Stories indexed with the term ‘tomatoes’

You say “tomato” …  I say they’re gross.

But it is a fact of life that others have deemed tomatoes to be a tasty treat. They’re included in various standard salads, soups, sauces and sandwiches. Take a sandwich from Zingerman’s Deli, for example, the Dinty Moore (#4):  Corned beef, lettuce, tomato, Russian dressing on rye bread.

I’m almost certain that a sandwich artist properly trained in the culture of Zingerman’s customer service would enthusiastically build me a tomato-less Dinty Moore.

But I do not want to be served such a sandwich.

I want that sandwich served to me the way the sandwich designer conceived it – with a tomato. I can then alter the sandwich to suit my individual taste by manually removing the tomato.

Why not just order a tomato-less sandwich and avoid the tomato traces that are inevitably left behind, no matter how aggressively the corned beef is blotted with a napkin? Because I want the option – up until the very last possible moment – of leaving the tomato on the sandwich, or restoring the tomato to its proper place atop the beef.

Those trace tomato flavors on my sandwich remind me that I still, apparently, dislike tomatoes. But maybe someday, it’ll occur to me that, Wow, that tastes terrific, I should put that tomato slice back on the sandwich!!

I’d like our readers to think of the public commentary we include in The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s meeting reports the same way I think of tomatoes. We include the public commentary, just in case you decide that you’d like to have a bite.

So let’s go back a year ago, to a tomato still preserved in The Chronicle’s archives as fresh as the day resident Jim Mogensen picked it. He was talking about video recording equipment to be installed in Ann Arbor police cars.

And yes, I’m going find a way, by the end of this column, to connect video recording equipment in police cars to Zingerman’s sandwiches. [Full Story]

When Royer Held decides which tomatoes to plant in his garden each year, he doesn’t look through seed catalogs. He simply sorts through a collection of plastic bags that hold his own private stash of tomatoes-to-be.

He’s a seed-saver, cleaning and saving seeds from his own stock of plants and trading with others who have varieties he’d like to try. It’s his way of saving the flavorful tomatoes he loves and maybe even developing a new strain by working with generations of hybrids.

“Seed-saving is the ultimate source of local food,” says Held, a computer programmer who’s been involved in gardening since he was a child.

Held’s slightly disheveled garden at Greenview Park – one of the Project Grow gardens there – is a library of tomato genetics, but with wood-and-wire frames in the place of shelves, and instead of handing you a volume to read, he might give you a tomato to taste – maybe a Lollipop cherry tomato or a sausage-shaped Pirkstine Orange. [Full Story]