TOMATO TIME!

One of the many pleasures of living in Kansas was the tomatoes and the roasting ears were ready by Independence Day.

In a recent survey, people on the street where asked how they liked to eat tomatoes. Give it some thought, won't you, while we address the love apple.

Many talk of NOT liking tomatoes at all! Their choice would be to turn all of them into spaghetti sauce or ketchup.

Others want them cut up in a salad or served in a sandwich. The most popular sandwich being the BLT variety. When we had these, Bud ate peanut butter and bacon.

Mother served them cold with salt and pepper.

Grandma sliced them even thinner and ate hers with sugar.

It wasn't until we planted nine plants in a natural water way by the sand pile one year that I learned how good the early tomatoes where picked on a warm day, washed and eaten like an apple. As the season moved along the skins got tough and the pleasure just wasn't quite the same.

While working in activities in the nursing home, I learned about fried green tomatoes from the residents. "Dip in egg, roll in corn meal, and fry", they said. And so, at the end of the season, when families where bringing in apples and tomatoes, we had fried green tomatoes and made crock pots full of applesauce which made the entire building have that kind of aroma we can't get out of a bottle.

People in Kansas are picking their first cherry tomatoes off the vine; Debbie in Tennessee is canning her vegetables from her garden. Alas, in Fargo, we have no ripe tomatoes and the corn is knee high near this 4th of July.

Picnic anyone?

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