Raw Green Tomatoes

 

I have a confession to make. I think tomatoes are gross. 

They are soft, squishy, things that, when provoked, burst unexpectedly and assail your mouth with a stream of slimy seeds. When even the slightest bit overripe, their flesh decays into a grainy, watery paste. When cooked, they collapse into mush and take on a pungent undertone that somehow always reminds me of vomit.

I never liked tomatoes, but as I grew up, I felt the pressure to expand my palate and eat the nasty slimeballs. I started with tomato soup, which, I discovered to my surprise in high school, was really good with grilled cheese. Then in college, I began allowing a few tomato slices to be added to my sandwiches. Now, as an adult, I put them in recipes when recipes call for them, and have even started growing them in my garden!

This puts me in quite a dilemma. How does a person who thinks tomatoes are only tolerable in moderation, deal with a whole crop of tomatoes darkening her doorstep all at once? Honestly, why would she make such a stupid growing decision in the first place!?

The answer to both those questions is this: she eats them green. And not fried green. Just plain old, straight up, green. And she likes them this way.

For learning that I can enjoy eating raw green tomatoes, I credit this one guy that I dated for a few months last year. One day, I was visiting his house where a crop of tomatoes was growing in pots on the patio. A green one had fallen off the plant. He handed it to me and asked, "Do you want a tomato?"

Well, he and I may not have lasted long enough to get engaged, but at least, to this one question, I said yes! Never one to turn down free food, I took the tomato home and cherished it. By which I mean, I let it sit around while I procrastinated. I figured I'd eventually cook it in the traditional way that one cooks green tomatoes (fried). But my favorite thing to cook is nothing at all, so it is not surprising that the future fried green tomato remained unfried.

Eventually I realized that this tomato's fate was not to be found in the bottom of a skillet, and I was going to have to get creative (read: lazy). I cut the tomato into slices and ate them.

And thus began a new era in my culinary life! The green tomato was much tastier than its ripe counterpart! It wasn't mushy or gritty but possessed a firmness more along the lines of a cucumber or bell pepper (which, by the way, is another vegetable that I have recently learned to appreciate). And its flavor was subtle and tart—none of that confusing semi-sweetness (Hey, are you a vegetable or a fruit? Pick a lane!)* that always throws me for a loop when I eat a red tomato.

This is how all tomatoes should be—taken before their prime and devoured without remorse!

This year, the most successful crop from my garden has been the tomatoes (in spite of my pitiful failures at supporting the plants. Turns out tomato cages are one of those gardening luxuries that might be more of a necessity!). And they've been a steady and reliable source of roughage in my diet for most of the latter half of summer.

By now, I've turned green tomato eating into an art. Every few days, I head out to the tomato plants and give each fruit a gentle tug. Any that falls off is mine to take and transform! I bring them inside, cut them in half, and scoop out the guts. This step is vital, because the seeds in their slimy matrix are one of the grossest things about tomatoes, and the flavor is mellower when the seeds are removed. 

 

Then, because as hollowed-out semi-spheres, they are difficult to bite into and weirdly off-putting, I cut them into bite-sized strips. One more rinse to get out any straggling seeds and slime, and then they are ready to eat! 

 

Even the dog wants these tomatoes! 

But the dog can't have these tomatoes because the last time the dog ate a fallen green tomato, the dog returned the fallen tomato (only slightly less green) back to its original location about 30 minutes later. I guess dog digestive tracts are not made for green tomatoes.

This brings me to an important point about the edibility of green tomatoes. I have some hazy recollection of being told that they are poisonous, which is why people don't eat them raw, so—after eating green tomatoes as my only side dish for several meals running—I decided to double-check. Better late than never, I guess? Multiple sources all confirmed: unripe tomatoes do contain several toxic compounds, but they are in low enough amounts that you'd have to eat a vast quantity of green tomatoes before they would make you sick. A lethal dose is apparently 300 tomatoes, so it's extremely doubtful my little tomato patch is going to kill me. I put more poison into my body every time I drink a margarita!

So yes, my raw tomato consumption will continue unabated until the last underdeveloped fruit has dropped off my last scrawny stem! And then I'll start all over again next summer!

