Tomatoes

KITCHEN TIP To rehydrate sun-dried tomatoes that are not packed in oil, place in a small bowl and add 1/3 cup of hot water. Let the tomatoes soak until softened, at least 5 minutes. Add the flavorful soaking liquid to the dish with the tomatoes when you can. From "Food to Live By," by Myra Goodman thegrocerygame.com For a fee, this site offers lists of sales at various stores to help coupon shoppers maximize their savings. Recipes, tips and online coupons are free. Kate Shatzkin

This just in: Organic tomatoes have more lycopene than conventionally farmed tomatoes. This also just in: Lycopene may not be as healthful as we thought. So goes the bold field of tomato research. As the most frequently consumed produce in America after potatoes, tomatoes provide vitamins, minerals and fiber -- and, of course, they're nonfat. Plus, with high levels of the antioxidant lycopene, they've been considered a potentially powerful cancer fighter. But even as new research identifies which growing methods produce the most lycopene-rich tomatoes, the Food and Drug Administration has said the fruit's health-boosting powers can't be proved.

I knew I was in for an adventure when I tried a dish from The Whole Beast cookbook by Fergus Henderson. Henderson is a London chef who specializes in what he calls "nose to tail" dishes. He cooks the parts of animals that, as he puts it in his book, "are often forgotten and sadly discarded in today's kitchen." Those include pig's head and tails, pigeon and duck hearts. He serves these dishes at St. John, his London restaurant. Cookbooks written by chefs often take what I call a creative approach to recipes.

Recipe for a perfect picnic: Start with a glorious day -- blue sky, maybe a few puffy clouds, not too hot, not too cold, preferably with a gentle breeze. Add charming companionship, friends or family. Season with some of your favorite foods. Relax and enjoy.Of course, it's not that easy to whip up an ideal outdoor dining experience. It takes organization and labor beforehand. To help you execute a perfect picnic, we talked to food and organization experts, and checked out local sources for equipment.

AFTER WEEKS OF picking and eating tomatoes, I am beginning to think I never want to see another one. I am suffering from tomato-fatigue syndrome.I suspect there are other folks out there who are suffering from this syndrome and who are also seeing red. I bet these folks are staring at mounds of home-grown tomatoes and feeling conflicted. They know that eating fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes is one of the great pleasures of life. But by now they feel pleasured-out.In July, a bite of plump tomato still warm from the sun sent their taste buds into ecstasy.

The food looked wonderful. Baked eggplant and tomato filled to the brim with a Greek stuffing. Long-roasted chicken, tender and homey. Golden rings of fried calamari piled high on a plate.The problem was, the food was not on our table. In fact, it was not even on the menu. These were specials the night we visited this new Greek restaurant and carryout on Eastern Avenue.All the neighborhood regulars, including a priest dressed in black from nearby St. Nicholas, knew the drill. They said a few words in Greek to owner Kostas Papavasilis.

IT IS ALWAYS HARD to say goodbye to the garden, even after years like this one, when your crops have not lived up to your expectations. Recently in this space I admitted that this year's tomato crop was a failure. This admission generated two reactions. Sensitive souls offered condolences for my loss and confessed they too had suffered a disappointing summer. Others, however, greeted news of my failed crop with the announcement that their tomato crop was the best in years. I told the second group, the braggarts, that their flourishing crops were proof that they were much more adept than I at slinging the fertilizer.

When the first Paolo's opened here a decade ago (another one followed in Towson), Baltimore had never seen anything quite like it. Cal-Ital had arrived: chic, fresh Italian food that included great salads and inventive pizzas and pastas. Paolo's contemporary setting had as much pizazz as the food, and Baltimore loved it. The only downside was the noise level at this always busy, stylish bistro.Over the years Paolo's Harborplace got a little worn around the edges, as restaurants do when they age, so the parent company, Capital Restaurant Concepts, closed it last year for a complete makeover and expansion.

You've eaten them sprinkled with salt, sliced over salads and layered on enough BLTs to put Hellman's out of business. You've foisted them on friends and family, nagged neighbors and co-workers to take "just a few" home -- until the sight of you with a bulging grocery bag can mysteriously clear a room. OK, maybe it's not as bad as all that, but you are wondering how you'll dispose of the tower of tomatoes mounting daily in your garden. A typical tomato plant can yield 20 to 50 pounds of tomatoes a summer, with some varieties bearing twice that amount.

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia -- The lifeblood of this city began flowing again yesterday.Eleven-year-old Isaj Kryeziu sold door locks at the outdoor Qulhan market, to people whose front doors had been smashed in.Hajri Hamza, teetering on a ladder, scraped the Serbian lettering off the front of his dress shop, so that only the Albanian remained.And Shenol Tabak, on his first day back in business as a barber in three months, snipped away at Afrim Gashi's straggly curls."This morning," he said, "I've seen too many bad haircuts that people tried to give themselves during the war."

