The Foul Weather Blogger

Dear fellow Gastro Junkies,

Last week I made a beautiful aioli from scratch the old fashioned way with a mortar and pestle. On Monday you would have found me slaving over a pot of beef stew, well past the hour of the night when normal people would have turned in their aprons for the evening. Last night I fixed up a stir fry with noodles that I had made from scratch and cut by hand. (Mr. gastro came home from work to discover me covered in flour, shoo-ing the cat away from the table where my beloved lo-mein were drying.) And tonight I am making Julia Child's Beuf Bourguignon with Pommes Dauphinoise. Later this week I have plans to tackle Ratatouille.

And this seriously isn't even the half of it. Pork chops with rosemary and mustard, my dad's linguini with clams, pan seared salmon steaks, peanut butter pie on Valentines day...I could go on. I sincerely wish, Oh Gastro-readers, that I could say I am able to tackle all these involved multi-course meals in my free time around work, but I would be a liar. Confession time. I was laid off from my job last Monday, the job that I only just recently landed at the dream company where I was happy, entertained, and financially stable for a whole month and a half before being downsized. (I was certainly not the only one. 35 of my new friends went along with me, many with years and years put into this company. My heart goes out to each and every one of them.) But here's the thing folks. This is not my first time being laid off. This isn't even the first time in the past 365 days. The first time I was laid off was last April, when my team was cut from the Theater we had been fundraising for. Which also happened to be right before I began this blog.

Oh yeah. I probably could have mentioned back in April time that all this free time I had to blog and cook was really due to my lack of employment, and looking back, I do make a handful of references to my job search, or vague, unnamed financial troubles. Still. I never really came right out and said, "I am doing this thing because I have to, because if I don't do something I am going to slip into a deep depression and die from a fatal overdose of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese." But now I'm back, in nearly the exact same position I was in back in April, so I'm saying it now. I need to cook, and I need to write, because I need to do something.

Does this make me a foul weather blogger? Certainly. I was definitely absent enough when I was planning my wedding, working for a video game company, enjoying my newlywed status. Fair. I can own that. But does it mean that I don't love cooking, or writing, or writing about cooking? Of course not. It's just that now I don't just love it--I need it too.

A little reprieve from my being a total bummer: I'm having a blast. There is a very real part of me that couldn't be happier than when I am dancing around my kitchen, listening to Nina Simone records and rolling out dough, browning beef, whipping cream. I'm in absolute heaven. The feminist side of my brain will sometimes look at me in this state, and sneer, "You look like you wish you had been born in the forties so you could be a housewife and do this all the time!" And when faced with this commentary I can only respond, "Maybe I do."

So I am at times a crap feminist. Guilty. And I also understand that I cannot be without a job, not do I really want to be. I want to find success and satisfaction in my career. But the fact of the matter is that right now, I just don't have a career. Not yet. So I seek success in the kitchen instead. Because it's fun, and I could use a little fun right now, and some comfort, and some activity.

So I hope all of you loyal Gastro-readers will forgive my on again, off again blogging, and perhaps even give me a pass now that I've given you the real scoop on the genesis of the Gastro-Junkie--this thing is all about passion, yes, but it is also about therapy--a fact I guess I forgot to mention before. You will almost certainly be seeing a lot more of me over the coming weeks, a fact that has its up side and its down, but please believe, dear readers, that having the space and the time to be a full time cook and writer, at least for a little while, is a big, huge silver lining. Much love,

Morgan

The Wedding of Mr. & Mrs. Gastro part 1

So maybe I needed the space of a couple months in order to properly write about my food-a-licious wedding day with Mr. Gastro. I'd really like to excuse my lack of writing with some line about needing time to process the beautiful event, and get settled into my new married life....and if you are inclined to use those lines to give me a pass for not writing for several months, knock yourselves out. I promise to make an effort to write more consistently of my food adventures to come. And to make it up to all of my very patient fellow gastro nerds, here is my completely epic, multi-entry, New-England-tastic play by play of all things food and romance from the Cape Cod wedding of Mr. & Mrs. Gastro.

First, I've got to set the scene: From the beginning, Mr. Gastro and I have said that what we really wanted for our wedding weekend was a gigantic farm house on Cape Cod. Something with enough bedrooms to house both sides of our now enormous family for several days, a kitchen that could stand up to the efforts of the famous Kitchen Sluts, and a yard where matt's Mom and Step-father could host a 30 person Lobster bake rehearsal dinner--oh, and you know, someplace for the ceremony and the reception. All within our fairly humble wedding budget.

