Radishes and Tomatoes
Feb. 18th, 2020 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mafiefRadish is done. I’m so happy to have it finished and celebrating that I wrote my first novelette/novella. I did get cake to celebrate. It ended up being my birthday cake, since I finished about the same time, but cake is cake.
Ever wonder about the inspiration for Radish? Probably not. If you are, then the story is under the cut.
Radish was about a gardening adventure of mine. I think I mentioned that I dislike tomatoes. That’s probably an understatement. I don’t eat them. I actively avoid them, and any food made of them. At this point you might be able to guess what I did next.
Each year I tried to eat tomatoes and tomato products and the results are about the same. This result annoyed me. Why don’t I like them? I have limited taste and smell, what is it about tomatoes that makes me want to gag? I want to like them, but can’t?
That got me thinking about secondary metabolites (think color and flavor) of tomatoes. Maybe there is something specific that I don’t like? As most of you are probably aware, tomatoes come in a variety of colors. Perfect. I wanted to methodically test each tomato color. I had green, white, yellow, purple, bicolored, orange, and red as my starting point. The different sizes of tomatoes might matter. My husband says that cherries are sweeter than the large tomatoes. Ok, so now I’ll test size like large, paste, and cherry. That gave me a 7x3 factorial of at least 21 tomato varieties. But there are different species of tomato. Solanum lycopersicum is the common tomato that we are all familiar with. But! In the community garden there were Solanum pimpinellifolium (currant tomato) that were growing free and I collected seeds of them the year before. What about outside of the Solanum genus? We grew tomatillos and ground cherries/husk cherries/cape gooseberries to cover that. Pouring through seed catalogues and designing/redesigning the garden plot was a much needed mental health break from the grad school grind.
That year we had a 25x100’ community garden space. It was, thankfully, not filled with only tomatoes. This was also the year where I was pregnant with my first and hated moving because the hormones made the ligaments in my hips stretch so every step hurt. Needless to say, we had a lot of weeds, but we also grew a lot of tomatoes. Husband had lots of cherry tomatoes to eat and was in tomato heaven (until he got a mouth sore because of the acid in said tomatoes). What we couldn’t preserve, we gave away.
The result was that I don’t like raw red of any species or orange. Whatever compound that is in reds and oranges, but not in others, is the thing that bothers me. I can tolerate white and yellow the best. Notice the word tolerate; I’m not going to actively seek them out.
We separated the colors out and made separate tomato sauces for each color. When I say we… Well, it’s my husband and me and somehow my mom got roped in. Yes, it was multiple days of cooking, a lot of dishes, and it looked like a murder scene in my apartment kitchen during the process. There was also a batch where we mixed everything together because we (well, they - I was out voted) collectively said uncle and just wanted the process done. The recipe we used included other vegetables (like carrots for the sweetness), and I ended up being fine with most of those and semi-tolerant of the red/orange. This is also the only tomato recipe that I’ll eat. For a while I made tomato dishes and the tomato loving husband was rather happy.
It was fun remembering this garden. I asked my husband why he didn’t try to negotiate me out of any of this. I had free reign and did whatever and have no trouble turning it up to 11. He just smiled and said that enjoys supporting his partner’s passion and all the random adventures I involve him in.
Ever wonder about the inspiration for Radish? Probably not. If you are, then the story is under the cut.
Radish was about a gardening adventure of mine. I think I mentioned that I dislike tomatoes. That’s probably an understatement. I don’t eat them. I actively avoid them, and any food made of them. At this point you might be able to guess what I did next.
Each year I tried to eat tomatoes and tomato products and the results are about the same. This result annoyed me. Why don’t I like them? I have limited taste and smell, what is it about tomatoes that makes me want to gag? I want to like them, but can’t?
That got me thinking about secondary metabolites (think color and flavor) of tomatoes. Maybe there is something specific that I don’t like? As most of you are probably aware, tomatoes come in a variety of colors. Perfect. I wanted to methodically test each tomato color. I had green, white, yellow, purple, bicolored, orange, and red as my starting point. The different sizes of tomatoes might matter. My husband says that cherries are sweeter than the large tomatoes. Ok, so now I’ll test size like large, paste, and cherry. That gave me a 7x3 factorial of at least 21 tomato varieties. But there are different species of tomato. Solanum lycopersicum is the common tomato that we are all familiar with. But! In the community garden there were Solanum pimpinellifolium (currant tomato) that were growing free and I collected seeds of them the year before. What about outside of the Solanum genus? We grew tomatillos and ground cherries/husk cherries/cape gooseberries to cover that. Pouring through seed catalogues and designing/redesigning the garden plot was a much needed mental health break from the grad school grind.
That year we had a 25x100’ community garden space. It was, thankfully, not filled with only tomatoes. This was also the year where I was pregnant with my first and hated moving because the hormones made the ligaments in my hips stretch so every step hurt. Needless to say, we had a lot of weeds, but we also grew a lot of tomatoes. Husband had lots of cherry tomatoes to eat and was in tomato heaven (until he got a mouth sore because of the acid in said tomatoes). What we couldn’t preserve, we gave away.
The result was that I don’t like raw red of any species or orange. Whatever compound that is in reds and oranges, but not in others, is the thing that bothers me. I can tolerate white and yellow the best. Notice the word tolerate; I’m not going to actively seek them out.
We separated the colors out and made separate tomato sauces for each color. When I say we… Well, it’s my husband and me and somehow my mom got roped in. Yes, it was multiple days of cooking, a lot of dishes, and it looked like a murder scene in my apartment kitchen during the process. There was also a batch where we mixed everything together because we (well, they - I was out voted) collectively said uncle and just wanted the process done. The recipe we used included other vegetables (like carrots for the sweetness), and I ended up being fine with most of those and semi-tolerant of the red/orange. This is also the only tomato recipe that I’ll eat. For a while I made tomato dishes and the tomato loving husband was rather happy.
It was fun remembering this garden. I asked my husband why he didn’t try to negotiate me out of any of this. I had free reign and did whatever and have no trouble turning it up to 11. He just smiled and said that enjoys supporting his partner’s passion and all the random adventures I involve him in.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-19 08:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-22 02:59 am (UTC)At home, we have problems with groundhogs. There is one very fat one living under my shed who ate all of my radishes and squash last summer. Not amused! I wanted to represent that problem and quickly realized that there aren't groundhogs in the UK, thus I chose rabbits since they are the equivalent pest.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-19 09:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-22 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-20 09:52 pm (UTC)I love just what a true scientist you are - I love your curiosity. And I love you and your husband's supportive relationship ^___^
And I also love just what a true artist you are - you took your own little adventure and made a wonderful fic out of it.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-22 03:19 am (UTC)Aw, thanks! :)
The blending of the fic with my adventure caused a lot of mental hang-ups for me. I kept overthinking and asking myself is this Holmes or me? I noticed that folks give these characters any sorts of non-canonical problems, so why am I hung up on being true to the character? It took a bit to be comfortable with Radish!Holmes and go with it.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-24 10:48 pm (UTC)I noticed that folks give these characters any sorts of non-canonical problems, so why am I hung up on being true to the character? Writing fanfiction is so much more difficult than writing original fiction, I think. It's such a delicate balance - you need to rewrite the characters to make them yours and fit the story you want to tell. But at the same time, you can't move them too far away from the canon interpretation or the characters become slightly grotesque and uncomfortable to read. I think you did really well with your characterisations of Holmes and Watson in your fic - they were just right.