College kids are notorious for packing too much for college. The rug. The futon. The mini fridge/microwave. I remember stuffing a shoe rack and 10 pairs of shoes into the trunk of the family car. By the time I went home for Thanksgiving freshman year, I was wearing only fringed moccasins. OK. You had to be there. But a garden? Packing a garden to take to college? That's what Matt Lehman had stuffed in the back of the family car for the 14-hour drive from his home in Ohio to college in Kansas.

Clarification The recipe for tomato pie in last week's column failed to mention cooking time. Bake in a 350 F. oven for 30 to 40 minutes. It looked like a picnic. But it was actually a tomato tasting, a thorough one. Fifty-eight different types of tomatoes - cherries, currants, heirlooms, hybrids - were sitting on picnic tables in a pavilion in Baltimore County's Southwest Park. It was the annual get-together of MAGTAG, or the Mid-Atlantic Gardeners' Tomato Appreciation Gathering, a loose-knit group bound together by their fondness for the "love apple."

Our grandmothers punctuated the summer by capturing the flavor of that month's bounty - strawberries, peaches, beans or tomatoes - in gleaming glass jars with coppery lids and seals. They called it "putting up" or "putting by" and the basement pantry shelves would be lined with the color of fresh fruits and vegetables, to be opened and served in gray winter months. Home canning may have skipped a generation as working wives and mothers found the process too time-consuming. But it has found a resurgence not only as a result of difficult economic times, but as the next step in a new determination to eat fresh and eat local.

My mouth waters for traditional Baltimore summer cooking, a commodity that seems to grow more elusive. Then, on a recent trip to Rehoboth Beach, Del., came a revelation: remarkable coleslaw. It was served at a grand Baltimore institution that has moved - Jake's Seafood House, run by the Klemkowski family, who for years seemed to have a corner on good food in Locust Point in South Baltimore. I'm not a seafood eater, so why do I go to Jake's? Because the owners are old-time South Baltimoreans who know how to make coleslaw.

Emily Schultheis never imagined that her love of tomatoes would translate into success in science. But that's what happened when her parents challenged her to explore a way to make it easier to pick her favorite fruit. "Ever since I was little, I liked to eat tomatoes," the 15-year-old sophomore at Glenelg High School said. "It was more fun to eat them than to pick them." Two years ago, Schultheis began working on a way to pick tomatoes using robotics. Her research has evolved into the award-winning project with a tongue-twister of a title: "Optical Feedback Improves the Accuracy of an Autonomous Robotic Arm That Will Pick Ripe Tomatoes."

April is Poetry Month, whatever that may mean to you, perhaps not much. Perhaps what with your nomination to be assistant secretary for human rights running into rough waters because of that silly song you sang at the company Christmas party in 1997, which has been used to make you look like an insensitive jerk, your interest in poetry is practically nil, and if so - hey, you're not alone. The reading aloud of poetry has been shown, time and time again, to be effective at breaking up gatherings of people.

Ever try a famous Primanti Brothers sandwich? You'll need a jackhammer to open your arteries. Two slices of Italian bread, grilled meat, cheese, tomatoes - OK, that doesn't sound bad. But get this: It also comes with coleslaw and french fries - inside the sandwich! All of it teetering 10 stories high on waxed paper. The fries poke out of the sandwich like wriggling centipede legs. The provolone congeals into La Brea Tar Pits consistency. This will shock you: It's a big favorite of drunks.

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.

Tropical Storm Hanna passed by Maryland last Saturday and dumped anywhere from 2 inches to 6 inches of rain, and my gratitude as a gardener was tempered with regret. "Well, that's the end of the tomatoes," I thought. I remembered last summer when the dwindling flow of tomatoes at the farmers' market suddenly stopped in the aftermath of a heavy rain. The tomatoes gorged on all that water after a typically dry August and proceeded to crack, split and rot. "I picked real close on Friday," said William Morris of Churchton, who harvested as many tomatoes as he could in advance of the storm.

WASHINGTON - Turf struggles, bad communication and weak leadership undermined the federal response to a recent salmonella outbreak that cost the tomato industry huge losses, witnesses told a House of Representatives subcommittee yesterday. Lawmakers joined farmers in a wholesale attack on the Food and Drug Administration's performance, potentially laying the political foundation for a regulatory overhaul and multimillion-dollar compensation package. "We have been the primary injured party," Reginald Brown, the executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, told the House panel, "and we look forward to Congress addressing that in the future."