We came to terms pretty early on with the fact that this house we had envisioned might in fact not exist, and so imagine our glee when not a month after getting engaged, we were shown around every inch of the Overbrook house on Bay End Farm in Bourne Massachusetts by a super chill organic farmer named Kofi. This was in January, so the house was closed and the farm covered in a blanket of snow, but we knew almost instantly that we had found our place. The house was a rustic 1920s gem, with eight bedrooms, a giant living area, a sun room, a little library, one sunny and super-functional farmhouse kitchen, and a dining table that seats twenty. As in people. Outside, a pretty little path lit with fairy lights cuts through the woods behind the house, runs over the bubbling brook, and leads to the dance hall nestled between the trees where we could set up a tent and tables and host our reception.

Now imagine this magical house on a mild, suede gray September afternoon, trees just starting to turn gold, and your new in laws setting up pots of seaweed and coolers full of crustaceans on the back lawn. My Long Island family had taken over the lodge next door to the house, my Mom and aunts were getting settled in the kitchen, Matt's adorable niece Dagny was boldly meeting what must have seemed to her to be about a hundred thousand new grown ups, and my Dad was gleefully running up to me with that Elvin smile he sometimes gets and exclaiming about how the house is "So cool! Completely awesome! I mean this is so cool!" I made a note to myself that if I happened to lose track of Dad at any point during the weekend, I would most likely find him happily tripping along one of the many footpaths that rambled around the property, exclaiming to himself about how awesome and cool everything is.

So this was the beautiful backdrop against which Mr. Gastro's and my culinary worlds collided for the first time. Now, my family is from New York, meaning that we have all at some point probably eaten a lobster. Most likely in a restaurant, or perhaps in stew form, but we've eaten them. Sometimes. Matt's family, on the other hand, is from Maine. When they eat Lobster, it's pronounced Lobstah, and it involves dropping the little buggers into a pot in your own backyard, covering them with seaweed, leaving them until they are red and dead and then slathering them with butter on a paper plate, alongside potato salad and corn on the cob. (Three guesses which preparation I prefer, and the first two guesses don't count.) The first time Matt ever took me to a cookout in Maine, I went in expecting hot dogs and hamburgers. When I was presented with my very own LOBSTER on a plate, I looked at Matt in wonder, and he coolly replied, "What? I told you we were going to a cookout in Maine." Right. Now imagine that New Yorker reaction multiplied about twenty times, and that is the sense of wonder and gratitude that was pouring forth from my family to Matt's for our very first meal together. It was our first night in the house, (or rather, in the back yard) and the gray afternoon had descended into a jet black Cape Cod evening, and a beachy, barely-there mist that wasn't ever quite rain served to soften everybody's edges and remind us with every whiff that we weren't exactly in Kansas anymore. Linda and Bill had worked non-stop since they had gotten to the house to present these two families with THIRTY FIVE LOBSTERS, along with chowder, salads, and blueberry cake, and the result was spectacular. To my New York family, my real live in laws from Maine preparing a lobster bake on Cape Cod was a regional novelty akin to if I had chosen to marry a man from New Orleans and asked his family to prepare gumbo. We were all simultaneously giddy, humbled, honored, and oh yeah...starving!

There have been fancier rehearsal dinners in the long history of such events. I'm sure there have even been glitzy rehearsal dinners in upscale restaurants with crisp white linens, where every guest gets their own lobster, and a waiter to crack it for them too. But I would make a strong argument that for uniting two families into one big one, few rehearsal dinners can touch ours. Paper plates, plastic forks and knives, jeans and flip flops, and every guest saturated up to the elbows with butter and lobster juice, pouring out praise onto your brand spankin' new relatives for the quality that we all seemed to rank among the highest valued in our own families--the ability to use food as a social adhesive, gluing together our ever expanding mix and match cast of characters with family recipes, regional specialties, and histories shared over home cooked meals.

Two Plates of Eggs

Among our group of friends in college, Stacey and I were always the ones who could cook. To be fair, we had many, many friends who liked to cook, and just as many who laid claim (to anyone who would listen) to the best chocolate chip cookies, or the best lasagna. But I don't think it's giving us too much credit to say that Stacey and I were widely considered to be two of the best cooks in our group of friends, the two who could throw together the best dinner parties on the shortest notice. The ones who would tell you which bottle of wine to buy in a pinch, if you didn't know a Cabernet from a Chianti.

