Mission: Accomplished.

It's always been about the tomatoes. Unless you grow tomatoes in your backyard, or if you live on a farm (and in that case, why haven't you invited me??), you just can't get a good tomato. Tomatoes you get in the grocery store are either a dull red that are hard as a rock or a beautiful red that are mushy as hell, whichever way, they're at best tasteless and at worst, plastic flavored. Unless you have some magic grocery store produce guy who conjures produce from heaven, those are your choices for tomatoes. It's really a consequence of the modern Agro-industrial complex, which demands year round produce in huge yields all at once. Most commercial tomatoes are picked green and pumped with ethylene which causes them to turn red, often times while they're in transit or far from the farm. Further, because tomatoes in the wild (like most plants) grow and produce fruit overtime and not all at once, modern industrially produced tomatoes have been breed to produce fruit all at once. What this has created is a hard, tasteless tomato. Now, of course, Farmer's Markets which offer fresher and tastier tomatoes than grocery stores, exists, they are both obscenely expensive and not as fresh as walking two blocks, picking a tomato off the vine and coming home and eating that fucker. 

And that's exactly what I did Monday night. My very good friend Nicole, who writes an awesome blog about vegan food and travel came to visit for a week from Berlin and while the tomato I planted so it would have fruit to eat when she was here, wasn't ready, two others were!

 Nom Nom Nom Nom
 It will be a matter of a few weeks before there's an epic avalanche of tomatoes and I'll be canning and jarring tomato yums well into the night. 

We made a really awesome pasta dish and while I'm totally game for pickling and preserving and showing that stuff here, I'm going to jet you over to Nicole's blog for the delicious tomato yumness that we made. You can find it here.