Recipes - Tales from the ArcaMax Chef

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Tales from the ArcaMax Chef

As the afternoon wore on it became hotter and more humid. The air was so thick and damp you had to swim through it to get anywhere. It was the kind of day for which air conditioning had been invented. You basically traveled from your air conditioned house to your air conditioned car to whatever was your air conditioned destination and back with minimum time out of at least some type of air conditioning.

Being an expert on tomatoes, I knew the little red gems in my tomato garden were relishing the weather. I had enjoyed tremendous success growing tomatoes the first two years I tried. By year three, I was learning it wasn't as easy to grow tomatoes as I had assumed, after a run in with some varmints who had taken a liking to my crop.

By year four, I had been forced to build a chicken wire prison around my garden, complete with chicken wire roof and all to keep the drunk muskrats from scaling the fence (The muskrats would get high on the fermented fruit in the orchard and then, with inhibitions lost, jump or scale the fence to get to the tomatoes.

The garden fortress had been a tremendous success. No drunk muskrats, or sober ones for that matter, could get in over the fence or through the roof and the tomatoes were flourishing. In just another week or so I would harvest a bumper crop of perfect red sandwich tomatoes (i.e., the kind that are perfect in a tomato sandwich) and be up to my elbows in fresh salsas and pasta sauce.

The emergency broadcast system was activated late in the afternoon. A strong line of thunderstorms was heading our way. By the way, why does the emergency broadcast system still sound the way it did 30 years ago. There must have been tremendous gains in technology for forecasting storms over the past 30 years but the part you hear on the radio sound like a throwback to the 1970's. The SOS beeps are scratchy and obnoxious and the computerized voice usually mispronounces the names of the local cities and counties.

I suppose it is designed to give everyone the same opportunity to figure out what is going on. Having localized systems would be OK for the locals but the Yankees and other tourists around here might not understand it if the warning was "Gully washer on the way. Y'all better git."

God Bless America.

Enjoy!

This news arrived on: 05/09/2008

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