Stacey has since moved to Chicago, where she went to pastry school and did the impossible--she improved upon what we all assumed was perfection. So when Stacey promised me brunch upon my very early morning arrival in Chicago for my bachelorette party weekend, I was excited. I was even more excited when I saw the photographs she posted online a few days before of the challah bread she had baked from scratch in preparation for the French toast she was planning on making. I mean, seriously, who does that? And when I showed up at her apartment on a Sunday morning on four hours of sleep and found myself in possession of a very large mason jar full of very spicy bloody mary, including, I'm not kidding, and entire pickle she had pickled herself... Well. Excited isn't even the word.

There were many hysterical, silly, happy, food fueled moments that weekend, but that brunch takes all. My sister and my cousin showed up, and Stacey showed us all what she had been learning in school. The french toast was buttery, the bacon crisp. There was even a concord grape sorbet which blew. My. Mind. But the winner hands down was the caprese egg dish that Stacey made. I couldn't help but think of the caprese salads we had made nearly every weekend the first Summer we lived together in Boston and the farmer's market was our second home, magically transformed into breakfast. Stacey used sun dried tomatoes, some fresh mozzarella balls allowed to melt just slightly in the pan of cooking eggs, and topped it all with gorgeous, fresh green basil. It was like we'd died and gone to heaven. The eggs were perfectly cooked, not runny or dry, and that happy hour spent over breakfast fueled us through the rest of our girly, fun filled weekend.

Now please understand how vivid the memory of that meal was not two weeks later when I received two travel weary bridesmaids after midnight two days before my wedding. Stacey was absent, flying in the next morning with boyfriend Elliot to meet us on the Cape, but sister Leigh and cousin Rebecca-two thirds of the magical bridesmaid trifecta of power-were dragging their suitcases out of a cab in front of my building in the wee hours of the morning, and looking...a little wilted.

When I asked the girls if they needed anything they put on their best brave bridesmaid smiles and lied, and told me, "Nope, water would be great!" But I wasn't fooled. "Are you sure?" I asked. "My kitchen's not exactly stocked right now, but if you two are hungry, I think I could whip up some eggs." The wide eyed looks on their faces told me everything I needed to know.

I wasn't kidding when I said there wasn't a lot going on in my refrigerator. Preparing for my long weekend on the Cape, I had somewhat neglected my larder, so a fancy re-creation of Stacey's triumphant dish was out of the question. Instead, I opted to go in a different direction, offering the girls a classic three egg omelet with no frills, just egg and butter. It was a deceptively simple kitchen basic I had been working on perfecting, and as the girls looked on I explained about the benefits of butter not only as a cooking fat, but as a flavoring agent. We talked about the importance of letting the pan heat up thoroughly, just the way Stacey had two weeks before, when she showed us everything a plate of eggs could be. I talked about how tricky the simple omelet can be, and all the ways it can go wrong, becoming dense or dry or gummy, or bland.

The kitchen gods were truly with me that night as I turned out two simple but altogether perfect half moon shaped omelets, my best two to date, and watched as two of my favorite girls sat at my kitchen table in the middle of the night and ate them. Mr. Gastro had gone to bed early to nurse an ill timed cold, and so it was just us girls, working ourselves up into a silly, pre-nuptial frenzy as we talked until two am about new names, new family members, and the mania the next two days were bound to hold. These girls were going to do me a lot of favors in the next couple of days. At the time I wished I could have prepared them a feast, but in retrospect it seemed pretty perfect under the florescent lights of my kitchen, at 12:30 in the morning, to be eating three egg omelets and talking about shoes until we finally forced ourselves to go to bed so we could wake up the next day, do some last minute packing, and make our way to Cape Cod for a wedding.

Introducing...Mrs. Gastro

So first of all, a great big apology for being so absent for the last month and a half or so. For anyone not in the know, I was a little preoccupied GETTING MARRIED!!! :) And therefore was too distracted with napkin colors, playlists, seating arrangements and travel itineraries for very much writing, let alone cooking.

