A few weeks ago, I tried making raw tomato leaf tea by stuffing tomato leaves in hot water and letting it steep, and found the experience underwhelming. I described the experience as “a little too delicate.” By which I meant that it tasted like slightly green leaf water with a blink-and-you-miss-it tomato undertone.

 

But the number of suckers that need to be pinched off has not changed, and in fact, despite religiously checking my tomato vines every morning for new suckers, sometimes there end up being massive suckers that seem to come from nowhere that need to be pruned. So I have continued to generate a large number of excess tomato leaves. So of course you know what that means: tea experimentation time!

 

I ran these basically simultaneously so I could do direct taste tastes. First up: a green tea version of tomato leaf tea, where the leaves were plucked from the stem, cleaned, patted dry, lightly withered, rolled, pan-fired, then dried. This was not “delicate” in the sense that the raw tomato leaves were, but that incredible scent that I associate with tomato leaves disappeared. The flavor that was there was stronger: vegetal and robust and caramelized, with a tiny hint of roasted tomato lingering at the end that you would only notice if I told you it existed and begged you to wait for it. But that hint was so tiny that I really won’t say this was worth the enormous effort involved in the green-tea processing.

 

Second: a white-tea version of tomato leaf tea. The leaves were stripped from the plant, cleaned, patted dry, and then left to completely dry in the shade on a day that was around 100 degrees hot and dry as a bone (I include this information here in case it turns out to be relevant).

 

I had kind of expected that the white-tea version would commit all the same sins as the raw tea, but I was completely wrong. There was an incredibly magic alchemy here—where all the compounds that contributed to the heavy vegetable flavor denatured, leaving only the ones that give tomato leaves their scent. This was the tea I had been hoping for: something that tasted exactly the way tomato leaves smell.

 

It was an absolutely shocking revelation of a tea—so good that I’m now letting my suckers grow just a little longer just to make more tea, and I’m going to crumble some up and toss it in a spice jar and try it that way, too.

 

If you have a garden and are growing tomatoes,  imagine me grabbing you by your lapels with crazy eyes and screaming, “shade dry the tomato leaves from your suckers!!! Thank me later!!!”

These tomato leaves came from my garden. I will have to perform additional testing, but the leaves came from Sun Gold and Black Truffle tomato plants.

It’s now the time of year where my squash plants are sending out hordes of hopeful male squash blossoms, and since I usually take about five seconds to make sure I hand-pollinate any of the female squash blossoms I see, I have no compunction about slaying the male blossoms and stuffing them with yummy things.

 

One of my annoyances about the current time is that I definitely do feel better if I have a high protein breakfast, but I don’t love meat (it just makes me feel less energetic), and while there are other things that work well for me, one of the constant things everyone seems to throw into their high protein breakfast recipe is cottage cheese. Despite loving every milk product known to man, I do not digest milk proteins well (no, not that milk protein either—I have experimented—and no, it’s not purely a lactase problem). 

 

My solution was discovered by a combination of laziness and happy accident. If you are making tofu, and you add just a little bit too much water, and you wait just a little too long before dumping it into your tofu mold, the thing you will get is very loose bean curds which are filled with protein and have the mouthfeel and structural characteristics of cottage cheese. (I have found people giving recipes for this and, for instance, pea-protein cottage cheese but they often add yogurt or something to make it better approximate the texture, and I just don’t think that’s necessary. You’re already making tofu, albeit lazy style. You’re doing enough work.)

 

So: take about half a cup of loose curds (bean or milk), shake off the water, toss them on a pan on medium-high heat with a little oil, add salt and a pinch of MSG, and then sprinkle in yummy things like basil and lemon zest, tasting all the way, until your loose bean curds taste delicious. Pop them in a bowl and wipe your pan.

 

While that’s happening, or possibly before, go fetch squash blossoms from your garden. (If you’re having this for breakfast, as I do, you can do this whenever. But squash blossoms are most open in the AM so if you are planning an evening snack, you may want to pre-gather). I suggest slaying as many of the men as you can find, as they come in excess.

 

How many? Let’s be honest—the limiting factor is the number of squash blossoms in your garden. But if you must know, if you’re using half a cup of cottage bean curd, you’ll probably have enough to stuff 5-8 blossoms and also to eat a few spoonfuls of the extra insides. Gently rinse and pat dry your squash blossoms.

 

Now, make your breading. I use a few spoonfuls of chickpea flower, a tiny pinch of baking powder, and enough water that the resulting batter will run just a little bit rather than drip, but isn’t fully liquid.

 

Gently hold them open and then, if you are like me, lose your mind and stuff them so full of the filling that they split. If you have actual patience and dexterity, get just enough filling inside that you can pinch the edges of the blossom over the filling. Roll them in the dough. Fry them in a pan with about a quarter inch of standing oil on medium, turning until golden brown. These go well with lemon-pickled red onions (thinly slice red onions/boil a combo of half water/half lemon juice with salt to taste/pour over sliced red onions and agitate).

Note: there is only one squash blossom on the plate because I absolutely split all the other blossoms in both of the trials of this dish. I’m just plating a single squash blossom like this to pretend like I’m competent. Which is goofy because I just told you I’m not.

I saw the premise for this book almost a year ago and it was so exciting that I immediately preordered it, and then ripped through it this last week.

 

This book is excellent. The premise is that Jada Williams is working a mall job with student loans. She is barely making ends meet until she is fired, at which point she ends up with a bunch of side-hustles trying to make ends meet. Ends don’t meet, and the thing that she doesn’t have space in her budget for is her student loan payments.

 

This book is set in a world that I would describe as hyper-realistic: so realistic about the world we live in that sometimes you have to wipe the sweat off your brow because you recognize the exact thing she’s talking about. It’s the kind of realistic that recognizes that Millenials are in their late-thirties and early-forties now, a thing that media outlets seem to forget on the regular. It’s the kind of realistic that describes a job like this: “If the uniforms look cute, if the website has any of that weird pink they’ve assigned to people in their thirties and forties, if there is any reference to families in the materials… you will need a year of therapy after the job ends.” Whew.

 

There is one element that feels like our world, except the pain dial has been upped from a nine to a twelve: In Jada’s world, there are debt police. Actual police, who wear turquoise (rather than blue) uniforms. If you fail to pay your debts, they will come to your house—or your job—or meet you in the grocery store—and they will rough you up and steal all your things.

 

And they will do it in front of other people who will just watch and then mutter that you deserved to get beaten for not paying your loans.

 

There are parts of this book that are rough to read, but I don’t want you to think that it’s just a book about how much debt sucks. This book is funny as hell. The characters are lovable and incisive and flawed in a way that forces you to acknowledge that people in debt are not perfect and people should not have to be absolute financial and personal angels in order to live a life where they can enjoy whatever it is that brings them small-scale joy. I adored Jada. 

 

As the book cover will tell you, this is a heist book: a book in which Jada and her mall-working friends all get tired of being beaten up by the debt police and come up with a plan to end student debt once and for all.

 

But more than anything, it’s a book about hope. About building a better world. About people who are openly, sneeringly eager, to watch you suffer, and yet beneath the surface, the millions of people are fellow sufferers are standing alongside them, too afraid of being targeted to say anything.

 

I know this book was written before this current moment, but it felt even more timely for where we are. I really needed to read this book right now.

 

(If you are wondering, it’s not even slightly a romance—so don’t expect that—but it’s a book about justice and building community, and if you like that in your romances, you will like this as well.)

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I do not think I have included pictures of my garden in my newsletter yet, although I have mentioned it quite a bit.

 

Anyway, newsletter bonus: here are my plants!

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