I assume you know that I'm talking about tomatoes, if you know me at all. My lunch today, a heavenly sandwich of sourdough bread and tomatoes, nearly sent me into a pleasure coma. Combined with the small Greek salad I made, with a homegrown (though not by me. Black thumb, remember.) cucumber and some Penzey's herbs, it made possibly the best meal I've had in a long time. Fresh and juicy and deliciously sweet and filling. I could probably apply rosy adjectives to it for pages and pages.
But I'm not going to talk about the fresh tomato, the (love) apple of my eye. I'm going to talk about cooked tomatoes, and the revulsion I've recently developed for them. That's right, I don't like cooked tomatoes. I don't like tomato sauce anymore. The thought of eating pizza covered in sauce leaves me cold and clammy; I'd rather eat a bowl of cereal, thanks. Can you order a pizza with no tomato sauce? I may be finding out very soon.I wasn't always this way, that's for sure. It's a pretty recent prejudice. In fact, the thought of eating pasta with a plain tomato sauce is also repulsive to me, and I used to gobble up a good marinara. I even turned my mom's venerable meat sauce into a marinara, that's how much I liked it.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to exceptions, and there are two major plain tomato sauce ones: my mom's meat sauce, which doesn't sound bad to me at all, and my dad's pizza sauce, which I'd happily eat any day of the week. And three times on Sunday. I'm not sure if it's because those are hugely familiar sauces, and the taste for them will never go away, or if it's simply that they're (to my mind) superior examples of a plain tomato sauce. I'm not saying this just to be nice; I'm pretty sure my parents know that they kick ass at their respective Italian food dishes.
There is one other exception to the tomato sauce thing, and that's when you doctor up a tomato sauce with cream, mascarpone, and vodka. I can eat that stuff all the time too.
This isn't to say that I don't love pasta; I just love pasta with non-sauces. (Because I don't really like cream sauce either.) So give me some rigatoni tossed with peas and turkey sausage. Or with sausage and asparagus and lemon. Or with greens and sausage. Or mushrooms and chicken in a light marsala. All those things sound delicious to me, but they mostly don't involved tomatoes.
This is all very odd; you'd think that since I worship the raw tomato, I'd like everything you can do with it. But no. Cook it, and I'm out. Make a nice bruschetta with it instead, that's my suggestion. Or a fresh pico de gallo. Or better yet, add it to some guac. Or....my very favorite of all time, the tomato-mayonnaise sandwich. Doesn't get any better in the dog days of summer.
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