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December 17, 2005
Green Tomato Chutney
People are always saying that it's a small world, and I disagree. It's a very large world, it just happens to be a large world in which one is constantly running into people who know people one knows.
Yesterday in the Phildelphia airport, while I was waiting for my very delayed flight to North Carolina to visit my family for our pre-Christmas Christmas, a woman asked if she could borrow my cell phone to call her cousin to let her know her flight was delayed. She mentioned that her plane had been held up in Burlington, so I asked if she was from Burlington, Vermont. Sure enough, she was. We got to chatting, and she happened to be an EMT, so she knew tons of nurses at the hospital in Burlington where I led the RN organizing campaign back in 2002. We played the name game for awhile, then I asked about what she did and found out that though now she's a woodworker, she used to work in specialty foods.
For years, she made giant batches of green tomato chutney with locally grown Vermont green tomatoes. She knew some friends of mine, David and Rachel of Full Moon Farm, who grow the most amazing sungold tomatoes on earth and sell them at the Burlington Farmers' Market every Saturday in the summer.
Farmers' Market... tomatoes... tomato chutney... suddenly it occured to me that I had sampled, purchased, eaten, and given as gifts this woman's green tomato chutney several times when I lived in Burlington. I even remembered that she used to mix the chutney with cream cheese or tuna fish and set the mixtures out as samples on her market stand.
Wow, it's a large world where one might loan one's cell phone to someone whose green tomato chutney you had eaten years earlier.
Now I'm at my father and step-mother's house, and we spent the morning making curried zucchini soup. My dad just taught me how to get the food processor to slice vegetables into little discs! Cool! What a father/daughter moment. He gave me my food processor, and has the same model at his house, so we have done a great deal of bonding through the years over the proper care and feeding of the Cuisinart.
Last night I was late getting out, so by the time I landed, visited the grandparents, and got to dinner, it was past my usual feeding time. We went to a Greek restaurant where I ordered a Greek salad with grilled chicken, but ended up eating so much of the Greek appetizer plate we ordered: Hummus, eggplant spread, and a bunch of other things I can't spell that were amazingly fabulous, that I saved my salåd to eat on Sunday night in the airport for dinner when I'm waiting for my plane home. I have a lot of occasions these days when I can't eat as much as I think I can.
Today we're having our family Christmas. My brother and sister-in-law are coming over with their beautiful almost two year old daughter, Madeline. We'll be having holiday family favorites... more on that soon, I have to go finish making the zucchini soup!
Posted by april at December 17, 2005 10:18 AM
Comments
What an adventure. The lady must have seen the tomatoes in your beautiful skin. Hooray for tomatoes in any form. M
Posted by: Marti at December 17, 2005 11:23 AM