It Tastes Like Sunshine

She stared into the darkness of the summer night, letting her eyes adjust. The warm breeze drifted through the open window and she smiled. She wasn’t sure what had awakened her, but now she had to use the bathroom and she didn’t want to wake up her young daughter by flicking on lights.

She made her way through the dark house, stopping at her daughter’s room to peek in at the sleepy girl in her newly assembled “big girl” bed. Her heart skipped a beat when she registered that the sleepy girl was missing from said “big girl” bed. She was not yet used to the idea that her daughter could move freely about at night, she tried to calm her pumping heart by assuring herself that her daughter was in the bathroom or the kitchen.

When she saw the open front door, those reassurances flew out the window. She flicked the lights on and shouted her daughter’s name.

“I’m right here Mom,” I said from the garden, before salting the tiny tomato and popping it into my mouth. The smile found my mom’s lips once more as I told her “it tastes like sunshine!”

Ah, the summertime tomato, with its siren song calling me out of the house in the middle of the night even as a toddler. There’s nothing quite like it and only a few short months that you can acquire it here in New England. Sure, you can find bland, muted tomatoes grown in greenhouses through the winter or shipped impossible distances from more hospitable climes. They will never compare to that ripe, juicy, kissed-by-sunshine flavor, though.

My childhood summers were filled with tomato sandwiches on simple white bread, nothing more than a few dollops of mayo, salt, and pepper to punctuate the sweet and acidic slices. When the plants reached their full bounty there would be vats of spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove top, herbs plucked from the garden dotting the bubbling surface. This would become pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce, tomato soup, marinara.

All of my neighbors grew tomatoes, so it was a common sight to look out the window in the morning and see our 90-year-old neighbor toiling away in our garden, getting his “extra” tomato sprouts into the ground before the day got too hot. There would be daily banter and excitement as my mom discovered her first ripe tomatoes or realized that one of the “extra” plants was yielding cherry tomatoes instead of heirlooms.

My siblings, the other neighborhood kids, and I would skip through the gardens and pluck cherry tomatoes off the vine, wolfing them down along with sugar peas and fresh basil. We’d play games of survival and have paper sacks full of those luscious little beauties along with raspberries, blueberries, and mulberries.

Now that I am older and grow my own summertime tomatoes, I’ve gotten a little bolder. I love a good caprese salad, but the realm of tomatoes goes so much deeper. Last year I started experimenting with yellow tomatoes and spherification to create vegan egg yolks that jiggle and pop. The fresher the yellow tomato, the tastier breakfast will be.

Blistered cherry tomatoes are their own vibe; they’re amazing when added to pasta with white sauce, stir-fry, or any kind of salad. The heat of the oven coaxes the sweetness from the tomatoes and softens the skin.

Summer brings with it fresh watermelon, grilled zucchini, Aunt Sarah’s potato salad, carnival cotton candy, ice cream on the beach, and a thousand other flavor sensations, but nothing will quite usher in the summertime like that first perfectly ripe tomato from the garden.