Summer in their skins.
Around here, the tomatoes have arrived - the mottled-green heirloom varieties, the plump red grape tomatoes, the pear-shaped yellow tomatoes just the right size to pop in the mouth. Fresh tomatoes smell sharp and musky, sit heavy in the hand, glimmer softly in bowls on the counter.
This week, I’ve chopped some for bruschetta on toasted homemade bread, eaten slices plain and dusted with pepper, roasted small sweet halves in the oven with asparagus and lamb.
Still a green and white tomato waits for me; still little yellow tomatoes offer up their flesh to my teeth. Tomatoes contain all of summer inside their skins.
August 29th, 2004 at 3:57 pm
God, yes. I can’t eat tomatoes at any other time of year — not now that I know what real ones are like.
The organic CSA farm where we belong grows a few different varieties of cherry tomatoes. Some are ripe when red; others are ripe when bright orange. I eat them like candy. I love the smell of tomato plants — yesterday when we were picking plums and heirlooms (for “sun-drying” in the oven, and for crushing/freezing, respectively) I kept compulsively rubbing the vines and then sniffing my hands. There’s something so sharp and alive and unmistakeable about that scent…