May 10 2005
Too Many Tomatoes
Finally, the plumbing knows who’s boss – Me!
Using my superhuman powers of persuasion, I convinced a friend to plunge away the commode-based ickiness (leaving my ignorance intact). Using my superhuman powers of whining, I finally got the building manager to get a plumber. After all, it’s only been 10 days of showering at the gym (though, as motives go for working out, having no hot water at home is pretty much unbeatable). He fixed it in less than an hour. There must be some mathematical formula for how long you wait for, say, a plumber or the car fix-it guy to show up (an interminably long time) versus how long it takes them to fix whatever it is (a breathtakingly tiny amount of time).
Having hot water seems to have woken up my long-dormant domestic side (actually, it was officially declared dead after being in a coma for so long), since I immediately started performing unnatural acts in the kitchen, like washing the dishes(!) and somehow ending up on a cooking binge.
It all started out innocently enough by deciding to make salsa. I made it, but discovered that I had been far too enthusiastic in my tomato buying, leaving me, like so many cooks before me, with Too Many Tomatoes. I roasted them in the oven with cloves of garlic, olive oil, freshly ground pepper, and thyme until they were soft and then squashed them all up (sans skin). Instant pasta sauce! Then I realized that the cilantro and scallions and limes I had left over from making the salsa could also be used for a Thai salad with the addition of sugar, red pepper flakes, mint (which I happened to have), and fish sauce, so I did that, too.
Quite an achievement for a girl with an unrivalled collection of take out and delivery menus, n’est-ce pas? What with the gardened windowboxes and all, they might start calling me Suzy Homemaker. I’ve been called worse things. I think.