And trust me, I have many an exciting gastro-journey to report surrounding the big day itself. I mean, sure, there was the food at the reception, which was good (at least I remember the one or two bites I was able to get down before I was whisked onto the dance floor being nice enough). But around that same general time there were lobster rolls, midnight omelettes, cape cod clam bakes, cheese and champagne al fresco, not to mention bachelorette brunches, bagels and lox with family, and one EPIC SIZED dining table. And I will relate each and every one of these adventures. Later.

But tonight, for my first blog as a married lady, I thought I would relate the particulars of a rather unremarkable meal I cooked a couple weeks back. I know. Boring. But bear with me. Because what makes this particular meal special is the fact that it was exactly how I would have liked to have been cooking throughout the escalating hysteria that is planning a wedding, had my life been anywhere near normal. But nothing had been normal. I'm pretty sure this was the first time I had gone into my kitchen in weeks. I think if you ask most newly married women how much time they had for the simple things like cooking meals during the weeks leading up to their wedding, the vast majority of them would laugh in your face and reach for the nearest takeout menu. Seriously. Things at Chez Gastro had been...a little hectic.

Lucky for me (and Mr. Gastro...and our tummies) one of the first gifts we received when the onslaught of wedding loot began about a month prior to the big day was a gift card to our local surf-hut themed food-o-rama. And this was an excellent gift. It was like someone gave us permission to cook again, just like that. It was like an invitation to get back to normal, if only for a day. So on the first cool crisp day of the season, I got a hankering for some old fashioned comfort food and picked up a couple of lovely french cut pork chops, some apples, and a bottle of wine and went to town. I locked myself in the kitchen and whipped up a marinade with dijon mustard, fresh rosemary, shallots, and a little bit of honey, and let the pork chops hang out in there while I fixed the salad. The beauty of this particular pork chop recipe was that with a little bit of olive oil and a drop or two of balsamic, a tablespoon of leftover marinade made a dandy salad dressing.

I had been thinking about the traditional combo of pork chops and applesauce, and decided to give it a bit of an update. A couple of sliced apples in a pan of hot butter, cinnamon, red wine and a dash of salt and sugar until they were just slightly soft turned out to be a great grown up twist on the old standard. I dropped the apples in a pretty little ramekin, propped the pork chops on a bed of baby arugula with blue cheese and walnuts, placed the whole shebang on our spiffy new china and had...::GASP:: a real meal with my fiancé.

I cannot stress enough what an average night this was. We ate dinner in front of the TV, racing each other to the correct responses on Jeopardy. We ate in our pajamas. But sometimes a meal can come together like magic, where everything is cooked to perfection, and the flavors are the exact right thing for that moment in time. When the kitchen gods are smiling on you. This was one of those nights. We needed that meal. Hanging out on the couch, alternating sweet spicy apples, funky blue cheese, and tangy tender pork chops, just to keep our tongues on high alert--it felt like we had earned that meal, with all of the previous month's planning and stressing, and micro-managing. With all of the pizza. We had earned it. With my feet in his lap and a big glass of red wine in his hand, Mr Gastro let out a big sigh, sank just a little deeper into the couch, and said, "This is perfect baby. This is wonderful."

So I promise, promise, promise, that in the next week or two I will share all of my food related wedding stories, in multiple installments if I have to. But for the time being, please content yourselves with this first meal, and a taste of what I can only hope will be the general flavor of our marriage from here on out. Something undoubtedly laid back, but crafted with a lot of care.

Brain Candy

The Green Street Grill

Green street Grill in Cambridge lays claim to the longest standing liquor license in the city, so what better place to stop for a much needed cocktail after a hard day's work? This was the mentality that food buddy John and I walked in with when our plans for an elaborate home cooked meal were derailed by a sudden emergency at John's office. What was supposed to be an early evening of steamed crab legs and angel hair primavera at my apartment had suddenly turned into a late evening of me looking over John's shoulder as he plugged information into his computer (none of which I understood) and he and his cube mate and I shared cheese and champagne while they worked. As far as late nights at the office go, this one definitely wins, but by the time we made our way out of the office and into the crisp air of Central Square around 10:30, we were ready for a real meal and some cocktails.

Green Street Grill did not disappoint. At John's recommendation I ordered the Sugar Daddy, a kind of deconstructed dark and stormy, with ginger beer and mint, and a snifter of rum served on the side. I was instructed by our wonderfully laid back and spunky waitress not to mix them. I'm normally not one to sip rum straight, but when she tells me it would be a waste of the lovely rum she's served me to mix the two together, I believe her and obey, and am rewarded with the beautiful velvety caramel of the rum, and the shocking bite of the ginger beer that chases it down my throat.

