You say "Tomato," I call "Shenanigans!"

Master and I had originally planned for the "big" Holiday meal on Thursday, so we made a pre-holiday trip to Walmart for groceries. Knowing now what I wish I had known then, those three words will forever fill me with dread. Walmart's supermarket may be fine for pantry items, and their prices are often unbeatable. But their produce section exemplifies all of the grievances cited in Jeffrey Steingarten's righteously crabby essay "Ripeness is All." I thank my lucky stars for the gourmet boutiques in my neighborhood, without which I'd sooner starve.

With the actual Holiday feast postponed until Christmas proper on Friday, I still needed to come up with something for Wednesday night's dinner. I'd spent the previous evening becoming reacquainted with Vegetable Heaven. So I was still in a Mollie Katzen state of mind when I began to gather ingredients for some manner of roasted tomatoes/roasted garlic preparation, maybe with baby spinach, mushrooms, possibly served over pasta. Easy, breezy, tasty, wholesome. The heaps of intensely rosy Roma tomatoes in Walmart's produce department at least held the promise of flavor. Alas, I knew better upon cutting into the mealy, never-ripened and furthermore frost-damaged flesh of the first tomato [sic] that I'd been royally had. Against all better judgment, I maintained hope that slow roasting might still coax some goodness out of these picture-perfect but utterly insipid tomatoes. Let no one say that there's no such thing as a hopeless cause. Roasted and peeled, the tomatoes still tasted like twice-microwaved Styrofoam. I was crushed. But the show must go on, and so into the pot, along with two whole heads of roasted garlic, went the tomatoes. Ample amounts of fresh basil and marjoram went some way towards salvaging the sauce. A little red wine or Balsamic vinegar (neither of which was on hand), and a few grinds of Parmigiano-Reggiano (ditto) might also have helped. But, honestly, if someone had served this to me without mentioning that there were tomatoes in it, I would never have guessed. Sure, I realize I'm being particular, perhaps even persnickety, about the produce. But I can't comprehend how anyone who has tasted a good tomato could ever settle for less.

More drama in getting the pasta to the table. I may have mentioned that Master's stove top consists of only two working burners, the larger of which smokes upon heating (due to a dousing of paraffin during a candle-making experiment many moons ago). The smaller burner was fine for the sauce, but it absolutely refused to bring the large pot of pasta water to a rolling boil. Even when I made a point of turning my back, as suggested by the adage, that water just would not come to temperature. After nearly an hour of this nonsense, I dusted off the electric cooktop again. By the time dinner was served, between the heartbreak of those tomatoes and the reticent pasta water, it's fair to say that I wasn't in the cheeriest of moods. I was just relieved to see the back end of a needlessly frustrating ordeal. Master actually liked the sauce - a lot more than I did. And that's all that really matters. It was enough to spare me the paddle that night, speaking of "back ends."