound of your foliage,
the unraveling of your tool kit,
your songs of loneliness,
songs of hurt.

The trains are motionless on the tracks,
the ships at rest in the harbor.
The dogs are cocking their heads
and the gods are peering down from their balloons.
The town is hushed,

and everyone here has a copy.
So tell us about your parents--
your father behind the steering wheel,
your cruel mother at the sink.
Let's hear about all the clouds you saw, all the trees.

Read the poem you brought with you tonight.
The ocean has stopped sloshing around,
and even Beethoven
is sitting up in his deathbed,
his cold hearing-horn inserted in one ear.


Goldfrapp, performing "A&E" live in 2008.

The kaki tree.

Today we bought a tree. More than one, actually, but this particular one will bear Japanese persimmons, bright-colored globes that hang from the inception of winter onward. They say that the tree that carries the "fruit of the gods" also allows one to actually predict the kind of winter coming, simply by looking at the formations inside the seeds...Hmm. At any rate, we can't plant our first-ever kaki, as the French call it, anywhere near where the car will be: the fallen fruit ruin the finish...

It's such an Asian fruit, to my way of thinking, but you do find them scattered across the atlas. The California Fuyu (kaki) growers even have their own promotional board...what will they choose to be the catchy kaki jingle? I'll keep you posted.

The first time I ever really considered the persimmon was when I was assigned a Li-Young Lee book at school.


Persimmons

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.
Naked: I’ve forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He’s so happy that I’ve come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

--Li-Young Lee


...Anyone have a persimmon recipe to spare?