 

 

Insomnia: One Year Later

Today, I stumbled upon my "Watch Later" playlist on YouTube, which I hadn't touched in over a year. One of the videos on it jumped out at me – a Qi gong routine for better sleep by Lee Holden – and I recoiled mentally in distaste. Now I have nothing against Lee Holden and his Qi gong videos, but having insomnia traumatized me. And apparently so did the videos I used to try and escape its thrall. 

Well, today, I deleted that video, and all six of the other videos on the list, every one of which was somehow related to insomnia or getting better sleep. That part of my life is over. But the video was a reminder to look back and consider how far I've come.

On this day last year, I wrote a blog post about insomnia, claiming that my sleep had improved a lot, but sometimes it regressed. On this day this year, I can say the very same thing. After all this time, I still can't trust myself to sleep reliably.

But fortunately, over the course of the year, the bad nights of sleep have become fewer and farther between, and I have noticed more and more patterns that contribute to them—making them less of a terrifying mystery and more of a minor inconvenience I can work around. I'm still an annoyingly sensitive sleeper who is inordinately affected by changes in bedtime routine, stimulants, ambient light, ambient temperature, bodily sensations, and her emotions. But not (and this is an exciting development!) by ambient narration.

Oddly enough, having a voice yammering in my ear has become one of the more useful tools in my sleep arsenal. My boyfriend suggested the idea to me, as he routinely plays YouTube videos on aeronautical engineering and other dense topics to help him get to sleep. I pooh-poohed the idea instantly, thinking about my failed experiments in sleeping to audiobooks—wherein I could occasionally fall asleep but would always wake up again, with the added frustration of having missed half the story. But then it slowly dawned on me, that if the problem was missing the plot, then all I had to do was pick subject matter that I wouldn't mind sleeping through.

It had to be something interesting enough to distract me from thinking about sleep while I remained awake, but unimportant enough that I could drift off to sleep with impunity when I was ready. I had a few false starts, but eventually discovered the perfect bedtime audio content: single-narrator history podcasts. They have simple stories that make them easy to follow without getting too bored or too mentally engaged, and the relative short duration of a podcast means I don't usually miss out on too much when I lose consciousness.

There was still the matter of waking up again, but that actually turned out to be a boon rather than a liability. I would suddenly snap to alertness at 1am, for example, with the conviction that I hadn't slept a wink, but then I could look back at the playlist and see how many episodes had played but I simply hadn't heard. I'd maybe been conscious for half an episode, and then the rest of the time, I was asleep. Sleep state misperception is real, and I was living it! The podcasts gave me a pretty clear metric of how much I was sleeping (a lot more than I had thought!) and with that, a much stronger confidence in my ability to sleep.

I had objective evidence that I was sleeping most of the time when I'd previously thought I was awake, and that felt good!

Another thing that felt good was giving myself permission to let go of my rigid sleep rules. Part of the insomnia recovery process involved setting a very strict wake-up time every day, and for months, I clung to that like a lifeline. But more recently, I've started letting myself sleep in after late nights out—and not just letting myself, but encouraging myself. On most days, no matter how late I've been up, I'll wake up between 7 and 8 AM. But then, I'll often go back to bed and stay asleep until crazy late. One day recently, I didn't wake up until noon! I was never able to do that when I had insomnia! I was never able to do that even before I had insomnia! So the fact that I'm able to do that now, far from making me feel like a lazy sack of waste as it once would have, makes me feel great!

It's because of lazy mornings like that (and of course, the podcasts) that I've recently been able to start telling myself things like "You're really good at sleeping"—and believing it!

I titled my last insomnia post, "Miles to go before I sleep (like I used to)" but the truth is, I'm probably never going to sleep like I used to. I'm probably always going to suffer from occasional spells of bad sleep and psych myself out with periodic sleep anxiety. I'm probably always going to sleep less than all my companions. I'm probably always going to have my nights disrupted by stupid little impediments like a particularly happy mood or a can of soda with lunch. But I'm also probably always going to be a high-energy person who can handle sleep deprivation better than most. 

While I have spent a lot of time learning all my many sleep weaknesses, it's only in this year of being a former insomniac that I think I've finally learned to have faith in my sleep strengths. I may not always be able to sleep well, but at least I can rest easy.