Tomatoes

Desiree made sinigang soup.  For those of us from my hometown of East Helena, Montana, sinigang soup translates into “sour soup”.  Tamarind is the agent used for souring the soup and pork is traditionally the protein introduced into the stock.

Sinigang soup has landed as my favorite dish from the Philippines.

In making this batch of soup, Desiree used two tomatoes grown in our sunroom.  One of the tomatoes was green, the other red.  Desiree nibbled at a couple smallish ripe tomatoes early on, but this marks the first official use (in a meal) of something grown in our sunroom.

That’s a pretty big deal.

Maybe, I thought, we can make that darned sunroom pay for itself in produce.

Last year, the price of tomatoes settled somewhere near $1.90 per pound.  What if we grew a pound of edible tomatoes every week?  At that rate, accounting for a few expenses along the way, we could pay for the cost of my sunroom in something near 400 years.

Desiree Holding Our Sunroom Tomatoes

Tomato Plants in Our Sunroom

—Mitchell Hegman