Unexpected Delights # 2: Best Tomatoes Ever!

I just had the best tomato of my life.  Seriously.  And I bought it from a grocery store.

I grew up on homegrown tomatoes from the rich brown soil of Louisiana, the red dirt of East Texas, and the black dirt of coastal Texas farmland.  I watched my mother’s father carefully tend his tomatoes, thumping vines with his thumb or the end of a garden hose to help them pollinate.  I ate my mother’s mother’s fried green tomatoes in cornmeal batter and her cucumber and tomato salads.  I ate my mother’s tomato sandwiches with tomatoes from my father’s garden.  I ate tomatoes from gardens all over Zachary, Louisiana.  And I have eaten countless local heirloom tomatoes from farmer’s markets from Vermont, the Hamptons, New York State, and California.  I get tomatoes almost every week from the Garden of Eden CSA farm.  They are all delicious.  I love tomatoes, not quite as much as watermelon, but still…I love tomatoes.

Not the common red thing called a tomato at most grocery stores and restaurants.  I haven’t eaten those for years.

Still, tonight I had a new tomato experience: dry-farmed tomatoes.

These tomatoes are grown without any irrigation.  They have to dig their roots deep to get their sustenance.  They seek the water far underground.

And the taste, the taste, oh, I have never tasted such a rich, sweet, deep, complex tomato.

There is a Vedic chant that translates, “May I be like the cucumber that when it’s ripe falls from the vine.” 

I’d like to propose a new chant, “May I be like the tomato that digs its roots deep for the sustenance that’s already there and tastes like heaven.”

For the prosaic-minded parts of ourselves, here’s an article about dry-farmed tomatoes:

http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/goldengategardener/article/Dry-farmed-tomatoes-how-to-grow-them-3169535.php

And for those of my readers who live in San Diego, I got them at Jimbo’s.