Late-season tomatoes are a difficult sell. They are not gorgeous. Spotty, misshapen, with fissures on their skin, they would be described, if they were children, as having faces that only their mothers could love.
Yet in this, the shank of their season, they draw attention from me and the fruit flies. The fruit flies circle the tomatoes that sit on a kitchen counter, looking for soft spots. Only days before, the tomatoes had been on the vine, catching a last bit of sunshine before biting cold and fading daylight shut down production. In the warmth of the house, they redden, ripen and sprout more leaks than a campaign press bus.
I suspect other folks are going through a version of this autumnal ritual of saying goodbye to the vegetable garden, or at least to its good parts. It is true that greens and other cool-weather crops can produce for a few more weeks. But the succulent stuff, the vegetables that taste like sunshine, have faded and we, their warm-weather companions, are searching for dishes that will give them the proper send-off.
This gets complicated because, in addition to being ugly, late-season tomatoes don't have immediately winning flavor, at least not compared with the nectar of summer fruit. You can't just slice them and toss on a little basil, mozzarella and olive oil. Late-season tomatoes, like life's late bloomers, need help to show off their strengths. Like cakes, cookies and - as the wicked witch in "Hansel and Gretel" would say - small children, they benefit from time near the heat of a fire.
So the other night, as the temperatures dipped and a cold rain pelted the windows, I experimented with ways to say farewell to my favorite crop. I considered making tomato sauce, but the freezer was already full of sauce.
The traditional treatment of frying partially ripe, breaded tomato slices in a skillet did not appeal to me. It seems to me that the secret to tasty fried green tomatoes is to cook them in lard. There is little on this earth that does not taste better cooked in lard. But while this technique appealed to my head, my heart, in particular my likely to-be-clogged arteries, nixed it.
Instead, I tried two new tomato dishes. One smothered chicken in tomatoes and spices, such as cumin and coriander, and baked it in a 400-degree oven.
The other called for brushing thick slices of tomatoes with olive oil, sprinkling them with salt and pepper, then grilling them over a moderate fire. Once they are done, you remove the skin from the slices and sprinkle them with torn basil and freshly grated parmesan cheese.
