Plum Tomatoes with Balsamic Vinaigrette

Hot week. Ninety-six on Tuesday and ninety-eight on Thursday and the cattle pulled into the cottonwood shade by ten in the morning and stayed there until the sun was off the Bulls. The grass is browning at the edges of the south pasture but there is still depth to it. We will hold. The reservoirs are full from May and the well is producing steady and I have water everywhere I need it. A hot July is not a problem. A dry hot July a month from now would be a problem. We are not there yet.

I shod three horses this week — two for Vera Halverson out in Hobson, one for the Reagan place near Lavina. The drive to Hobson is sixty miles each way on county road and I left at five-thirty Monday morning with the truck loaded and the forge cold and arrived at seven-fifteen and was working by seven-thirty and finished both her quarter horses by noon. She paid me with a check and a jar of apricot preserves she had put up last August. The check was for two-fifty. The preserves are worth more.

The new bookings keep coming in. I have a waiting list now — five horses I cannot get to until August and three more that called this week. I am turning down work, which is something I had not anticipated, and the choices are not easy. Some of these are people who have called me for three years and I will keep them. Some are new and I cannot fit them, so I refer them to the younger guy out of Roundup who I trained two summers ago. He is good now. He calls me about hard horses and I walk him through it on the phone and his work is solid and he is the reason I can turn anyone down at all.

Patrick had a bad day Wednesday. The medication was off — sometimes it just is, the doctors say, a cycle thing, an absorption thing, a mystery — and the tremor was the worst it has been in months. He could not hold a fork. Mom fed him at lunch and he hated it and she did it anyway and he hated it some more and at the end he said, I am sorry, Coll, and Mom said, There is nothing to be sorry for, Patrick Gallagher, and that was the conversation. By dinner the medication had caught up and he could feed himself and the day ended better than it had middled. But it scared me. Not because it was new — it was not new — but because the bad days are starting to be days, plural, and the good days are starting to be hours, and the trajectory is what it is, and the trajectory is not something I can shoe a horse out of.

I made gazpacho Thursday from the first ripe tomatoes and cucumbers from Mom's garden. Cold soup is not what Gallaghers do — Gallaghers do hot food, even in July, the way Irish-Catholic ranchers always have — but I made it anyway and Mom drank a bowl and said it was strange and then asked for more, and Patrick refused to try it and ate a sandwich with white bread and ham and yellow mustard, which is what Patrick eats when he wants to disapprove of something quietly. The gazpacho was very good. Tomatoes blended with cucumber and red pepper and a little garlic and olive oil and white wine vinegar and salt, chilled three hours, served with a dollop of sour cream and a scatter of basil. The recipe came out of the book — the book mentions cold soups in a section about July, which I had written more in theory than practice, and now I am putting the theory into practice and discovering it works. The book is teaching me things, which I did not expect.

I built a fire Saturday night just for the company of it. Eighty degrees at sundown, no need for warmth, but I built one and sat with it for two hours. Patrick came out for a while and sat beside me and we did not speak. The Milky Way came up the way it does in Montana in July when the moon is new and the stars are everything and the sky is so deep you can fall into it forever. Patrick looked at it for a long time. He said one sentence the whole night. He said, This is a hell of a place. I said, Yeah, Dad, it is. He nodded. He went inside. I sat for another hour with the fire and the sky and a glass of water and thought about how a man can say four words and mean a life, and how I have been doing that my whole life and only just now noticing it as a kind of language. The fire was good. The fire is always good.

Mom’s garden gave us the tomatoes that went into the gazpacho, but there were more where those came from — and after a week that heavy, I wanted something I could make without turning on a burner, something that asked almost nothing of me and still tasted like the place. Plum tomatoes with a good balsamic vinaigrette is about as close to that as food gets: it’s not a recipe so much as a decision to trust what the garden already did. Patrick ate his sandwich. I ate these. Neither of us was wrong.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 25 minutes (includes resting) | Servings: 4

Ingredients

6 ripe plum tomatoes, sliced 1/4-inch thick
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 1/2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 small clove garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons fresh basil leaves, torn or chiffonade
Optional: flaky sea salt for finishing

Instructions

Slice the tomatoes. Cut plum tomatoes crosswise into 1/4-inch rounds and arrange in a single overlapping layer on a wide, shallow plate or platter.
Make the vinaigrette. In a small bowl or jar, whisk together the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, minced garlic, and Dijon mustard until emulsified. Season with salt and pepper.
Dress and rest. Spoon the vinaigrette evenly over the sliced tomatoes. Let the plate sit at room temperature for 15 minutes so the tomatoes absorb the dressing and release their juices.
Finish and serve. Scatter torn basil over the top just before serving. Add a pinch of flaky sea salt if desired. Serve at room temperature — not chilled — for the best flavor.

Nutrition (per serving)

Plum Tomatoes with Balsamic Vinaigrette — When the Garden Finally Gives You Something Cold Worth Eating