As tomatoes go, it was no prize. It was small, about the size of a silver dollar. While it was reddish, it was not exactly the Susan Sarandon of tomatoes.
But it was my first tomato from the garden, and that gave it status. First tomatoes and first children usually get an inordinate amount of attention. Especially if they are late arrivals.
This one was. Everybody else I know who grows tomatoes seemed to have been harvesting them for weeks. My tomatoes were late. Traditionally I plant tomatoes on the third Saturday in May, which is easy to remember in Baltimore because it is the day the Preakness Stakes horse race is run at Pimlico Race Course. But this year I was a little slow getting out of the gate and, instead of planting on Preakness Saturday, I got the plants in the ground sometime between Memorial Day and Father's Day.
Some of the plants were grown from seeds in a bedroom window by my kids. These home-grown plants did fine when they were living under the protection of our roof. But once they got out in the bug-eat-plant world of the garden, many of the bedroom-raised plants bit the dust.
I also bought some tomato plants at a garden supply store. I got the feeling that buying plants from a store was frowned upon by the serious, know-the-heritage-of-your-tomatoes crowd. But I was not as interested in tracing the lineage of tomatoes, as I was in having some to slice into juicy hunks. And these store-bought plants looked big and hardy. Finally, some of my tomato plants were volunteers. They just sprang from the ground. It was one of these volunteer plants that produced the first fruit of the season, a cherry tomato.
I washed the prize off and thought about the proper way to serve it.
I could give it the basil and olive oil treatment: The tomatoes are sliced, put on a plate with fresh basil leaves, then sprinkled with extra virgin olive oil. Eating this dish always made me feel like I was in Italy, sitting at a cafe overlooking the Mediterranean, even if I were really sitting in Baltimore slapping at mosquitoes.
Two more of my favorite things to do with tomatoes are to put them on a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, or on top of a soft crab sandwich. Man, that is living!
If I were feeling artistic I could stuff the tomato with some goat cheese. Not only did the flavor of the goat cheese go well with the juicy tomato, it also looked classy. If I were feeling democratic, I could stuff the tomato with tuna fish. That is a tomato dish popular with the masses, or at least with the masses at our lunch table.
