Wednesday's snow is almost gone. More is expected on Monday. These are the days we envisioned in the heat of last August, telling ourselves that it would all be eventually worth it and hoping that we would not be hit by a bus in the meantime.

August is when the local tomatoes here are at their best. And August is when we make sun-dried tomatoes -- so that we can eat them in February and remember the sun. We sweat a lot in August so that in February we can miss the feeling of sweat, I guess. In Colorado Springs, you have to make your own fun.

We call our sundried tomatoes "Tuscan Sun-Dried Tomatoes" because of the Detroit Rule ("Food sounds better with the name of a place in front of it -- with one exception.") although they are not sun-dried and are not particularly Tuscan in any way. When the Food Police come, there will, undoubtedly, be hell to pay.

This is how we make them:

Start by making Basil-Infused Olive Oil (unless you are using your own tomatoes, in which case, "Start by growing tomatoes.") To make BIOO, roughly chop up a big pile of fresh basil. Mix this with an equal amount in volume of olive oil. How you determine equal amounts of something that comes in a big pile of foliage and and something that comes in a thick liquid is anyone's guess. You may, if you like, drink a lovely glass of red wine to help you figure that out -- you still won't know what "equal amounts" means, but you won't care so much. Heat the mixture gently in a pan on the stove. (Jonathan says, "If there are equal amounts of basil and oil, why is it basil-infused oil and not oil-infused basil?" I would explain it to him, but the early morning glass of wine has made that seem rather difficult, so we call ours Basil-Confused Olive Oil instead. This is what happens when you live with a mathematician. Where were we?)

Heat the oil/basil confusion gently on the stove while kind of pounding it every now and then with the tip of a wooden spoon to bruise the basil and release the oil. Heat until just barely simmering and then turn off the heat and let it cool. When it is completely cool, strain it into a bottle or jar. This can be done way ahead of time and can be done with any fresh herb. Rosemary is particularly nice.

The next step is to wait until the tomatoes are at their very best and then buy a lot of them. Like two or three dozen if they are big. Maybe more. Get perfectly ripe and beautiful ones. Smell them to make sure that they are very tomato-y. The aroma should make your eyes kind of roll back in your head and other people also buying tomatoes will see you fondling the produce and swooning and they will move away from you, giving you room to get all the best tomatoes (everyone, that is, except for one old lady who knows exactly what you are doing and doesn't give an inch. That old lady is your friend and you will give each other knowing smiles over by the zucchini later.) When you get home, wash the tomatoes, but don't peel them.

Cut them into quarters and cut off the hard green stem part inside. Use you thumb to gently scrape out the seeds. You don't have to be fascist about it. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees.

Line as many baking sheets, cake pans, etc., with parchment paper as you can fit into your oven. Arrange your oven racks to accommodate everything. Put the cut tomatoes on the parchment paper, skin side down, in one layer. I lay them out very carefully to use every bit of space while making sure that none of them are underneath others. I wish I had a picture of this because it is a thing of completely anal beauty, but it did not occur to me last August to photograph any of this. (This failure to photograph myself, more than anything else, gives away my extreme elderliness, I guess.) Lightly sprinkle the tomato wedges with a bit of dried basil leaves and then with kosher salt -- no iodine! (Iodine turns preserved things brown -- or at least, that is my understanding. I have never actually seen this because I was raised by a bunch of southern ladies and have been part of the pickling/canning/preserving process since before I can remember. I have always known about the iodine in the same way that kids growing up in Colorado know about carrying water bottles with them everywhere and kids growing up in New York City know, presumably, about avoiding rats and Woody Allen.) 

Then into the oven the tomatoes go. (This is the part where they are not exactly [or at all] sun-dried. I will not discuss the reasons for this, but only mention squirrels, birds, and bugs in the backyard -- it's like a Hitchcock film out there.) They (the tomatoes, not [hopefully] the squirrels, etc.) stay in the oven at 200 degrees for anywhere from seven to 14 hours, so prepare yourself. I try to put them in the oven the very last thing at night and then wake up early and start checking on them. It is August, after all, and having the oven on -- even at 200 degrees -- all day long is really too gruesome to contemplate. Better, apparently, to risk your house burning down in the middle of the night from an unattended oven.

After seven hours, start checking on them. They are ready when they are the consistency of fruit leather and are quite dry, but not brown or crunchy. They should still be bendable -- like, you know, a sun-dried tomato. They might not be all ready at the same time, like children on the way to school in the morning, so take out the ones that are dry and leave the others longer.

(Heavens, this post is getting long! Here is a close-up of one of the flying pigs from yesterday to cheer you up.)

It is morning when you are doing this and you will need coffee because there is hot oil coming up and hot oil and drowsiness do not mix. Carefully calibrate the coffee, though, because jitteriness and hot oil also do not mix. If you fear that you might overdo the caffeine, you can handle it the Italian way by making yourself a Caffé Corretto, which is a shot of espresso with a shot of grappa in it. Grappa is the distilled product of the seeds, skins, and stems leftover after pressing the grapes for wine. It smells like flowers and goes down like gasoline. It is sort of like Italian moonshine. I think it is funny that this is what Italians call "correct coffee." There is no doubt in my mind that Caffé Corretto played an enormous role in creating the Renaissance -- or at least the Caravaggio part of it.

In any case, when all the tomatoes are dry, roast some cloves of garlic: take some peeled whole garlic cloves and put them on a square of aluminum foil with some olive oil. Twist the aluminum up to look like a big Hershey's Kiss with the garlic and olive oil inside. Bake at 330 degrees for about 30 minutes or so, depending on the size of your cloves. They should be the color of old ivory when they are done -- not the color of sepia. 

While they are roasting, mix together four cups of water with half a cup of apple cider vinegar in a non-reactive sauce pan on the stove and bring it to a gentle boil. In another sauce pan, start gently heating your basil-confused olive oil from so long ago.

When the vinegar mixture is boiling, put the dried tomatoes in it several at a time and let them boil for two minutes before taking them out with a slotted spoon and putting them to drain a bit on paper towels. By the time this is done, the garlic should be ready.

You should now have very very very very clean jars ready to go. It is probably a good idea to have been boiling them in a big pot of water starting when you got up, but I forgot to tell you that earlier. I blame the whole Caffé Corretto thing. How Michelangelo got the entire Sistine ceiling done is a mystery to me.

Start packing the clean jars with layers of dried tomatoes that have been vinegared, throw a clove of roasted garlic in every now and then. Occasionally sprinkle in some chopped fresh herbs -- I put in chopped basil and thyme. Throwing in a sprig of fresh rosemary is always nice. As you are packing the jar quite tightly with layers of tomatoes, pause every now and then and pour in some of the hot basil-confused olive oil that you have been warming on the stove. Be careful -- it is hot and it might splatter a bit. This is where you want to be sure that you have your caffeine/alcohol intake correctly calibrated -- it is not a time to fuck around. The tomatoes might float a little bit in the hot oil. If they do, carefully push them down with a spoon.

Stop putting in the tomatoes when they are about half an inch from the top of the jar. Fill the oil until it is a quarter of an inch from the top. Put a lid on the jar and store it in a dark, cool place. It should keep for many months. Then sit back, look forward to February, and wonder why you didn't just buy the fuckers from the store.