Days of beauty and tomatoes

     Sometimes simple is best. Like slices of homegrown tomatoes on a piece of fresh challah, spread with butter.      

     The tomatoes are the big news. After, well, too many years of having them just not come in — hard green spheres that never ripen — they are bountiful this year. The only thing I did different was, early in the season, hit them with a few doses of Miracle Grow Tomato Plant Food. So maybe they deserve the credit, not me.

    The challah is from Kaufman's, in Skokie, so was fresh and superlative. Sent by a reader as part of a care package to make sure I wasn't starving while laid up. Thanks for that. Had I thought about using this photo, I would have moved the ashtray out of the shot — readers zero in on a detail like that. Don't worry; it's from my hometown of Berea, Ohio, and hasn't been used in years — I usually smoke a cigar on the front porch, flicking the ashes into the hydrangeas. I noticed the ashtray in the basement and brought it up, but haven't used it yet, haven't smoked a cigar in months — tobacco and healing from surgery do not go hand in hand. Not even this week after a former colleague, doing a wellness check, brought by a trio of my favorite Rocky Patel Vintage 1990s from Iwan Ries. Though the day I light up one of those bad boys draws ever nearer. The surgeon said Thursday I can go without a sling, in the privacy of my own home, and I have been reveling in that, though eventually the arm becomes taxed and I sling up again.
     The weather was so nice, my wife suggested breakfast outside. Sitting on the porch for that hour, with the tomatoes and the challah, hot coffee plus a few — okay, four — Kaufman's cookies for dessert might have been the best hour of summer. Though, as I told Edie, it wasn't really four cookies. One was a rugelach.