Tomatoes for dinner
I read the recent article on how to use up tomatoes with great interest. At the time, I had about ten tomatoes sitting on the counter, and I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Melissa Clark proposes several appealing recipes, for soups and marmalade and baked stuffed tomatoes with goat cheese. The problem is that every time I cut open a gorgeous summer tomato, all I can manage to do is sprinkle some flaky sea salt on it and stuff it in my mouth.
I find that the older I get, the more I like tomatoes. I disliked them as a child, and was mostly uninterested in them until just a couple years ago. These days, each tomato I eat is better than the last one. Maybe they are improving as the season goes on, or maybe I get better at picking them from the Greenmarket, which is bursting at the seams with beautiful, fragrant tomatoes of every shape and color. I like to go at the end of the day to buy bags of them for a dollar from the stand up by 17th Street, and to plow through them in giant slices alongside corn and salad.
The last thing I want to do is cook them. A recent tomato sauce was good, but utterly bland compared to the taste of a perfect, overripe tomato. I confess that I prefer the sweet acidity of a sauce made with canned Italian tomatoes to that of one made with ripe knockouts from the tri-state area.
Nathan is quietly growing tired of the same dinner over and over. But especially now that it’s too hot to cook again, I can’t think of a more perfect meal than fat, salty slices of heirloom tomatoes accompanied by whatever else I can find in the house. I don’t need to stuff and bake them, or turn them into soup, or chop them into salad. I just want my mouth to be full of them as many times per day as possible until the season ends and I can turn the oven on.
Comments
Leland: If you can stand having your oven on for just a short time- our favorite way to have tomatoes lately is cutting them in half, sprinkling on some olive oil, sea salt, and a dollop of homemade pesto and baking for about 1/2 hour. Then before you serve them stab them a little with a fork so the juices run into the bottom of the pan. Serve with a good loaf of bread because the juice is scrumptious for dipping!
I could also eat tomatoes every single day for dinner with not much more than a little salt (and some bread, cheese and wine if they are laying about). I also just discovered the TJ’s peanut butter this week! It’s really good, right?
Me, too. It’s all I can do. I’m helpless in the face of ripe, summer tomatoes. Totally and completely helpless.
Well, as much as I adore raw tomatoes with nothing but fleur de sel, I actually just made some stuffed tomatoes tonight with my farmer’s market’s bounty, alongside a stuffed zucchini (the zuke is from a co-worker’s of my husband’s, who grows monster-size veggies in his Queens garden). Now I just have to wait for it to be all baked, and I’m starved…
This comment doesn’t really have to do with wonderful tomatoes being eaten for dinner, but I think that’s OK, because I have a question here! Now that you’re using Nathan’s Typeturner, where the hell has the comments RSS feed gone? I need that! I need it to live! Hellllppp!
I cannot tell you how many times during the summer as a child my dinner consisted of corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes, all from the Wilkinsburg Farmer’s Market. It did tend to get a little old, but now having to figure out a way to feed myself in 99 degree heat, I completely understand my mama’s rationale!
I agree — little that you can do with a tomato compares to the almost unadorned tomato. I find that’s also true about ripe fruit and berries. No matter how many fancy things I cook with them they’re never quite as good as the plain old fruit itself.
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