Green Tomato

In an effort to divide and conquer, while Dennis made a hardware store run, I found myself alone at the nursery recently, which afforded me a rare bit of power and influence. Even though my list said, "more tomatoes, variety of my choosing," my shopper's eye drifted, almost without my realizing it, beyond the tomato table, just as it might drift toward the ladies shoe department or the jewelry counter in other shopping venues.

But, as they say, browse and ye shall find. In this case, I found tomatillo plants with beautiful green papery globes growing on thriving, young plants. And my brain, along with my tastebuds, immediately conjured up bowls of bright salsa verde. Without hesitation, I grabbed two plants and headed for the cash register.

Driving home, I gauged how much of a sales pitch I would need in order to get my spouse's buy-in on the tomatillos, since they were perhaps a tomato cousin, but definitely not on my shopping list. The answer was only a tiny sales job, because as soon as he understood that tomatillos were the base of the delicious green salsa we regularly consumed at our favorite Mexican restaurant, he was fully on board. Dennis immediately planted them and then did some Internet research on how succesful other gardeners were with tomatillos.

We quickly learned that my shopper's instinct to buy two plants was spot on, because tomatillos apparently needed a buddy in order to cross-pollinate. However, Dennis had not planted them exactly side-by-side, and we worried they were too far apart. Of course, we only considered this a problem for a minute or two, before arriving at the obvious solution: Go back to the nursery and buy two more plants, which we did.

Now we have four tomatillo plants, which seem to be thriving. Because I couldn't wait for them to mature, I bought a couple of tomatillos at Whole Foods yesterday and made a small bowl of salsa last night. If yesterday's salsa is any indication of what's to come, this is going to be a very good summer.