Produce aisle tantrum

In the grocery store this evening, I saw a toddler in a cart, preparing to throw a tantrum. But the object of her ardent desire was not the usual sugary cereal or candy bar.

"I WANT those little tomatoes!" she told her dad (and everyone else in the vicinity), pointing at a basket of cherry tomatoes. 

It warmed my heart to no end, seeing a small child get that wound up — in a positive way, that is — about produce. And not seedless grapes or strawberries or melon, but tomatoes. When I was a kid, I hated tomatoes. Hated. Of course, I was an especially picky child, and also hated avocados, pesto, persimmons, and all sorts of things I now know to be wonderful. (I was very fond of lima beans, though. Go figure.) 

But still. How many kids are that excited about produce? How many fruits and vegetables can inspire that kind of passion? And most importantly, how do you get kids (and grownups, for that matter) to crave fruits and vegetables the way they crave candy and chips and soda?

The folks behind those ubiquitous boxes of diminutive mandarin oranges, tangerines, and clementines have certainly done a good job. Their little citruses are delicious, seedless, easy to peel, and just the right size for little hands. Plus, they've got a marketing budget to help make that point, with commercials and magazine ads. 

The packaging is brilliant, too. Putting them in 5-lb. boxes means eye-catching displays, and helps you ignore the fact that you probably wouldn't buy them five pounds at a time if they were sold individually. And once you've got them home, the fact that you have five pounds of them makes it easy to eat two or five or ten at a time.

I'm not suggesting that all produce should be branded and marketed this way. I'm not looking to raise costs for the growers or consumers. And I certainly don't want to bring more problems into a market where perfectly good produce is left to rot because it doesn't meet a distributor's specifications for size, shape, and color.

I would, however, dearly love to find an advertising network that would enable me to support this blog with well-designed, tested, and optimized advertisements for whole grains, in-season produce, and your local farmers market. 

First rain of the year

Scarlet runner beans with tomatoes and polenta

Regular readers may have been wondering whether I ever cooked those beautiful purple scarlet runner beans, and if so, how they turned out.

In fact, I made them only a few days after we picked the beans, but more important blog topics jumped to the head of the queue. Like bitching about the goddamn deer. Come to think of it, this recipe would probably be excellent with venison. Just, you know, in case one of those deer happens to accidentally fall onto some bullets.

Organic red flint "Floriani" polenta

Vanilla-Tomato Jam

When I was ten or eleven, I read an article on the state of French cuisine. It began with a description of a dessert being prepared at a high-end Parisian restaurant. Fresh tomatoes were hollowed out, stuffed with a mixture of lemon and orange zest, chopped nuts, and spices, then braised in vanilla-infused caramel for 45 minutes. By cooking the tomatoes in hot caramel, constantly stirring it around the tomatoes without actually touching them, the chef was able to concentrate and intensify their flavor without turning them into tomato sauce.

Roasted veggies

Some time back, I bookmarked a lovely-looking recipe for lemon-braised chicken with white beans and mint pesto. I was planning to make the dish last night, having finally remembered to pick up white beans.

This was before I discovered that one of the big heirloom tomatoes on the countertop had quietly gone bad overnight, and the other needed to be used immediately. The squash bed, thanks to improved watering and some compost, had several speckled zucchini that were getting to indecent sizes. There were portobello mushrooms in the vegetable bin that needed eating. And somewhat more than half a loaf of Acme Pain au Levain was about to cross over from slightly stale to rock-hard.

Also, I'd forgotten to pick up any chicken.

Evil tomatoes, part 2

Remember the evil tomatoes? For months, people have been asking, "Are those black tomatoes?" and "What do they taste like?" and I've been answering, "Yes," and "I don't know, they're not ripe yet." We've been eagerly discussing whether they'll taste just like other tomatoes, or if they'll have some complex flavor befitting their dramatic appearance.

Well, friends, the Indigo Rose tomatoes are finally showing signs of ripening. And they still taste lousy.

Either it's still too early, or I'm doing something very, very wrong with my watering, or the folks at Oregon State still have a lot of work to do. These last ones are better than the even less ripe ones I tried earlier, but there's no intense tomato flavor, no sweetness, no acidity — they're just bland and a little mealy.

I'm really hoping they'll improve over the next weeks. If not, I may follow a friend's suggestion and use them while they're still unripe, sautéed in olive oil. I hear you can also make green tomatoes into chutney, pies, pickles, and cakes. While the cake concept seems a little questionable, I may have to try the chutney and pickles just because they'll look so damn beautiful.

Anyone got a good green tomato chutney recipe?

FAQ: Evil tomatoes

What's that plant? and other frequently asked questions

Is that a black tomato?

Yes. The variety is called "Indigo Rose."

Why is it black? 

It gets its color from anthocyanins, the same antioxidants that make blueberries blue.

How do you know when it’s ripe?


If you look carefully, some of the tomatoes have green patches where they were shaded from the sun. When the tomato is ripe, those green patches will turn red, and the rest of the skin will change from the dark black to a slightly brighter purple color.

What does it taste like?

I don't know – this is the first time I've grown this variety.

Is it a real tomato? Is it GMO? Is it a hybrid?

It is a real tomato, and it's not GMO or hybrid. In fact, it's open-pollinated. (That means that if you let the plant pollinate itself and then plant the seeds, the plant that grows will be the same as the parent. You can't do that with GMO or hybrids – you have to buy new seeds every year.

Where does it come from?

Indigo Rose was developed by vegetable breeders at Oregon State University using traditional methods. Many kinds of tomatoes contain small amounts of natural anthocyanins in their leaves and stems. Some wild tomatoes from Chile and the Galapagos Islands had small amounts of the purple pigment in their fruit, too. The OSU breeders took tomatoes from these lines, cross-pollinated them, and chose the purplest of the offspring to be the parents of the next generation.

I bought these plants as seedlings from Berkeley Horticultural Nursery.