A to-do about tomatoes

A few weeks ago, The Husband and I were hosting two young visitors: our former foster son, X, and his cousin, E. They’re 12 and 11, respectively, and they were over for the weekend so their mom could have a break and we could get some bonding time with the little guy we’ve missed every day since he moved out going on — could it be? — five years now.

I was working on dinner — I can’t remember what was on the menu — and the gravitational pull of the kitchen island proved that people were hungry. “Daddy Joe, is it ready yet?”

I couldn’t exactly speed up the air fryer, but I could throw together something to tide them over. Head on swivel: Some perfectly ripe heirloom tomatoes from the farmers market sat on the counter. But would the kids like a tomato salad as much as, say, the Drumsticks in the freezer or the Doritos in the snack cabinet? (Don’t get me started.) We were about to find out.

This is no news flash, but I’ll say it anyway: Tomatoes, especially when they’re fresh and in season, are the ultimate no-recipe-required food, a standby of off-the-cuff cooking. I cut them into wedges, spread them on a platter, then added thinly sliced celery, smoked Kalamata olives (from Divina: recommended), the good-stuff olive oil, thin shavings of dried-out-but-still-tasty Parm, salt, pepper and chopped parsley.

They all dug in, and they all dug what they dug into — the youngest one perhaps most of all — and the questions turned from hangry to wondrous. “Why is this so good?” my husband asked.

You fellow tomato lovers know the answer: Because tomatoes are so good!

Have you read about the fascinating history of tomatoes? It starts with their growing wild in the Andes some 80,000 years ago — they were small, meaning my current obsession with cherry tomatoes might actually be a blast from the long-ago past. They traveled north, thanks to birds and people; became a staple of the Mayans and Aztecs, who cultivated them; went to Europe, thanks to explorers who became colonizers who brought them back to Mexico; became indispensable to Mexican cooking, perhaps thanks to salsas; were unfairly blamed for poisonings in the U.K., possibly thanks to pewter plates whose lead the acidic tomatoes unlocked; became inextricably associated with Italian cooking, maybe thanks to the inventors of modern pizza; and generally have become so beloved by eaters, cooks, gardeners and hybridizers around the world that, well, if you want a BLT in Boston in the winter, you can get one — and the tomato, at this point, might actually taste like something.

But it won’t taste anything like those heirlooms in my salad, I can promise you that.

Like a lot of cooks, I try to stay away from the out-of-season, shipped-from-afar tomatoes, partly because I want to support local agriculture and partly because I just adore the peak-summer flavor. When I break down and get fresh tomatoes in the winter, they’re usually either plum/Roma tomatoes or cherry tomatoes, which I find taste better than many other varieties when it’s winter here and summer (or inside a greenhouse) wherever they were shipped from. Canned tomatoes, naturally, are another story for another newsletter.

And then when the great local ones start showing up at markets in the summer — or when my own plants produce like mad — I stuff myself with them while they last. Salads like the ones I described above, gazpacho, pasta dishes, pico de gallo, other salsas, more salads, more soups, more pasta, a classic Southern-style tomato sandwich (soft white bread, Duke’s, a thick tomato slice, salt and pepper). Sometimes I allow myself to be overrun with tomatoes just so I can start oven-drying them, a 12-hour technique I’ve been employing for decades that leaves them a little jammy and even more versatile for quick cooking because that outstanding flavor is extra-concentrated.

Even though I said tomatoes are such a great no-recipe food, I have of course written plenty of recipes featuring them — and have enjoyed the tomato recipes of so many others, too. One favorite is from Amy Chaplin’s book “Whole Food Cooking Every Day”: You make a stellar pine-nut sauce, salt the tomatoes separately without cooking them, and combine the two for one of my absolute must-makes every summer.

A new go-to comes from Sami Tamimi and his latest book, “Boustany,” a celebration of Palestinian vegetable cooking. I had a powerful conversation with Sami last week over Zoom, and include more on that below, but first up, his recipe for Tomato, Za’atar and Sumac Salad. It’s another keeper, trust me.

Now for a little myth-busting. I know this is going to be hard for some of you to accept, because you’ve always heard: Don’t refrigerate them. Well, guess what? I’ve been doing it for a really long time, with no ill effects, and it turns out science was on my side. The upshot: Yes, refrigeration can turn tomatoes mealy if you let them ripen there, but if you ripen them on the counter, as you should, you can extend their life by a few more days in the refrigerator.

No harm will come. I swear!

To recap, my top tomato tips:

• Don’t be afraid to refrigerate them — once they’re ripe.

• Don’t cook them.

• Or, don’t cook them for long.

• Or, go ahead and cook them for long.

• Or, for fun, try cooking them for really long.

