Last week was my swan song for the season in New Jersey, and as I packed for the return to Texas, I mentally prepared for the change in cultures. A few points of difference came to mind:
■ In New Jersey, you bag your own groceries but someone else pumps your gas. Texas is where you pump your own gas but someone bags your groceries for you.
■ In New Jersey, Coca-Cola, 7-Up, and Barq’s Root Beer are called “sodas”; in Texas, they’re all called “Coke.”
■ That place where the ocean meets the land? In NJ, it’s “the shore”; in Texas, it’s “the beach.”
■ In New Jersey, we get better pizza and bagels; in Texas, better barbecue and Tex-Mex.
■ In spite of one state being very blue and the other mostly red, the politics of both states verge on the ridiculous, including the behavior of their governors.
And in both places, when I tell people we spend part of the year in New Jersey and part of the year in Texas, I get the same response:
In New Jersey, they give me a funny look and ask, “Why Texas?”
In Texas, I get the same funny look as they ask, “Why New Jersey?”
Regardless of my allegiances, it was a great summer for tomatoes in New Jersey – just the right amount of rain and sun. And I expanded my palate this year to include heirloom tomatoes, which I hadn’t liked the one time I tried them long ago. I know, amazing that the Kitchen Goddess wouldn’t like heirloom tomatoes. Must have been a bad batch. In any case, I’ve now discovered what a wonderful texture they have – smoother, almost transparent flesh that’s less grainy than the cultivated beefsteak tomatoes. Now, I’ve been devouring New Jersey beefsteak tomatoes all summer, and they beat anything I’ve ever bought in a grocery store. But we were in Nantucket recently, and my friend Laurie served me heirloom tomatoes she’d grown there this summer. OMG. And wow.
