Patience with food

When it comes to being patient with food, the time that most comes to mind is when waiting for our garden vegetables to ripen. As I have talked about earlier in my blog, homegrown tomatoes are my family’s obsession. However, we only get to eat these delicious tomatoes about three months out of the year. The rest of the year required much patience on our part. The late fall and winter months the garden is dormant and fallow. Then in the spring we plant our vegetables in hopes of tasteful produce by July. The months we had ripe tomatoes were always memorable growing up. They remind me of the good old summer days when all I worried about was what meal would we have where the tomato was the center of attention. Some years, we were not as fortunate. A few summers ago, we were hit hard by a draught. None of our plants survived and we did not receive a single that year, not one. This meant that we had to wait two years to get our precious homegrown tomatoes. Of course, we did get tomatoes at the local farmer’s market, but they didn’t quite have the same savory taste of home. Even though that extra time we had to wait to get tomatoes was difficult, it made us appreciate them even more. After those two years of waiting, I had forgotten what the homegrown tomatoes tasted like. But after eating them again for the first time in two years, I appreciated them so much more than before.