Tomatoes!!!

Tomatoes

Globes, teardrops, kidney shapes, pears..

scarred, pleated, cracked with brown,

gold and green and mottled red,

striped and parti-colored,

that peculiar green tomato smell

(the smell of a summer garden)

rough, fuzzy stems,

yellow flowers;

sun and earth and seed and memory:

heirlooms.

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Brandywine, Marvel Stripe, Black Prince, Cherokee Purple, Flamme Orange, Green Zebra, Lemon Boy, Vintage Wine, White Beauty, Sun Gold, Beefsteak, Indigo Rose...If you thought that lovely romantic names were the exclusive province of roses and beautiful flowers, think again. Then add to scent and color the sense description of taste. It is tomato season.

A walk through your farmers’ market doesn’t do the tomato family justice. Beguiled by the smell of tomatoes, I’ve picked up the occasional beefsteak or even a nameless red tomato, and sliced it or fried it or layered it or basil-and-mozzarella-ed it without grasping the spectrum of flavor available. No more.

This week, we experienced a tomato tasting and lunch at our friends’ house in Palo Alto.  I have been an on-again, off-again gardener all my life, planting the occasional pepper plant or cherry tomato seedling. I do better with herbs. In small pots. But Ann and Allen’s garden shows what avid gardeners can do: assorted beans, berries, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers growing vertically, horizontally, and every way from upside down to sideways--in beds, in boxes, in pots, in the ground. Marvelous.

Even more marvelous was our sumptuous lunch: salad greens with a king’s bounty of various items from the garden; there was also hearty bread and smoked duck and olives and mozzarella--and raspberries for dessert.

City-dwellers that we are, we forget the taste of authenticity. Granted, the relatively recent farm-to-table movement seems to be working at whittling the distance between growers and consumers, but seeing farm-to-table reduced to backyard-to-table was inspiring, to say the least. Popping sugar-sweet cherry tomatoes (ahem--or Sungolds!) has to be a lot healthier than popping potato chips. Thanks, Ann. Maybe next year, I’ll work on a pot or two of edible beauty instead of those mundane flowers.