Wednesday, August 25, 2010

BLT Tacos and Summer Salsas

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Cool, sweet, piquant, ripe, juicy…criminally juicy. Real. What are the words you would use to describe the taste of a tomato?

I would have said, how would you describe a tomato to a Martian, but really, how would you describe a tomato to anyone who eats the industrial variety? You know the ones that can be described as plastic, mealy and watery. Those are usually a sicky dusty red, or even worse, a sort of red that is at once the ideal of tomatohood and a mockery of that state.
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But, tomato, a true tomato, is the stuff that summer food joy is made of. I serious wait all year long to bite into a sun-ripened green zebra. I get giddy thinking about colanders full of yellow cherry tomatoes. I dream of the first black krim of the season.

While a tomato cooked, dried, sauced, souped, and Indian-fooded makes me joyful, the truest expression of a summer tomato is in the raw, salted, period. Next to that, then there is the salsa. Salsa with yuck tomatoes needs to be spicy, salty, cooked. With good tomatoes, it need only be diced tomato, a bit of onion, salt, and minced green chili. Get a little nutty, add some cilantro. Go wild, add sweet corn. Then mix in up, use grilled zucchini, thyme, raspberry and cherry tomatoes (or green zebras, cantaloupe, mint).

Then how do you serve these salsa up? Well, first, you should try to keep from slurping it all up at the kitchen counter. You should like the part that dripped down your wrist. You should dip in a chip. You should shovel it into your mouth with a spoon.

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Or you could make a fancy BLT taco, as we did. Flour tortillas, homegrown tomatoes, grilled zucchini, grilled chicken, lovely local bacon, and some homegrown lettuce…

This post is part of Summer Fest 2010, which is a community food blogging event to write about (and eat!) seasonal produce. Today's Summer Fest theme is the lovely tomato.

I particularly like these other ones that I have read: from a dollop of cream, from white on rice couple (an organizer), from gluten free girl and the chef (another organizer), from a way to garden (organizer too), from pinch my salt , from tigress in a pickle . We you go around, read the comments to find more links.

11 comments:

Margaret Roach said...

Same dishtowel, same array of cherry tomatoes here on my counter too! Sweet.

Thanks for joining in; nice to "meet" you.

Joanne said...

I have to say, now that I've had heirloom tomatoes, I will never be able to go back to the regular kind. They seem criminal.

This salsa though - get out of jail free card. Delicious.

Unknown said...

Breathtaking 1st pic, I would love to be sitting there.

angela@spinachtiger said...

What is about BLT's that made me stop what I was doing and click over.
What a great way to eat tomato!

Dirty Girl Gardening said...

This looks sooooooo yummy!

lisaiscooking said...

Those are fresh and fabulous tacos! Great use of your garden harvest, and the salsas sound fantastic.

Thistlemoon said...

These look so good! I have a nice pile of tomatoes, and we enjoyed them in a caprese salad - another amazing way to enjoy fresh garden tomatoes! No black krims yet...waiting...

Foodjunkieh said...

Great tomatoes need very little to shine and salsa is a great way to enjoy them.I have some tortillas lying around, so I might give our dinner a "kick" :-)

Jackie Ewing said...

Hey I noticed this little healthy recipe on your blog and it caught my attention. Do you have a lot of recipes that are healthy? If you do, you should enter them into this cooking contest that's coming to Cleveland on September 25-26th..it's the Aetna Healthy Food Fight. You can go to healthyfoodfight.com for more details, but the deadline for Cleveland is September 8th. Oh, and throughout the contest, celebrity cooks will be judging (Bobby Flay, Sunny Anderson, Sara Moulton, or Cat Cora). Good luck if you decide to enter and if not, please post more recipes! :)

Nancy said...

Beautiful photos! the colors are just striking. The tacos sound delicious with the grilled zucchini, yummy!

Alicia Foodycat said...

We've just begun eating our home-grown tomatoes. It is a revelation of what a tomato is supposed to taste like!