Tasty Tomato

I love the look, smell, taste and versatility of tomatoes. I can instantly bring to mind the shiny red skins of the fruit and sweet fresh smell of the green leaves that make up a tomato plant. Before choosing a tomato to pick, I like to brush my fingers along the leaves letting the grassy fragrant scent attach itself to me like my favorite summer perfume.

Then it’s time to look for the most perfectly ripe tomato. I can tell by looking at my choices hanging from the plant, where I will start. The ideal tomato will be truly red, a shade darker than ones that aren’t ready and I can tell by lightly squeezing if it is a good one. It’s not too hard or too soft. Once I pluck the tomato from its spot, I rub it on my shirt to get any dirt off, and the skin looks like it’s been polished. I pop the fruit in my mouth and it bursts. It’s part sweet flesh and part tangy juiciness that makes it so palatable.

Inside, the seeds and that slimy translucent part taste like the smell that was left on my hands after I touched the leaves. When a tomato is fresh from the garden and the sun has been beating down on it, the candy-flavored flesh is warm and the tart seeds seem cooler in my mouth. Sometimes for cooking the recipe says to take that part out, but I usually don’t. If I do follow the recipe, I gather all the guts and add a little salt and slurp them up. They are so good!

Eating tomatoes reminds me of my grandfather’s tomato growing ritual, spending hours, days, months babying his plants that he grew from seeds from his prized tomatoes the year before. Stored in the garage to protect them from the weather, he would cart them out to a sunny spot every morning, not always an easy find on the foggy Oregon coast. He would chase the sun for hours, then put them to bed back in the garage and start again the next morning. My grandfather grew the tastiest tomatoes I have ever had. They were often eaten right off the plants in the garden, but also made into sauces, added to sandwiches and canned to be savored all winter long.