The Miracle of Leftovers

School has begun again, and each morning starts the same way for me: caffeine first, lunches for my preteen girls next. The transition seems simple, but what seems straightforward is often fraught with turbulence, as is the case here.

When the oven glows at 6:15am, before anyone else is awake, steaming coffee in hand, I throw open the refrigerator door only to find that I cannot locate the generally-appeasing strawberry jelly. Sighing commences. I have to put the coffee down. Soon, both hands push aside the fresh container of Duke’s, a half-full jar of spicy pickles, and three bowls of garden vegetables. I spot the mega-sized jelly jar behind the fluted lavender bowl. More sighing. With my left hand, I grab the fluted bowl and send a dozen cherry tomatoes free-wheeling around my bare feet. If I had gotten to drink any coffee, I would be stabbing at the miniature tomatoes with a poignant slurry of curses. As it is, I sink to my arthritic knees and gather them back up with a final sigh.

Each morning, in a hollow I create with the bottom of my pajama shirt, I carry about two dozen cherry tomatoes, eight okra, three green peppers, and five jalapeños from my garden. After five days, the joy is still palpable. After fifteen, it slumps toward anemic. After a month, my friends insist they don’t want any more Ziploc bags stuffed with produce. Subversively, as Southerners will do, they send me recipes for things like jalapeño drip jam so I will cease foisting the peppers on others.

After the kids and their hard-won lunches have been delivered to school, and after I am allowed to retrieve my cup of coffee, I holler from the front room across the foyer to my husband, who is preparing his sermon at the dining table. “Hey, does it say what the disciples did with the leftover bread and fish after feeding the five thousand?” He smirks, searching my face for signs of sincerity. “No,” he says, keeping his eyes on me, waiting to see what reckless thought will take the conversation captive. “Just checking,” I mumble. “Leftover fish. Eeek,” I grimace. But before he has time to reenter his work, I yell again, “Bread pudding!” “What?” he says, with confusion and hesitancy. “That’s what we do with leftover, staling bread: make bread pudding! Doesn’t that sound so good right now? Ooooh, or panzanella!”

Ah, yes, panzanella. If only I had some tomatoes around. Suddenly, the swift and concise blade of truth falls. Bowls of provision are not the problem. I am the problem.

When I have an attitude problem and need a swift kick and my mother is otherwise occupied or avoiding my phone calls, I turn to Robert Farrar Capon, which usually does the trick. Ever trustworthy, here he is again to set me straight. He says of the world, “It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have.” He is right.

Lack of imagination, appreciation, and perhaps time were my problems, not a lack of options.

In the first week of garden harvests, I ate most of the tomatoes walking barefoot through the dewy grass back to the house. I marveled at the shapes and colors. They were not all merely tomatoes, but I remembered their kind: Sungold, Tiny Tim, Super Sweet 100, Green Grape. I had been flabbergasted, in awe of each one of these coin-sized miracles.

Now? Leftover fish. Bowls of it. Grimace.

In honor of Capon’s wisdom and my mother’s, who, if she hadn’t been ducking my calls would have said the same thing, tonight I am making tomato sauce. 

I manage to sink two of the three bowls of veggies loitering in my fridge and the last bottle of red wine into the pan. It almost cannot go wrong. Capon says, “It is the finish to end all finishes.” Indeed, tonight we are celebrating the fact that it is not quite finished, for there are a hundred more tiny, green orbs on the vines.

Tomorrow morning at six, after I pad barefoot out to the garden with fresh coffee, I will return with a shirt pouch full of more okra, tomatoes, and peppers. I will put them in a fluted navy bowl and hide the easiest route to the strawberry jelly jar. Mid-sandwich making, I will slosh coffee on myself as I spill half a bowl of tomatoes to the floor. They will roll like marbles, finding the tricky spots under the fridge. I will sigh, inhale all the lingering scent of tonight’s sauce, and remember, again, the miracle of leftovers.