We decided we were feeling a little crazy and ordered offal to split as an appetizer, since neither of us had ever tried fried cow's brains before. Now I can say I've had them, and I would certainly order them again, but perhaps not here. The texture of the meat itself was delicate almost like a scallop, but the niceness of the texture was ruined when all I got for flavor was the slightly burnt oil it had been fried in. The whole dish was saved by the details however. The salad of baby arugula the offal was served on, with its bright, acidic dressing, and the swirl of funky aioli underneath kept my mouth happy and distracted.

My entree of fresh homemade pasta with Wellfleet littleneck clams was a great example of why fresh pasta is worth bothering with, (you can absolutely tell the difference, both in the texture and the flavor) and the light citrus-y sauce was so yummy that John continued to reach over and sop up what was left in the bottom of my bowl with his bread long after his own entree was gone. Even against the sunny sauce, the flavor of the clams shone in every bite, which is why it was such a shame that the clams themselves were slightly rubbery. That being said, John's lobster gnocchi was the clear winner for the entree round. The lobster's flavor could easily have been overwhelmed by the chorizo it was served with, and almost was, but then somehow it sneaks back into your mouth after the spiciness of the sausage has died down for a little fresh kick of seafood to balance out the richness of the rest of the dish. We both had to scrape our jaws off the table after the first bite.

Everything up until this point had been very nice, save for a few technical snafus. But dessert won the entire evening, hands down. We ordered the ricotta fritter, and received a tidy pile of chocolate pastries in the shape of pretty little eggs, sitting in a pool of liquid chocolate. When you cut into them they reveal themselves to be light and airy, not the dense heavy bricks of cheese and chocolate I had been expecting at all. And biting into them...pure heaven. The slightly crisp exterior melts into the sweet, slightly tangy cloud of ricotta and pastry inside, managing to be both shockingly light, and unbelievably rich. We were literally stunned into silence by our dessert. Finally I got my brain together long enough to say what we were both thinking: "It's like an evil doughnut!" John was still chewing, and so could only nod his approval and make yummy noises, in what I could only assume was his agreement with my (slightly unsophisticated) assessment.

All in all, a lovely dinner, a friendly and unpretentious server, and the discovery of a restaurant in my neck of the woods that's not afraid to put brain on the menu kept my Gastro-brain humming, and my mouth happy.

Confessions of a (formerly) Picky Eater

"Mom, I just don't like rice, okay! I don't think I should have to eat it if I don't like it!"

This is me, fifteen years ago, a ten year old making demands about what my mother should or should not serve for dinner. I remember my sister taking her cue from me from across the table, the very picture of seven year old self-righteousness, saying, "Yeah, I don't like it either!" and setting her fork down with a firmness that was just downright silly. I can't for the life of me figure out if my distaste was justified or not. I remember thinking rice was dry, grainy, tasteless and horrible. But this is not necessarily a reflection of reality, or of my mother's cooking, considering the list of foods I would rather have had my jaws sewn shut than eat at the time included pickles, quiche, guacamole, apple pie, tomatoes, cheese on hamburgers, gravy, olives, mussels, rare beef, cherries, yogurt, cream cheese... the list goes on. This is my dirty little secret. I was an atrocious eater. It took two and a half years of vegetarianism, a Summer as a vegan, and then a plummet back into the delicious world of meat to get me to realize that people can eat a lot of cool stuff, especially if they really have to. (My two favorite world cuisines, Ethiopian and Thai, would have never been on the menu for me if I hadn't been forced to broaden my horizons by my limited dietary options and my very veggie boyfriend.) Strange new foods are very often delicious, and the only way to find out is to bite the bullet and try it. Choking down rice doesn't seem like such a big deal once you've been feasting on Shiro Wot and Yeabesha Gomen at your local Ethiopian joint.

So I wonder what that ten year old version of me would have thought if she had been able to witness me this past Thursday night, sweating over a giant pot of arborio rice and mushrooms, willing it into becoming risotto. She probably would have begged me to order pizza.She would have been so wrong.

