You say "to-may-to," I say "to-mah-to"

Courthouse Corner Cafe Cold Plate

Let's talk about tomatoes for a minute.

Naturally, being raised in an Italian family, tomatoes were a mainstay of my diet. As an adult I would no more have a kitchen without at least five cans of tomatoes in my pantry than I'd make marinara sauce from a powdered packet. But the summer was the time my entire family went crazy for tomatoes, fresh-picked from our backyard garden.

Everyone but me, that is. Oh, I would admit that the summer crop of tomatoes tasted infinitely better than the balls of tasteless vegetable matter the supermarkets insisted on calling tomatoes. But I was ambivalent about raw tomatoes and only a little more impressed with them in a salad or layered with mozzarella cheese and fresh basil.

One year recently we decided to find out what all the fuss was about what were being called "heirloom tomatoes." Heirlooms were old varieties that had been "improved" upon by botanists to make them hardier or earlier or more disease-resistant or whatever property of the tomato annoyed the home gardener back in the day.

But all that convenience comes at a price and the price the tomato paid was in flavor -- which I thought was kind of the whole point they even exist.

Some kind souls (with amazing foresight) saved those seeds and these days those olden-day varieties are widely available to gardeners and, if you are lucky, people who know those gardeners.

Heirlooms made a raw tomato lover out of me.

The old school-days know-it -all loved to make a big deal over the fact that tomatoes are not vegetables, but are actually a berry. Heirlooms are sweet and fruity and the only similarity between them and their supermarket cousins is how they're spelled.

So I was delighted when Chuck came back from the Romney Farmers' Market with a bag of heirloom tomatoes, enough that I could put them on our cold platter along with some potato salad made with locally grown red and white potatoes and our usual chicken salad.

Okay. Yeah, yeah...I'm really happy that I can offer heirloom tomatoes and locally-grown potatoes to my customers. But I'm even happier to slip a few of those tomatoes in a bag to take home with me.

Oh! And thanks to our customer Tom Linger who waited patiently for his lunch while I took pictures!