My Tomato Comeuppance
Plus, burrata—and a quick lemony basil oil to add a little herbal essence to your life!
ONE OF MY GREATEST REGRETS in the last decade of my life—at least, one that doesn’t concern my intermittent spinelessness, or my bad judgment about people, or my almost pathological slowness in realizing that the brutal rejection we experience as we make our way from birth to death often turns out to be a mystical trap door that gently plunks us onto a new path, to happiness—is that I didn’t appreciate my access to truly great tomatoes when I had it.
Friends and strangers who have followed me on Instagram for the last decade or so might beg to differ. Year after year, while I was living monastically in mountain farmland in rural North Carolina, I subjected them to an ongoing pageant of my sexpot tomato photos (and plum, peach, melon, lettuce, spring onion, various bean, and squash photos, too).
I became concerned when one friend suggested that my tomato/produce photos—and my donkey, goat, tree, river, moss, and rock photos— were a sign that I was wasting my life. But I now realize that nothing could have been further from the truth. My years in the remote countryside turned out to be holy steppingstones to salad enlightenment, which, while it can never truly be attained, is a worthy pilgrimage for anyone in this world.
I have since learned to disregard the kinds of people who think it’s important to “get” or “understand” how other people live their lives. But that is neither here nor there. The point is that while I luxuriated in these tomatoes, I’m not sure I truly understood what a privilege it was to live in a place where all summer long you could pull off the road into the gravel lot of a small hut to find stalls lined with freshly picked, ripe tomatoes with dirt still clinging to their warm skin. Or where neighbors would leave baskets of flowers and blackberries on your porch.
If I’d been able to comprehend my extreme tomato privilege, before I left the mountains I would have driven around with a loudspeaker on top of my car, thanking the farmers and country kitchen gardeners who fed me so well.
But I didn’t. And now I am getting my comeuppance. Living in an urban area, I feel extremely put upon by the effort it takes to find a decent tomato. And I have also begun worrying neurotically about how all the people who don’t live where I used to live get by in the tomato department. This is a lot of people to fret over.
Which is why I have a recipe for you today that you can make with tomatoes that are just okay. Would it be better if you made it with great tomatoes? Yes. But the truth is the only thing you should be doing with great tomatoes is slicing them, drizzling them with olive oil, and eating them with nothing but salt and pepper. Great tomatoes don’t need our help.