When Life Hands You Tomatoes...

I met a longtime friend for lunch last week. As we were saying our goodbyes after our marathon meal and catch-up session she asked me to follow her to her car because (as she put it), "I have a job for you." No kidding. She opened her trunk and presented me with a large - very large - bag of the most beautiful, ripe red Roma tomatoes. My job? Make marinara sauce.

Confession: Although I'm Italian by blood and pretty much love all things Italian I have never, ever made tomato sauce from scratch. I can, however, doctor any jar of Classico like no one's business. (My Nonna Angelina is somewhere in heaven disavowing me right now.)

Another confession: Fresh produce makes me feel guilty - as in, "If you don't deal with me now I will rot and turn to mush and that's incredibly wasteful and there are people starving and it's all your fault." I come by the guilt naturally as the other 50% of me is Jewish. My husband claims that my Italian Catholic and Russian Jew mix explains my tendency toward hysterical guilt. Makes sense to me.

Anyway I returned home with a bag full of guilt - a bag that kept calling to me from the dark recesses of my refrigerator until this morning when I decided to peel the little darlings and make my first ever batch of marinara sauce. After a brief internet search, I created my own recipe and headed out to the store to purchase the rest of the ingredients.

This is where the story gets interesting, at least to me.

A couple of days ago I ambled down to our mailbox to pick up the mail. We share a rural curbside mailbox with our neighbor - two receptacles mounted on a 4x4 post embedded into a concrete base. On this particular day I opened our mailbox as usual, except this time the entire mailbox fell over and I was left holding onto the little door, just as another neighbor drove by. Slightly embarrassed I waved to the neighbor as if it was perfectly natural to be holding onto a mailbox door while the rest of it was crashing at my feet. The neighbor waved back and kept on going so I guess my casual and jaunty attitude fooled her. (By the way, dual mailboxes embedded in concrete are heavy - if one starts to topple on you best to step aside.)

Yesterday my husband, Greg, and I purchased a new prefab cement base with the intention of repairing the thing today so the mail carrier can resume delivery. Apparently the USPS does not leave mail a) in a tipsy receptacle b) on the dirt next to a tipsy receptacle or c) at your front door.

Anyway, this afternoon as I was getting in Ernest (my Prius) to get ingredients for the marinara sauce I remembered that the new, very heavy cement base was still in my trunk so I hoisted it out and set it off to the side of the garage, well out of the way of human and auto traffic.

I made the roundtrip to the store in record time and turned into our driveway happily engrossed in "This American Life." As I pulled into the garage I suddenly heard a deafening, tearing, crunching sound that was not coming from Ira Glass on our local NPR station. Simultaneously, Greg came running out of the house screaming, "Nooooooo!"

Apparently in the 10 minutes I was away from the house, my loving partner moved the cement block from the safety of the sidelines into my usual parking spot. When I came home, I figured the thing was right where I left it - in my defense, our driveway is steep so it's hard to see over the hood of the car when pulling in. Consequently I blithely headed for my designated space thereby encountering the cement block which eventually came to rest tightly wedged under the passenger side of the car.

I think we both handled it quite well. Greg stood outside the car and stared at the ground for about an hour without saying a word and I sat in the car with my head in my hands for about the same length of time. Then I collected my groceries, went inside and made marinara sauce. Greg jacked up the car, removed the cement block, and fixed the mailbox.

When life hands you tomatoes, make marinara sauce.