Eric Clapton is playing on the 'puter as I write this. First, it's the Derek & The Dominos version of Layla, and then the unplugged version of Layla, lather, rinse, repeat. I suspect most of us have Patti Boyds in our lives, and that's why Layla is thought to be such a great song by so many critics.

It doesn't hurt that Eric is one of the few guitarists that can make his guitar gently weep. Ain't hardly anyone that ever did a cover of that song, except Duane Allman, and it's not really a cover if you played on the original recording, is it?

D. C. al Coda

This would be the perfect spot, I suppose, to launch into a story about the one true love, truly unattainable, of my life, but I think I'll pass on that one tonight. I'm the guy who went to the manager of the Hallmark shop, asking if I could get a price break if I buy two dozen of the card that says, "To my one true love, ever and always, be my Valentine."

Most guys, I think, are. Men are romantics. Walk past us, and we're in love. If your perfume wafts our way, you can't walk past us; we follow you. Susie explained that much to me, one night in a dark corner, and then went on to explain that's why she never dates single men. She wants to rent, not own, and it's too hard to peel away clingy men. But some women are that way, too. When they asked Charlie Sheen why he paid women to have sex with him, he said he didn't pay them for that; he paid them to go away afterwards.

This Blonde Isn't

But I will talk about a dumb blonde, if it suits you. This one is so dumb, her hair has turned brunette. Her name is Jan Kirby, and with Tim Haas, she hosts "Southern Fresh", a cooking show on RFD-TV. I was going through the TiVO Suggestions and discovered an episode of theirs on container gardening. That's not planting seeds and producing a harvest of boxes and bags; instead, it's putting your seeds in containers of dirt instead of out in the garden.

Jan was telling us all about tomatoes. These things, she said, I call 'em suckers. No, ma'am, it's not that you call them suckers, that's what the name is for them. And she proceeded to tell us that we should get rid of the suckers because we want the plant to put all its energy into producing fruit.

Pelting Didn't Help

No matter how loudly I yelled, no matter how many socks and pairs of undershorts I threw at the TV, I couldn't get her attention. Suckers form roots. You want a good strong root system. In fact, when one transplants tomato starts into the garden, one should plant them neck-high in the dirt, not just waist high, because the stem will turn into root, and the stronger the root system, the stronger and healthier the plant.

What they didn't mention, but is especially important in container crops, is keeping the plant's roots moist but not wet. Containers tend to dry out quickly, and the plant's roots need to be able to draw moisture to replace that which transpires through the leaves. On the other hand, if a plant sits in standing water, the roots get eaten up by rot, and that's no good, either.

Vitamins, Not Food

You've heard people call fertilizer "plant food" but it's really plant vitamins. Tomato fruits are mostly made of carbon (from air), water (from water) and energy (from sunlight), with some minerals and vitamins from the soil. Trace minerals are especially important, as they greatly influence the flavor.

But God was feeling charitable on the day that he invented tomatoes. No matter how dumb you are, you can only fuck up a homegrown tomato a certain amount, and so most homegrown tomatoes are fairly good.

Then, they went inside, and Tim started talking about cooking. He mentioned that tomatoes were second only to garlic in cooking. I went up and gathered my socks and underwear, because I had run out of ammunition. Tim is one of those cooks that makes everything taste of garlic.

The Cruelest Allium

If I have the slightest bit of garlic, I immediately get a headache. My late first wife, Em, didn't believe me about that, and kept trying to sneak garlic powder into dishes, finally realizing that I wasn't kidding about it. Sometimes, I live with the headache anyway; I get the hankering, every so often, for garlic spears, and I grab swallow several ibuprofen as I fetch the jar from the refrigerator. But if you can't figure out how to make foods with a variety of tastes, instead of making everything garlicy, you ain't much of a cook.

And then they mentioned that you can freeze tomatoes when you have too many. If you are growing tomatoes in canisters, that doesn't seem too likely. But anyhow, they were talking about how you peel tomatoes for freezing.

I had a boss once, who previously worked for Campbell Soup. He was so thrilled that I couldn't guess how Campbell's peeled tomatoes. They put the maters in a vessel, and hit them with live steam, he said, and the skin explodes off the tomatoes. Oh, yeah? Jan told us that you make a cross-nick in the bottom of the tomatoes, and drop them into scalding water, and they'd slip right off.

Teaching Granny To Suck Eggs

You wouldn't want to be peeling the skins off the tomatoes with a paring knife like your grandmother, Jan crows. Except I don't know where Jan came up with her addle-pated grandmother. Where I come from, every grandmother knows to scald tomatoes to skin them. It's in the Ball Blue Book, in the Keer Red Book, in the instructions your county extension agent gives out for canning tomatoes, and it's how they peeled tomatoes at the ketchup factory back home.

