The most romantic tomato

Today, my boss gave me a perfect tomato to take home, and she told me the romantic details of how it came to our kitchen.

Sorry the photo is less than perfect.

The local farmer who grew the tomatoes planted the tomato seeds with his wife on Valentine's Day. When the fruits of the summer's labor were ready, he filled a tub of water and left it in the sun to heat up so it would be the same temperature as the tomatoes, then he dipped each tomato he picked into the warm bath and polished it with a terry cloth. When he takes his tomatoes to the farmer's market, if a customer picks out an imperfect fruit, he picks out a better-looking tomato and says, "if you want that tomato, you should also take this one because it is more perfect." For the box of tomatoes he brought to our kitchen, he separated out the less perfect tomatoes from those that met his high expectations, placing them in the lid, so we wouldn't have unpleasant surprises inside the box.

I think that this well-loved tomato is just what my kitchen needs today. It earns the French tomato nickname "love apple."

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What's cooking this week? Berries!

Our friends who have turned their entire back yard over to food production occasionally find some of the crops getting away from them. My husband and I benefit when they invite us over to help with the picking in exchange for some of the harvest.

This week, we helped pick blackberries and gooseberries. Many thorn scratches and pokes later, we had enough blackberries to eat them for breakfast a few days and make jam plus enough gooseberries for a pie.

I have not eaten a gooseberry pie since I was a kid in Minnesota, where my parents found some growing wild one year and brought them home. This year's pie is just out of the oven, so I can't say yet whether it tastes the way the first one did. The berries are different, since the ones we picked this week were light red and sweeter than the tart green ones I remember from the childhood pie.

Here is the recipe I devised after looking up a few recipes online and picking out what I liked from about three of them.

Gooseberry Pie
makes one double-crust 9-inch pie

3 1/2 cups gooseberries
250 to 300 grams (about 1 1/2 cups) sugar (use more or less depending on tartness desired)
3 Tbsp instant tapioca (e.g. Minit)
1/2 tsp salt
two 9-inch pie crusts (my favorite recipe is from Cooks Illustrated, part of their "Best Blueberry Pie" article from 2008)
Optional: 2 Tbsp of milk and 1 Tbsp sugar

Prepare pie plate with bottom crust. Place in refrigerator while cooking filling. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Crush 1/2 berries in a saucepan, add sugar, tapioca and salt and 1 tsp water to wet the sugar.  Cook gently until mixture comes to a boil, stir frequently and cook another 3 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the rest of the berries.

Roll out top pie crust. Pour filling into prepared bottom pie crust, then cover with top crust. Cut off excess crust and crimp the edges to seal in the filling. If desired, brush top crust with the optional 2 Tbsp milk and sprinkle with the optional 1 Tbsp sugar. Cut slits and holes in top crust to allow steam to escape. Bake 35 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Cover edges with aluminum foil if the crust edge starts to brown.

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