Frazz by Jef Mallett for August 31, 2014

My Dad used to call them Michigan Gold. :)

You have to live long enough be disappointed a few times to really appreciate one.

You’d see it if you remember what an imported winter tomato tastes like!

Nothing better, there are 13 of them on the kitchen windowsill right now!

This is so true. I couldn’t stand tomatoes or mustard when I was a kid, and they weren’t big in my family. Then, I had to learn to accept them to make my husband’s sandwiches. And now, I’m a Believer! And, when the weather starts to turn, and it’s just about cool enough for a soup pot, but there are still garden tomatoes coming in – that’s the sweet spot! Soup beans with cornbread, garden fresh cukes, green onions, and chef d’oeuvre of the repast, the beefsteak my husband just picked, lovingly sliced and plated solo, and reverentially presents to the diners while hovering anxiously, awaiting the reviews as if he were the agent of Mother Nature herself.

Yikes…. Alexi…. You can delete a couple now.

Just in case this was the problem: when you hit “submit” and it seems like nothing happens…give it a few minutes…or open the same forum in a different window… and see whether your post is there.

Don’t keep clicking the button, cos when this creaky ‘ol site catches up, you’ll have posted multiple times.

Anyway … a good September tomato doesn’t need anything…no recipe, no salt, no salad dressing…

Use that stuff on lesser tomatoes… the better-than-supermarket-but-not-home-grown ones from the fruit stand, for example….Don’t bother eating the supermarket ones this time of year unless you really can’t grow any where you are, get to a farmer’s market, or prevail upon the kindness of friends with gardens.

But somebody please buy that kid a small one from the store, and have her taste it next to a real tomato….I’ve known tiny children who relish the difference, and wait for the summer crop with huge anticipation.

I help sell wonderful tomatoes at an evening farmer’s market in summer … it just ended last week, sadly.One family stopped by almost every week this year just to buy a pound or so of cherry tomatoes for their toddler son…..who gleefully “sampled” from the bins the whole time they were there.They kept telling him to stop and he cried…I told them it was fine…. we love to see future happy customers.

My darling wife buys tomatoes from the supermarket in the winter sometimes. I’ve pleaded with her to stop, I really can wait for the garden to produce, there is that much difference.

How’s that song go? Paraphrased: “Best things in life are true love and home-grown tomatoes.”

Growing up, I never had anything but canned tomatoes and half-ripe slices in elementary school lunches. I didn’t learn to like fresh tomatoes until I began seeding them, and I still don’t like raw ones by themselves. Chopped in salsa is fine; a slice on my sandwich gets picked off.

tomatoes are a berry, not a vegetable kid

I can’t stand whole, raw tomatoes – it’s both a taste and texture thing. I grew up with my parents growing them, so it’s not from the quality. I now grow them for my wife, but I still won’t eat them (cooked is OK.)

Just slice them into wedges, little salt, little pepper, couple drops of Sriracha… Heaven!

Of course, there are always those summer tomatoes with crazy gams to admire…

Sorry, I’m 46 and still can’t stand them. Cooked until they’re mush in a sauce, they’re good. Raw they are nasty.

thebird55, that’s true about most things in life….

A little salt, a little pepper on a beefsteak, Yum….Cherry tomatoes are so sweet they don’t need anything, but dipping them in ranch dressing is sooooo good it’s silly…Yum….

in the ’40’s, back-yard tomato sammiches on whole-wheat bread, a slather of sugar and mayonnaise and being chased out to the back porch where the juice could run down off our elbows and nom-nom-nom ! (“git away, cats!!”)Odd how tomato plants would mysteriously pop up under the porch next spring wherever us kids et them sammiches !Nobody ever said that farm life waz for the genteel.

Summer means a home-grown tomato that is juicy and goes so nicely in a BLT sandwich…HEAVEN!!!Been eating my own 3 varieties of Cherry tomatoes on salads these past few weeks!! Also very nice over cottage cheese.

From the 1920’s through the 1950’s Tomato was slang for “a woman”. The guy in the bib overalls may be thinking this.

I saw that even when I was a kid.

I’m 32 and I hate tomatoes. Now any tomato based products like sauce or ketchup? I’m all about that!

Little Feat, 1978. We’ve got this album, lurking somewhere in the basement.

Night-Gaunt, yes, people do have “different taste buds.” It can be difficult to understand how someone can enjoy a taste that is “disgusting” to yourself. And vice versa. -Susan, your story about the toddler is especially resonant for me. Since I didn’t like tomatoes as a child, it never occurred to me that my children might. Then, when she was about 6, my oldest daughter came home from playing in her friend’s yard, and told me they had been eating cherry tomatoes off the vine, and she loved them. I was so surprised! Well, that was how we started planting tomatoes. My husband had always loved them, but we hadn’t gotten into gardening before then. After that, we always planted several cherry tomato plants for the children to eat at will, and other varieties for us… that is, if we were fast enough!More than one summer day, my husband would come home, looking forward to enjoying the tomatoes he had scoped out while watering the previous evening, only to find the plants picked clean of anything ripe. (We had four children by then, and our daughters would also invite their tomato loving friends over to forage.) It was frustrating, in an amusing way, but it is now a precious memory. I am sure that you are helping to create a treasured memory for that toddler’s family.

I like my tomatoes acidic. I want them to bite back.