Tomatoes

It’s National Grilled Cheese Month. You heard me right. If anything deserves a month, it’s definitely grilled cheese. This comforting classic, when made just right, can elicit the loudest of “mmm’s.” It’s perfect in its simplicity; toasty buttery bread stuffed with melted cheese. To celebrate and honor this beloved sandwich, I’ve made a couple versions of a slightly more grown-up and refined grilled cheese. Try them out, or take the inspiration and spin your own grilled cheese creation.

The people who work for Custom Pak in Westover, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, pack tomatoes for a living. Their employer is a Florida company, LFC Agricultural Services Inc., one of the largest grower-packer-shippers of tomatoes in the country with operations in Florida, North Carolina, California and Arizona. Custom Pak prepares fresh tomatoes, including heirloom tomatoes and tomatoes on the vine, for supermarkets, wholesalers and food-service companies. With about 100 employees, the Custom Pak plant in Westover is one of the largest employers in rural Somerset County.

Forget waffle cones and parfait glasses. Ice cream gets served these days atop hunks of pork belly. Amid pools of gazpacho. Alongside chicken Parm. The frozen confection has gone over to the dinner side of the menu, with savory tastes like tomato-fennel and ranch. Even when the ice cream is for dessert, the flavors sometimes sound like supper: olive oil, beet, basil, pink peppercorn, cucumber, corn, red cabbage. For traditional ice-cream lovers content with good old vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, just the thought of these out-there frosty treats is enough to bring on brain freeze.

Another article in a series about the people and the jobs that define a Maryland summer. The building is a rustic, three-sided corrugated metal number, its contents a local food-lover's dream. Heirloom tomatoes, obscure orange-fleshed honeydews, peppers in every color of the rainbow but blue — nearly everything grown organically and on the premises — fill the Howard County farm stand that Dave and Lydia Liker started two years ago quite by accident. It is the sort of place that, in the midst of summer's bounty, makes people believers: in life without mealy supermarket tomatoes; in ecologically friendly food systems; in a new generation of farmers; in the wisdom of chucking everything and living a tranquil, purposeful life in agriculture.

Anne Loy from Knoxville, Tenn., was looking for a recipe for making a baked tomato dish that used brown sugar to make it somewhat sweet. Now that the summer crop of tomatoes is here in all its glory, this seemed like an ideal time to explore some recipes for this classic Southern-style side dish. Phyllis Taylor from Middle River sent in four different versions of sweet baked tomatoes, which she said came from a cookbook her family self-published several years ago for a family reunion.

There is no summer experience quite like a stop at your favorite roadside stand for Maryland tomatoes and corn. This week, we stopped on Route 16 in Caroline County, a few miles short of Denton, and filled a car. In the four days following, I polished off a whole watermelon. The stop reminded me of the day my brother Eddie decided to set up his own little market on the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach, Del. It was about 50 years ago, in the days when families spent entire summers at the ocean.

Whatever happened to a Maryland-grown tomato that tastes like a tomato? When did Maryland farmers decide it was better to provide a near-perfect looking tomato than a tomato with real taste? I miss tomatoes grown by farmers that taste like a Maryland-grown tomato. The ones you thickly cut and enjoyed on a BLT or, the ultimate Maryland pleasure, a lettuce, tomato, mayo and soft crab sandwich. The tomatoes you buy today in farmers' markets are perfect round, red-globed beauties with texture and taste not much better than the ones available at the grocery store during the winter.

The Gulf of Mexico oil leak gets nastier by the day. MARC trains have shown a tendency to either miss their stations or to stop in the middle of nowhere. The Orioles are mired in the cellar of the American League East. Yet this summer all is right with my world. I say this because, a few days ago, I harvested my first homegrown tomatoes. They were not very big, a handful of cherry tomatoes, Sun Gold and White Currant. But they were a harbinger of good times. Tomato plants are like rabbits; once they start producing, they have a hard time stopping.

Judith Kelly from Guerneville, Calif., was looking for a recipe for pasta with shrimp and cherry tomatoes. She had a wonderful recipe for this dish that she found in a San Francisco newspaper 15 or 20 years ago that she unfortunately lost in the 1995 Guerneville flood. Some internet research on my part turned up a promising recipe from a site called eatbetteramerica.com. Their healthy adaptation of the classic garlic shrimp and pasta dish was delicious. At only 323 calories and 9 grams of fat per serving, the dish was surprisingly rich and full of flavor.

Linda Ratarsky from Knoxville, Tenn., was looking for the recipe for the tomato dill soup with shrimp that she so enjoyed at Puleo's Grill in Knoxville. Unfortunately, I had no luck getting the specific recipe she wanted, however an Internet search turned up a soup that sounded pretty close to what Ratarsky described. This recipe comes from Oprah.com and was adapted from a recipe from Art Smith's "Kitchen Life" cookbook. I made the simple substitution of fresh dill for the marjoram that was in the original recipe since that was the flavor combination that Ratarsky said she liked so much in the restaurant soup.