How to eat a tomato

When the tomatoes ripen, choose a bright, sunny day when the temperature is above 80F. Prepare for the meal by setting out a bottle of good, flavorful olive oil, a large shallow bowl, a knife and cutting board, and some good sea-salt on the kitchen counter. You can use a tomato shark for coring if you have one.

Step off your back porch, and make your way to the garden. Stand there with a self-satisfied smile, surveying the dark green leaves and ruby stems of the chard, the latest crop of radishes popping their shoulders out of the soil, the burgeoning bushes of basil, the beans, the cilantro, the chilis, even the disappointing eggplant. Let it fill your eye and your soul with pride. Cut off a stem of basil with at least 4 or 5 leaves, and pull some garlic if there's none in the kitchen.

At the cutting board chiffonade the basil (roll all the leaves into a tight cylinder and slice thinly). Peel, crush and mince a clove or two of garlic. Pour a couple of hearty glugs of olive oil into the bowl and add the basil and garlic.

When you're done, take a pinch of salt and step carefully through the garden to one of the tomato plants. (At this point I sometimes pause to think about how much better it is to tie tomato plants to stakes then witches.) Reach out and rub a leaf of the plant between your fingers and smell the scent left on the tips. That distinctive scent of chlorophyll and nightshade is critical to the pleasure of the eater. That scent is in the tomato, but it starts to dissipate as soon as the tomato is picked. Trust me you don't want to lose it. The hot sun beating down on the red, yellow, or brown globes intensifies the flavor of their flesh. So the following steps must be performed expeditiously.

Pluck a ripe tomato. Lick the skin. sprinkle a small amount of salt on the wet spot and bite it. You can taste the sunshine. Continue salting and eating until the tomato is gone. Drop the core on the ground.

Pluck two more ripe tomatoes and return to the kitchen. Core them (just get rid of the place where the stem attaches). Slice them about 1/4 inch thick and put them in the olive oil bath. Flip them to coat fully. Dust with a pinch of salt. Take the bowl and a loaf of crusty bread to the back porch and eat the tomatoes instantly. Use the bread to mop up the oil as dessert.

Holy Greens

Chard is the plant that keeps on giving. It's really hard to keep up with its growth. One gardening friend of mine (no doubt still somewhat confused by overindulgence during his hippy daze) calls it the Ultimate Spinach.

Another friend was watching me prepare dinner one night and was a little horrified that I was using chard leaves that had holes chewed in them. "How can you do that?" he said, making a yuck face, "something has been eating that already."

"I know," I replied, "the insects and animals in my yard are like the royal tasters, keeping me from getting poisoned."

The way I figure it is that a perfect plant is a sign that something is wrong. If other animals don't want to eat it I get suspicious. It doesn't mean that I won't knock hornworms off the tomato plants into a bucket but usually I don't mind sharing my produce with other animals if they leave me enough for my needs. The leaves get washed well so no-one has to worry about caterpillar or bunny spit, and they get chopped into pieces anyway.

I just gathered some chard and basil from the garden a few minutes ago. Tonight I'll stir fry them with tofu, baby corncobs and mushrooms, and serve it over curried rice.

The Attack of the Chard

I have never grown chard before, so it came as something of a surprise when it took over my garden. I bought six small plants this spring, and within weeks was harvesting it almost daily. The tomatoes, eggplants and chilis are moomphing along, but the chard, basil, and radishes are growing faster than I can consume them.

In addition to my recent Parrot recipe, I have used it as the greens in a bulghur salad, as a primary vegetable in a green salad, shredded in spring rolls, and in green smoothies. If the temperature were not so high, I'd experiment with using the leaves to make something akin to doulmas.

Chard leaves, basil and chard stems.