urban bicycle journeys

Tomatoes occupy a special place in Tootie’s and my diet in Chapel Hill NC. On Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings during the prime tomato season of July, August, and September I bicycle one mile west to Carrboro Farmer’s Market. My friends Cindy and John Soehner and their family are a favorite vendor. Here John sells tomatoes on a Wednesday, with a younger helper.

Tootie and I live in a seventh floor condo. On our terrace I grow basil in a foot by two foot EarthBox but otherwise have no interest in farming or gardening. Instead I buy from the Farmer’s Market. Yes, it’s expensive, but it is delicious fresh food grown or raised on a small scale by local people, many of whom I consider my friends.

I am originally from Virginia Beach. My brother Alex told that back when he lived in Norfolk there was nowhere to buy a good tomato in the entire Hampton Roads / Norfolk / Virginia Beach metro area, population 1.8 million. I would think they are available SOMEWHERE but the region is really spread out.

Alex now lives in Portugal now and a day or two ago a member of his men’s singing group handed Alex a bag or two of nearly FIFTY tomatoes that the guy had grown in his garden. Just take them, he said. While Alex thought some looked green he said they were all spectacularly delicious. He WhatsApped me a photo.

The truth is that a “good” tomato means a tomato that was home grown. Southerners have a tradition of passing home grown tomatoes around to their friends. Apparently a tomato has that fresh taste only if ripened on the vine but the recently picked tomato lasts only last three or four days before beginning to decay. Furthermore, they are fragile! If a commercial grower were to box juicy red fresh tomatoes they would squish each other. It is all problematic. Also problematic is that tomatoes come out suddenly in July, overwhelming our ability to eat them all. That is why, I guess, the Sicilians invented ways of preserving tomatoes, like tomato paste.

I live in New Orleans part of the year and I have yet to find a great tomato there, perhaps because we seasonally leave New Orleans in May when the tomatoes are just emerging. New Orleanians refer to “Creole Tomatoes,” originally a brand name but now denoting almost any local tomato. It might be similar to the situation in the North Carolina mountains near where Tootie grew up talking about “Mountain Tomatoes.” In New York City they rave about “Jersey Tomatoes.” To me that shows a tomato needs to be fresh, locally grown, and carefully handled. You cannot buy these in supermarkets.

My friend Kirk who lives in both New Orleans and North Carolina likes the taste of a “good” tomato but swears by the Campari brand of hot-house commercially grown tomatoes, available at big stores like Costco. She says they are delicious. I am hesitant to try these because she might be correct. If true it would kill my story that great tomatoes are only locally grown and found with difficulty.

I do love good food. When I am fortunate enough to be invited to someone’s home I always eat whatever they offer without being judgmental, even inside my own head. Just having been invited is the special pleasure.

At home I am so much pickier. In season I usually eat one tomato every day for lunch, double that if Tootie is involved. I often make what the Italians call panzanella salad, stale bread soaked in chopped fresh tomato. I then add whatever else is available; avocado, arugula, lettuce, sausage, cheese, or canned tuna. It’s usually fabulous but only if the extra ingredients are high quality and delicious in their own right.

I do not consider myself a true tomato aficionado because I have not spent much time nuancing the dozens maybe hundreds of different tomato varieties, each with its own shape, color, and taste. John and Cindy, from the market, have a low-cost group they called “ugly,” those starting to rot or that have had a serious defect from birth. Yesterday, in addition to the “regular” John Soehner tomatoes that I eat for lunch, I bought a four dollar bag of six big “ugly” tomatoes.

John’s “ugly” tomatoes this day were not the Roma variety that make the meatiest sauce. John’s “ugly” were juicier and make a delicious but thinner sauce. That evening, putting the pasta water on, I dropped the six ugly tomatoes into the boil for ten seconds, then took them out to cool. In a separate saucepan I sautéed some local garlic and red pepper in olive oil, then let that cool. I peeled and cored each tomato, cutting off any “ugly” spots, then seeded them by squeezing each over a strainer perched above the saucepan, then dumping the tomato flesh into the pan. Chopped up this sauce could have been served almost immediately but that evening I chose to boil it down for about an hour.

From a different Farmer’s Market vendor I had bought two light purple eggplants. I chopped one into three quarter inch cubes and tossed these heavily in salt. Ten minutes later I soaked two changes of paper towels by squeezing “water” out of the eggplant cubes. In a third pan, a heavy iron skillet, I fried a couple of chopped cloves of garlic in a tablespoon or two of olive oil, then fried the eggplant cubes over medium-high heat about ten or fifteen minutes until they were reduced to little crisp salty garlicky blackened chunks of deliciousness.

I boiled half a pound of linguine then added it to most of the recently boiled tomato sauce, along with several repeated quarter cups of pasta water plus ten or fifteen hand-torn basil leaves I had picked from the EarthBox on the terrace. We topped each of our servings with eggplant cubes, which I guess now makes this dish Pasta Norma. I sprinkled each serving with a handful of freshly grated genuine Parmigiano Reggiano. On the side, we split one local hot Italian sausage cut into big slices. This summer evening was a rarity in that because clouds blocked the late afternoon sun we could eat outside on the terrace.

By the time the tomato season truly ends at the fall’s first frost we are usually ready to move on to something else!