Summer Tomato Salad
Summer gardens are the best, aren’t they? So many delectable and fresh vegetables that hardly need a recipe to enjoy. We’ve had a banner year for tomatoes and I’ve served them nearly every day for months. The crop is nearly done, but there’s always room for one more fantastic way to use their delicious goodness.
This hero ingredient only needs a few embellishments and the possibilities for variation are numerous. Serving pasta? Add some fresh mozzarella and basil leaves to your tomato salad. A French omelette pairs nicely with a tomato salad dressed with a Dijon mustard vinaigrette, thinly sliced shallots and blue cheese. Barbecue chicken would go well with a chopped salad of fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion and ranch dressing.
“My eyes widened at this jungle of freshness, the earth on the ground. The back wall, around thirty feet high, burst with terra-cotta pots filled with every herb imaginable- basil, thyme, coriander, parsley, oregano, dill, rosemary, and lavender. There were tomatoes of almost every variety beaming with colors of red, dark purple, yellow, and green. Lemon trees. Avocados. Lettuces, like roquette and feuille de chêne. Zucchinis and eggplants. Fennel, celeriac, artichokes, and cucumbers. Leeks, asparagus, cabbages, and shallots, oh my.
I exhaled a happy breath. This explosion of color, this climate-controlled greenhouse, was every chef’s idea of heaven. I ran my hands over the leaves of a cœur de bœuf tomato plant and brought my fingers to my nose, breathing in the grassy and fragrant aroma, an unmistakable scent no other plant shared. All of the smells from my summers in France surrounded me under one roof. As the recipes Grand-mère taught me when I was a child ran through my head, my heart pumped with happiness, a new vitality. I picked a Black Krim, which was actually colored a reddish purple with greenish brown shoulders, and bit into it. Sweet with just a hint of tartness. Exactly how I summed up my feelings.
”
Sharon LaFleur
