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."