wishing for waldingfield
April 24, 2008
If you like this recipe, I am sure you will love these related recipes!
I’ve been thinking about how this got started: why I love foraging from markets, (wish I had the wherewithal to hunt for morels in the bayou forest) hoarding ingredients, and trying to make them into something interesting–without ruining how good fresh food is on its own. 
There are few things I can do with a ripe tomato that top cutting it open and tossing on some grainy salt. 
But, I didn’t know that until I worked at Waldingfield Farm.
I’d encountered many tomatoes before, certainly. I’d eaten thousands of them by the time I stumbled into the tilled fields at Waldingfield in May of 2004. But, no tomato had ever knocked my socks off. 
Until then, they’d mostly been mix-ins for color: a few requisite slices in a green salad, or perhaps a sliced beefsteak as a vehicle for mozzarella, olive oil and basil. Oh but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
I spent the summer kneeling in the dirt, collecting callouses, ticks, poison ivy and an appreciation for food straight from the dirt. 
(That is not my hand.) As time went by, I enjoyed the first fruits of Waldingfield’s vine–strawberries(!) sugar snap peas, a variety of lettuces, zucchini–I realized that perhaps the 80,000 tomato plants we’d stuck into the ground would be different from those I was accustomed to.
When the cherry tomatoes finally spotted the fields, announcing the upcoming onslaught of the Bull’s Heart, Pruden’s Purple and Ball’s Beefsteak varieties, I discovered that there is nothing better than these colorful fruits. The heavy purple, green, yellow and red toms that emerged in late July were organic heirlooms, fat, shiny, lumpen and as full of history as they were with seeds. I spent late summer with angels dancing on my tongue.
It was a coming of age story, really. Tasting my first cherry tomato would have knocked my socks off, no doubt about it. But I was barefoot.
Oooh summer, come quickly! 