Like I said, blonde, except for the hair color. They've got a good concept with the Southern Fresh cooking show, if only they'd come up with someone who knows something about gardening and cooking.

It was during a lull in the pelting of the television show that Blondie asked me if I'd like a salad for supper. It seems like we've been eating salad every day for the past two weeks, usually two times a day, and while I like salad, and while Blondie makes exceptionally good salads, I said no.

Whassamatta Salad?

Don't I like salad any more? Sure, I like salad, but I'm saladed out. Steak, she asks? Sure.

But when I come down, it turns out that she didn't have any, so I get a preformed hamburger overcooked into a piece of shoe leather, and some steamed vegetables.

I like steamed veggies, but the people that produced that bag had a bunch of carrots formed into sticks of various thicknesses and lengths, whole English peas, and large chunks of broccoli stem and crown, again of varying size. There were also some other things, hard to identify, but I suspect they included red peppers.

They say one eats with his eyes, so an attractive presentation is important. What's more important is that size be uniform, or else you end up with small pieces that are mushy moosh and large pieces that are crunchy undercooked. It seemed a shame, because these weren't bad vegetables before they were cut up, they were appropriately ripe.

Blondie, The Cut-Up

We'd bought some strawberries at Giant a couple of days ago. I cut them up, Blondie said, and they're in the refrigerator. I went to get them, and was disappointed.

Normally, when you hull the berries, you put them in a bowl, and cover them with a half cup or so of sugar, so that the berries get soft and you end up with a lot of juice. Instead, the sliced berries were crisp, and piled in a colander.

Meanwhile, Blondie got out a pound cake, and put a couple of slices on paper plates. No, honey, I told her, bowls. Otherwise, the milk ends up all over the floor.

I Got A Bowl

I got out a bowl, poured the strawberries into it, and added some sugar. It takes time for the sugar to work, so when I was ready for the dessert, the strawberries weren't. I ended up putting a few spoonfuls on the cake anyway, and adding some milk atop.

I don't ask Blondie to bake anything. She says she can't, and I will take her at her word. If you're not suffering from vascular dementia, though, you probably can make good shortcakes; they're awfully easy. Basically, it's just a sweet biscuit.

Mix 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 3/8 cups of sugar and 1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg, then cut in 4 tablespoons of lard. That should give you a really "crumby" mix. Mix 2 eggs in 1/2 cup of milk (I actually use a smidge more) and then add this to the dry ingredients and just barely mix together, then drop onto a cookie sheet (I use a sheet cake pan). You can brush the biscuits with melted butter, and sprinkle with sugar if you like. Bake until brown. It takes about 10 minutes at 400F.

So Much Better

Real shortcakes are so much better than the sponge cakes or pound cakes they sell in the produce department. Mamma always used to cut them in half along the waistline of the biscuit, but they tend to fall apart. I don't even bother to try cutting; I just crumble them into large fragments.

The strawberries were really huge, the ones that Blondie got, and I should have known better, but I was disappointed anyway. There's always the hope that huge strawberries will have a huge taste. 'Member me saying something about trace minerals? If you have really huge strawberries, that means (among other things) that there's a lot of water in them. The trace minerals and the natural sugars are diluted, and there's neither much flavor nor much sweetness. Small strawberries are so much better.

Shari's Berries

On the Dan Patrick show, they were advertising Shari's Berries. Dan warned the Danettes that if someone helped himself to the box before he did, that someone would be fired. He opened the box on the air, and they were OK. In fact, they were pretty hard to figure out. They were the size of a medium small potato, and because they were covered with chocolate and then further decorated, it was hard to decide what they were. I had to go to their website

Mother's Day is Sunday. If you click on the microphone on the Shari's Berries website, and type in "Patrick", you can get a half-dozen berries - 2 dark chocolate dipped, 2 milk, 2 white, all of them decorated - for $19.98. On the other hand, I just told you that huge strawberries just aren't all that good. This would be a good gift if you can't be there in person, and you're more concerned about boggling her eyes than with pleasing her palate. If you can be there in person, some strawberry shortcake over your own homemade shortcakes would be nice.

Operator? Person-To-Ghost, Please.

Me, I'd like to call Mamma on the phone, but she's been gone a couple of decades. "What'll you do when you get lonely And nobody's waiting by your side?" I guess you could always play Layla on the computer. I'm not sure which version I like better.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Ball Blue Book - blonde - brunette - Campbell Soup - Charlie Sheen - container gardening - Dan Patrick - Derek & The Dominos - Duane Allman - Eric Clapton - garlic - Hallmark - Jan Kirby - Keer Red Book - Layla - milk - pound cake - prostitutes - salad - Shari's Berries - shortcake - Southern Fresh - sponge cake - strawberries - suckers - Tim Haas - tomatoes - Valentine - vascular dementia