BLTs Never Grow Old

by irene on July 3, 2010

 

There are several firsts that we look forward to during the cooking year.  The first “real” arugula in the spring.  The first grilled New York Strip of the season.  And, without a doubt, the first BLT made with home grown tomatoes.

Nothing touches home grown tomatoes.  Even farmers’ market tomatoes just aren’t the same.  Pulling a plump, juicy tomato from the vine, feeling the heat of the flesh from the sun, cutting into the tomato and getting that smell of ripe summer… it just does not get better than that.  Especially when it is the very first tomato of the season.

We reserve the first tomato of the season for our BLT ritual – served al fresco, with wine, for lunch. Our goal, which we hit almost every year, is that this tomato is ripened by the first weekend of July.   But the details of the BLT tend to vary from year to year, depending on what is on hand and at its freshest.  This year our BLT contained Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Bacon, arugula, Butler Farms Fresh Brebis Cheese with Garlic and Herbs, and farm fresh sweet onion.

And yes, it was as good as it looked.

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Ok maybe that second headline is a bit over the top. There has been a lot of fretting about the dangers of choking on hot dogs because of a policy statement on children and choking issued in February by the American Academy of Pediatrics. With summer upon us and the sizzles and smells of tubular meat in the air, the fear mongering is being ratcheted up! Now don’t misunderstand me, choking is a bad thing. It has always been a bad thing.

My mom relates a tale to her and I driving down the road when I was a small boy. More than likely I was standing up in the back seat with no seatbelt (you just didn’t do that in the early 60’s). She had given me a lifesavers candy. As she tells it, I began to choke on it and she had to pull the car over and pull me from the back seat. The image of me hanging upside down from my mother’s arms; her smacking the crap out of my back, makes me wonder why she wasn’t arrested for child abuse. If that were to happen today, I am sure she would have. From that day forward I was not allowed to eat a hot dog that wasn’t cut into 5000 pieces until I reached the age of 17. Even today “Grandma” will tell her grandchildren to “cut that hot dog up before you eat it”. This does not thrill my 20 year old daughter. Do we have to completely change a historic food icon because parents don’t tell their kids to “chew your food” or because they don’t cut their hot dogs up before they serve them?

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