This next meaningful food is a real culinary tale. It is the tale of me and the tomato. I never liked tomatoes as a child. They had an awful smell and the jelly middle parts disgusted me. My distaste refusal to eat fresh tomato was sealed for me around the age of four. My Greek babysitter had placed a wedge of tomato on every one's lunch plate and I ate everything but that. Before I could go out side and play with everyone, she said that I had to eat the tomato. I didn't want to. So my dear babysitter, with the best of intentions, forced the tomato in my mouth and held my mouth shut until I swallowed. Needless to say, I didn't eat another fresh tomato for almost 16 years.
I was 19 and living in Orlando working at Primo by Melissa Kelly. The restaurant has a garden where they grow a large portion of the restaurant's produce. One night I was working the pastry line and Penny, who was working the salad station announced that she had an extra tomato salad and offered it to me. This salad had always disgusted me, it was a plate of nothing but fresh tomato wedges drizzled with balsamic vinegar and fresh basil. Instinctly, I refused the salad feeling queasy at the thought of eating it, however, in a spilt second I realized that it was not queasy I felt, but ravenous.
It was ten O'clock at night and I had not eaten anything substantial all day. I turned around and snatched the salad before someone else took it and only out of the desperation of starvation, I forced a tomato in my mouth and swallowed as quickly as possible. I did it again and again trying not to taste the tomato, but it was too late. The tomatoes had coated the inside of my mouth with their sweet, hearty flavor combined with balsamic and basil... I had a religious experience while eating that salad; I was in heaven.
Later I realized that those were not the perfect, red, disgusting tomatoes of my youth. Those were wonderful heirloom tomatoes of many shapes and colors.
Heirloom vegetables are open pollinated, meaning that they will cross pollinate with any flower in their plant family and produce viable seeds. The vegetables that you buy in the grocery store are genetically modified (GMO) and hybrids. The seeds have either been genetically modified to not grow or will not produce consistent vegetables because they are hybrids. They have been bred for consistent size and color to survive shipment rather than flavor.
Heirloom's beauty are in their imperfection and wide variety of colors. I consider them to be the ultimate food porn, they are described with terms like lobed, luscious, juicy, succulent and I would add sexy. Part of their sexiness also comes from their limited availability; unlike their GMO cousins, these tomatoes are only available in the heat of summer usually from the garden. Or so I thought... I was dumbfounded when I walked through the produce section of our local Hy-Vee grocery store and saw local, hot house heirloom tomatoes!
I said a Hail Mary and asked for forgiveness for buying tomatoes in the middle of winter. In my defense, they are real heirloom tomatoes grown locally in a green house, not shipped from Chile. They taste like hot house tomatoes, but they are absolutely beautiful!
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| Heirloom tomato skewers with fresh torn basil and drizzled with balsamic vinegar. |
I toyed with the idea of growing heirlooms, but they just feel so... daunting. I always worry that if I grow tomatoes, they won't be anywhere near as good as my late grandfather's. The family story is that I ADORED tomatoes and ate them like apples as a little girl, but wouldn't eat them again until I was into my teens because until then, we didn't live near enough to a farm that tomatoes as good as grandpa's could be found. Conversely, he passed away before my sister was old enough to have eaten many of his tomatoes, so she still hates them at 20 years old.
ReplyDeleteI think, if I can get a real garden going, I may grow tomatoes this year... it would be so nice to have heirlooms come summer :)