There are lots of nice-looking tomatoes out there, but if given the choice, I skip the conventionally pretty and go for the ugly-hot ones instead. Think Black-Eyed Peas over Black Swan kind of hot.
You can find identical tomatoes that appear to have popped out of a factory any day of the week. But the days are numbered for these crazy looking guys.
If I don’t feel like cooking (which is embarrassingly often), I opt for a raw snack (read: eat something without doing a damn thing to it) like this luscious thing, sliced up and sprinkled with kosher salt, olive oil, vinegar.
Something else you might want to know, if the taste alone isn’t enough to sell you: Tomatoes are packed with vitamins C and A and loaded with all kinds of other goodies, including lycopene, an antioxidant that researchers believe may be linked with bone health.
Serious. Check out this particularly juicy bit of info from a non-profit site I recommend called World’s Healthiest Foods:
“A study was designed in which tomato and other dietary sources of lycopene were removed from the diets of postmenopausal women for a period of 4 weeks, to see what effect lycopene restriction would have on bone health. At the end of 4 weeks, women in the study started to show increased signs of oxidative stress in their bones and unwanted changes in their bone tissue. The study investigators concluded that removal of lycopene-containing foods (including tomatoes) from the diet was likely to put women at increased risk of osteoporosis.” (original article appears here)
This study was published in the Journal of Nutrition Health and Aging.
OK, folks, so get ’em while you can.