...is picking my own herbs and vegetables from the garden so I can make homemade sofrito. I use the sofrito as a base to sautee along with the sazón and the sweet-as-pie red onions my mami recommended in my husband's Cuban-style black beans so they taste like glory.
This spring I went a little garden-store crazy and bought four or five Cubanelle sweet pepper plants to grow my own. Now, I have almost a dozen chartreuse-green sweet peppers hanging from tall plants that are threatening to overtake their flower bed, crowding out the rosemary and the basil I planted alongside them.
I took one of those aptly called Cubanelle peppers, a sweet-as-pie red onion (truly the best onions ever), two cloves of garlic, and four small sweet red peppers I bought at a specialty store and I Cuisinart-ed them all together with a few sprigs of my own fresh Italian cilantro and thyme. That yielded about 3/4 cups of sofrito, which smelled and tasted much better than the Goya brand I bought at the Latin@ products store recently, which has a bunch of preservatives and what-nots.
I remember how my Abuela Hebe, my mami's mom, used to make a world-famous sofrito that my mami always praised for its aroma and its ability to turn even the blandest dish into a feast of flavor.
Mine doesn't achieve such heights of culinary accomplishment but it's not a mean sofrito either. And I do love making it, especially watching my cute mini-Cuisinart blend all those flavors and textures and colors into an aromatic base that suffuses the kitchen with its tropical perfume.
While my peppers and my herbs are doing well this summer, my heirloom tomato is toast. When the wrecking crew came to tear down our pathetic excuse of a garage, they burned my little tomato plant with the exhaust of their machinery.
"Did the little tomato plant perish during the wrecking process?" I asked the man driving the guilty-as-sin machine.
"Perish?" He asked, clearly missing the point of what I was trying to ask.
"Died. Did the little tomato plant die during the wrecking process?" I corrected myself.
"Hey [Joe, or some such name], can the exhaust of this thing kill a tomato plant?" he asked his partner in crime.
I didn't stay to hear the expert's answer. My burned and almost leaf-less plant was evidence enough to answer that question. I transplanted the poor plant to the flower bed with the pepper plants, and it did well for the rest of the day, recovering some of its color and shape. I naively thought that I could save it from total extinction.
That night, as I slept in the innocence of the ignorant, something, some one of the many possible quadruped culprits that inhabit my backyard, pulled my heirloom tomato from its roots, broke the root ball apart and unceremoniously ate the entire plant, leaving only the lonely plant-less roots as evidence of its tomato-cide.
No fresh heirloom tomatoes for me this summer. But I've learned my tomato-planting lesson, that's for sure.
I have to say that construction crews are not the friendliest to herb and vegetable gardens. For some as-yet-unexplained reason, the idiot who delivered the lumber that was used to build our new garage (which sits half-finished as we speak with mysterious ladders placed against its walls and evidence of half-hearted sweeping but no further action on its lonely framed structure) dropped the tons of lumber on top (yes, on top) of the huerto.
There went my asparagus, my husband's pumpkins (which he tries to grow each year, albeit unsuccessfully, with the hope that we'll carve our own on Halloween) and one of my Italian cilantro plants (the survivor is growing in an unlikely space between the concrete driveway and the raised bed of the huerto). What kind of an idiot fails to notice an herb and vegetable garden in full growth? I don't want to imagine.
In any event, wrecking crews and idiotic lumber suppliers cannot sour my glee. Right now, I'm quite content that I made my first batch of homemade sofrito of the summer. Hopefully, I'll be able to make at least one more batch before the cool of October rolls around, announcing that another fresh herb and vegetable season is ending.
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