Most of the year we don’t eat tomatoes, because we know what they should taste like. Oh, we’ll buy a few Roma tomatoes to cut up into salads, but they just plain don’t taste like much.
I once described the flavor and texture as “ketchup-tinged oatmeal,” and I stand by that description today.
At this time of the year, though, we can have all the tomatoes we want. In fact, we have trouble keeping up.
Even eating them up to three times a day does nothing more than keep us from losing love apples to rot. The horror.
Which is why I’m thinking of it as an attack, a la “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small affiliate commission on items purchased through my links.)
My niece and great-niece came over for a lunch of Black Prince and Cherokee Purple tomatoes on DF’s fresh rustic bread with mayonnaise, some of our Red Sails lettuce and crisp bacon, plus fresh cucumber slices on the side. (More on those in a minute.)
This has been a year for some weirdly shaped tomatoes. That one in the illustration was uglier than sin, and twice as satisfying. Some of them look normal, but we’ve had quite a few gnarled behemoths that are hard to slice, but completely worth the effort. The flavor just knocks us out.
It’s hard to describe the taste of these heirloom varieties: sweet as sugar but with an underlying tomato tang. There’s a reason they charge $10 a pound for them at the farmers market here in Anchorage.
And there’s a reason we refuse to buy them. In part it’s because we don’t want to pay $10 a pound for meat, let alone tomatoes. It’s also because we can grow these beauties ourselves, and for a few short weeks we can gorge ourselves. More than a few short weeks, actually, because when the weather gets too chilly we’ll bring in all the greenies and let them ripen. Usually we finish them all by the beginning of December, at which point we start to dream tomato dreams once more.
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