Killer tomatoes

Yesterday, because I am lazy, and also in an effort to slow the sucking of my life force whenever I enter my place of employment, I stayed home. It helped that it was to be the last sunny day for the next year or so. I composed a short "I'm taking a personal day and if you don't like it, you can see me in hell!" message to my boss (who is a lovely person, I just added the "see me in hell" part because I am a timid wussy girl and must work myself into a full-on Tizzy in order to Be A Rebel. By staying home from work. Although, how much of a rebel can you be when you take a personal day instead of pretending to be sick? Gah.)

Also, the average person playing hooky from their full-time job probably goes back to bed after hitting "send" on the not-going-in-today email message, but oh, not me. No. I make tomato sauce.

Phillip shipped off for his day at the office and I tapped my fingers on the kitchen counter scheduling the next eight hours. I made a list, people. I made a list of the the things I wanted to do before noon, the things I wanted to before five, the things I needed to buy at the grocery store and the things I didn't feel like doing but needed to get done (hello final project!) Mostly I just wanted to go shopping at U Village, but my shopping friend was unavailable until later that afternoon, so I decided to start on dinner. At nine in the morning.

I thought I would have to buy tomato sauce, like the rest of America, but Internet, I hail from the tomato sauce capital of the universe, and also, I own a very pretty sparkly kitchen that has produced only twelve tons of chicken stirfry and fourteen thousand chocolate chip cookies in its year-long existence. We'd also just been to Costco and the fridge was full of produce that we were going to have to throw out in a week when we would realize, for the millionth time, that we shouldn't buy healthy food because healthy food is ignored and then it ROTS.

So anyway. I cored six Roma tomatoes (only six! It was an experiment!) and poured boiling water over them, just like the cookbook said. I peeled off the skins. I squeezed out the seeds (gross) and diced them. I sauteed some garlic in some olive oil, dumped in the tomatoes and let it simmer for 20 minutes. The end result was not pretty. It might have burned a little. It might have been an unfortunate brown color. I tried not to look too closely.

This is the fifth or sixth time I've attempted to make my own tomato sauce. I have yet to succeed. It's true that I did not follow the recipe completely. I did not add onion or carrot or celery, because, EW. I did not eat red sauce for the first twenty years of my life because of all the THINGS floating around in it. Ick. (I didn't like tomatoes either, but fortunately I've snapped out of that.) The only red sauce in the universe that I would eat is the stuff the Italians dump on top of a plate of Spaghetti Pomodoro. Tomatoes, olive oil, basil, garlic, salt, pepper, basta. My sister even gave me a tomato grinder for Christmas one year, but I can't get the grinder to actually grind. It should not be this hard, people.

I had to go buy tomato sauce. (I like this stuff.) Then I made eggplant parmesan. Then I cleaned up the kitchen, made the bed and started some laundry. Then I sat down on the couch and thought about taking a nap. That's what other people do when they stay home from work. But I? Am INSANE and berated myself a full fifteen minutes before my body was finally all, "Girl, you crazy" and fell asleep. But I woke up because they are laying the pipes for the new townhouses next door and those bulldozer thingies are noisy. So I cleaned the bathrooms. Sigh.

The rest of the day took a definite upward turn when I helped my shopping friend spend her entire paycheck at Ann Taylor (let us all kowtow to Pants That Fit!) and, while browsing through Crate & Barrel, fortuitously remembered that I'm going to a wedding and picked a gift off the handly little registry computer thing. So convenient!

THEN, because I am a timid wussy girl who felt incredibly guilty about staying home on a sunny day, I made treats to bring to work. It's all part of the plan- getting the powers that be so fat that when it comes time to fire me, they won't be able to speak for the fat rolls crowding their jowls.

(You may ask: why I am I pursuing this job security strategy when my full-time job makes me want to poke my eyes out with a spork. Good question! Probably becaue I am currently plotting to do away with my crap job entirely and create a new very cool very awesome job and I need them to want to keep me around. Cookies help tremendously. You have no idea.)

And? AND! I am going on vacation this weekend. (I KNOW. A day off AND vacation? Spoiled. Rotten.) This, after my husband and I have spent a small fortune on a new coffee table, a funky dining room ight fixture and mounds of produce we will not be able to consume before it all grows fur. But we are going, dammit, because if we don't go SOMETIME we will never go and I hate that whole "let's wait until the absolute best time" thing because it NEVER EVER WORKS. That is why I have not been to Europe in TWO YEARS. TWO YEARS PEOPLE. For someone who will not eat red sauce unless she is physically in Italy, that is an ETERNITY. I can't believe that the last foreign country I visited was CHINA (and we are totally ignoring Canada because, really, Canada?) and China was EONS AGO.

Whatever. We are going to Friday Harbor, which is not even in a different state, much less a foreign country. And we will be holing up in the least Victorian bed and breakfast available and watching television for 48 hours straight. I CANNOT WAIT.

Comments

[orangepaas]

your days off sound like my days off. Full of house-chores, intermittent napping, and then a blog report to tell all about it :)