Risotto is really much more pasta than rice. Yes, it is rice, technically. But when it's been infused with onions and garlic and dry white wine, and stirred into oblivion until it's a creamy, starchy bowl of loveliness, the resemblance is much closer to a lovely pasta in cream sauce than a big bowl of rice. And let me address for a moment the mystique surrounding risotto, and it's reputation for being a difficult dish to pull off. I believe this is a conspiracy. Is it tedious? Sure, when you're adding stock a half a cup at a time and watching diligently as each grain soaks up every little ounce of liquid, it can feel a little tedious. This is not a quickie dish. But in terms of difficulty it's, well...not. I truly believe that risotto's reputation as a difficult dish is a farce put forth by professional chefs and restaurant folk in order to be able to continue serving what is essentially, I'm sorry, STILL RICE, in their fancy restaurants. And don't get me wrong. I adore risotto, and believe that it should be served in restaurants regardless of whether it takes years to master or not. But you should not feel discouraged from exploring the beauty of a well crafted risotto in the comfort of your own home because some professional cooks say it's difficult. Do not be intimidated, fellow Gastro-Junkies. It's just not that hard.

Here's the routine. There are a billion ways to prepare risotto, and a billion different preferences about type of stock, the toothiness of the grains...this is how I do it. Adjust as you see fit. Saute up a medium sized onion and 1 clove of garlic in about 4 tablespoons of butter over medium heat, until the onions are translucent and soft. Add the uncooked rice (use high quality arborio, not your regular long grained rice, the results just won't be the same) and toast until the edges of the grains go translucent. Reduce heat and add some good dry white wine, about a cup, and stir until the liquid is absorbed. You'll know when this happens because when you stir from the bottom of the pan the liquid won't run in to fill the space right away. Now add about a cup of high quality chicken broth (or if you're me, some good home made stock with a little water) that you've been keeping slightly warm on the back burner. Stir until the liquid is absorbed. Once it is, continue to add more broth, a half cup at a time, waiting for the liquid to absorb between each addition. Continue doing this for about 20 minutes, or until the rice is the consistency you prefer (I prefer mine fairly thick and creamy, as opposed to looser and soupy). Remove from heat, add a generous amount of Parmesan cheese and some cracked black pepper, and mangia.

You can adjust this recipe to be made with seafood (switch to vegetable stock), add mushrooms, or drop in a few drops of black truffle oil for some funky flavor. Whatever you choose to do with it, don't be afraid...it's only rice.

The Ugly Tomato

A fellow blogger pointed out recently on her page (which you can find here) that people tend to have wonderful, memorable anecdotes surrounding our dear friend, the tomato, and I felt inspired. My favorite tomato story isn't really a story at all, more like a memory of the first time I really tasted a tomato. But it also speaks to one of my major attractions to food--it gets all tied up in our memories and grounds us in them, and causing us to hold on more clearly to otherwise unremarkable moments about kitchen tables, conversations about nothing, and places we used to live.

Senior year of college, the three of us roommates sitting at the kitchen table in our apartment in Brookline in the Summertime. I still couldn't tell you how we got that apartment--it was too sprawling, too rambly and romantic for three girls still in college. Hardwood floors, working fireplace, built in glass cabinets, original 1920s molding, and no doubt, original 1920s dust. Steam radiators that hissed in the Winter and couldn't be adjusted for temperature. One of us took up residence in the old dining room, where she traded a little bit of her privacy for a chandelier and a walk in closet that used to be the butler's pantry. We adored it. No air conditioning, no dishwasher. Still, I've never lived anywhere nicer.

Too tired after work to make real food, the three of us sit down still in our work clothes and cut up the Brandywine tomato Stacey and I have brought home from the farmer's market. Misshapen, alien, heavier than you think it ought to be and sporting purple splotches, with streaks of yellow and green at the top. A crack of broken skin across the bottom, they'd never sell this thing in the supermarket. Nobody would want it. It's hideous. It's perfect. We cut it into slices, and the thing holds on to all of it's juices, doesn't waste them all onto the plate. We douse this monstrous tomato in olive oil, sprinkle it with salt and pepper and the three of us eat it just like that with forks and knives, all off of the same plate. Then we eat it with our fingers. It's sweet and slightly savory, not pale and watery and pink like the tomatoes we'd see at the store. It tastes like where it came from, we decide. Laugh all you want, but we decide it tastes just a little like the coast, like a little touch of coastal New England seawater somehow made its way into our ugly tomato through the soil. Finally, when it's gone, we grab chunks of Italian bread and drag it through the remaining oil and pink flecks of tomato juice, getting every last ounce of enjoyment out of this one tomato.