I love tomatoes. Love them. They're my favorite fruit, or vegetable if you want to call them that. I'll sit and eat cherry tomatoes the same way other people might munch on grapes. One of the worst things about living in the far, far north is that the only tomatoes we can get are underripe, flavorless, hydroponic greenhouse tomatoes. Like these*:
This is where all of those years studying plant physiology comes in handy. Apples give off ethylene gas, which is a ripening hormone. It's why you can't store apples and, say, tulip bulbs in the same place. The ethylene from the apples kills the shoot inside the bulb. But it also helps our boring, watery tomatoes get some flavor. Here are the same tomatoes, after 24 hours in a closed plastic bag with a really ugly, bruised-up apple.
These could have used another 24 hours in the bag, but are now fit for consumption, as pizza sauce. Which Vidar makes every friday, from scratch. Yum!
In an unrelated note about apples, Henrik has now added that word to his vocabulary, and can finally tell his kindergarten teachers what sort of fruit he wants for his afternoon snack. (Apple is "eple" in Norwegian; almost a homophone for the English word.) We didn't even know he liked apples until we went to the kindergarten with him to celebrate his birthday (a few days delayed, no thanks to a stomach virus). We had tried to give him apple several times before but he never ate them so we gave up. Then we're sitting at the table at snack time and his teacher tells us "Oh yes, Henrik loves apples. He eats so many slices every day, they're his favorite." Which is the first of what will be a long list of things we never knew about our own kid. It's still a bit strange to think that he now has this life apart from us, every day, at kindergarten.
*Apologies for the rotten lighting in these photos. It's Norway. I won't have decent lighting again until March. Maybe April.
This is where all of those years studying plant physiology comes in handy. Apples give off ethylene gas, which is a ripening hormone. It's why you can't store apples and, say, tulip bulbs in the same place. The ethylene from the apples kills the shoot inside the bulb. But it also helps our boring, watery tomatoes get some flavor. Here are the same tomatoes, after 24 hours in a closed plastic bag with a really ugly, bruised-up apple.
These could have used another 24 hours in the bag, but are now fit for consumption, as pizza sauce. Which Vidar makes every friday, from scratch. Yum!
In an unrelated note about apples, Henrik has now added that word to his vocabulary, and can finally tell his kindergarten teachers what sort of fruit he wants for his afternoon snack. (Apple is "eple" in Norwegian; almost a homophone for the English word.) We didn't even know he liked apples until we went to the kindergarten with him to celebrate his birthday (a few days delayed, no thanks to a stomach virus). We had tried to give him apple several times before but he never ate them so we gave up. Then we're sitting at the table at snack time and his teacher tells us "Oh yes, Henrik loves apples. He eats so many slices every day, they're his favorite." Which is the first of what will be a long list of things we never knew about our own kid. It's still a bit strange to think that he now has this life apart from us, every day, at kindergarten.
*Apologies for the rotten lighting in these photos. It's Norway. I won't have decent lighting again until March. Maybe April.
