“Remoted” – Workday 72 / Day 98 (Monday)

The first tomato pie of the season happened tonight.  I’ve been looking forward to summer tomatoes and tomato pie for a while. The plan started to come together the Friday vacation day of the dentist appointment when I deserved the ice cream that led to stopping at Market Basket and the resulting full grocery shop, referred to as “the $50 ice cream.” If I’d stuck to the Plan B of vodka that day, which I have plenty of, there would have been no tomato pie today, so it worked out well for me.

Thanks to the one-way aisles, I traversed each row without the safety net of a grocery list. The traffic flow, plus the absence of many other shoppers allowed me to look around for a change, instead of my usual pre-pandemic scatterbrained, scattershot approach of skipping crucial rows due to “too many people” or forgetting where things live in the store. The orderly travel pattern allowed me to notice things like the presence of Pillsbury refrigerated pie crust, a delicious and affordable solution to my complete and utter lack of interest in mastering crust. It is housed in a corner of the dairy area that I usually blow right past in my haste to get to the nearby grated cheeses, another key ingredient to tomato pie and staple of my pantry. I get nervous if there isn’t a stash of a variety of cheeses in my freezer. 

Tomato pie!

Tomato pie always makes me think of Nashville and the Tomato Art Fest in August, which celebrates the lovely tomato (“A Uniter, Not a Divider - Bringing Together Fruits and Vegetables”) with parades, concerts, art exhibits and contests, Bloody Mary Garden, and baking contests. This was my introduction to tomato pie many years ago, and for that I am still grateful. Thank you forever, East Nashville!

Tonight’s tomato pie was everything I remembered, even though I couldn’t remember if I’d used this particular Paula Deen recipe before. There is  now a collection of about 10 different tomato pie recipes between the paper file and my computer. Once the aggravation of pie crust is eliminated with pre-made crust, the hardest thing about this recipe is peeling the tomatoes. Either both of my peelers stink or nicely ripe tomatoes are hard to peel, and I ended up using my fingers to pull off strips of the skin for about half the effort. If I had this problem in the past, I’ve forgotten, which is just as well. Leaves more room in the cranium for more important memories, because Lord knows that is still a challenge.

This morning, long before the pie making, I was at the back door watching Moose as he headed to the yard to potty and I was noticing the tiny corpse of a baby bird on the ground under the end of the downspout below where the robin’s nest is built. I wondered about the cause of death of the tiny, pale, featherless creature. Was it homicide? Suicide? Accidental? What happened to you, tiny baby bird? Were you shoved, did you jump to escape an evil sibling, or did you just fall? That’s when I realized with a cold chill and rising panic that the car was not parked in the usual spot near that very same downspout. Then I remembered the car was at the shop getting the A/C fixed. The shop exactly two streets over from the house where I had driven it just a couple hours earlier, then walked back to the house. Did I mention I sometimes have the 20 -second memory retention  of a chimpanzee? It’s random. Some stuff is forgotten instantly, other stuff I remember for-ev-er. It certainly keeps things interesting and can sometimes be helpful in trivia games.