Basically, just figure out your favorite ways to enjoy them while you can — and then wait for next year. They’ll be back, and you’ll be ready.

I break for animals: Zoe

From Eat at Joe’s subscriber Laurie Mitsanas of Concord, California:

Zoe
Age: 3
Cardigan Welsh corgi/border collie mix
Favorite treat: Frozen carrots
Cutest thing she ever did: “Recently my husband was getting her ready for a walk while I was out somewhere with the car. He told her that she would be going to stay with her trainer, who she loves, the next day. Zoe was happy and excited. Then they stepped outside and she saw the car wasn't there, and turned to my husband with a reproachful face as if to ask, ‘How are we going to get there without the car!’”

Keep the pet photos coming, people!

Recipe: Tomato, Za’atar and Sumac Salad

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This recipe from Sami Tamimi’s “Boustany” is simple to put together and (not but) boasts the most vibrant combination of flavors, particularly sweet, tart and earthy from the tomatoes, lemon, sumac, pomegranate molasses and fresh oregano leaves. (Note that Sami makes it with fresh za’atar leaves — not the spice mix, the single herb, a type of wild thyme that grows in the Middle East and hard to find here, but he allows for oregano as a substitute, and my garden is overflowing with that.)

Serves 4

• 1 pound ripe tomatoes (2 to 3 medium to large tomatoes), cut into ¼-inch wedges

• 1 pound cherry tomatoes, halved
  ¼ of a large red onion, chopped (½ cup)

• ¾ cup fresh parsley, chopped

• 1 tablespoons sumac, plus more for sprinkling

• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• ½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest

• 2 ½ tablespoons fresh lemon juice

• 1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses

• 1 ¼ teaspoons fine salt, plus more to taste

• ¾ cup fresh za’atar or oregano leaves, chopped

• 3 tablespoons pomegranate seeds
  

In a large bowl, combine the tomatoes, red onion, parsley and sumac.

In a small bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, pomegranate molasses and salt. Taste and season with more salt as needed.

Pour the dressing over the salad, add the za’atar or oregano leaves and toss to combine.

Pile the salad onto a serving platter and sprinkle with the pomegranate seeds and more sumac.

Recipe from “Boustany” (Ten Speed Press, 2025) by Sami Tamimi.

More favorite tomato recipes

These are gift links to recipes I wrote for The Washington Post. Note that they require you to register but not subscribe. Gift links are free to access for 2 weeks, so if you want to save any of these recipes but don’t subscribe or want to subscribe, I suggest you save them!

Summer Tomato and Basil Pasta
With Pine Nut Sauce

Cherry Tomato Pasta

Twelve-Hour Tomatoes

Cookbooking: Sami Tamimi and ‘Boustany’

Sami Tamimi noticed something interesting when he was on book tour in the U.S. recently to support his first solo cookbook, “Boustany: A Celebration of Vegetables From My Palestine” (Ten Speed Press, 2025). Most of the people who came to see him speak about this gorgeous work were non-Arabs.

“People are really kind of broken emotionally from everything that’s happening, but also from Gaza,” he tells me in a Zoom call from his London home. “Coming to see me and talk about Palestine and the food and everything felt like a kind of relief. I got so many hugs from people, which is really sweet in a way. But I felt most of the time that they needed the hug more than me.”

I had asked Sami about the difficulty in presenting a work that celebrates the bounty and generosity of the Palestinian kitchen right when the most wrenching images of starvation in Gaza are being seen around the world. His answer, in essence, is that he’s glad for any reason to help the world better understand his spiritual home, including its foodways.

When the October 7 attacks led by Hamas struck Israel, becoming the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history, Sami was in Jerusalem on a work trip and planning to visit his family in East Jerusalem. “I didn’t get to see them,” he says. “I was really scared for my family, for their safety, and also, you know, just couldn’t wait to just get out of the place.”

His family is OK, but Israel’s punishing campaign against Palestine since the attacks has left him riding “a whole rollercoaster of emotion and feeling and anger and you name it. Looking back, it's just like, God, it's been going on for the last 80 years.”

He was nearly finished with “Boustany” on October 7, and he considered making changes to the book in response, but decided against it. “This is another side of Palestine, and I have these beautiful memories that I wanted to share with people. This feeding and cooking and sharing and hosting and eating is a big part of the culture and tradition.”

In Arabic, “Boustany” means “my garden,” and the book connects Sami’s modern approach to cooking with his memories of frequent visits to his grandparents’ home on the West Bank when he was a child. “My grandfather took immense pride in his garden, and his dedication to it was evident in the quality and abundance of the produce he cultivated,” Sami writes in his introduction. “He taught me the importance of patience and care in growing food, lessons that have stayed with me throughout my life.”

This is one of those rare books whose pages I plaster with Post-Its marking the recipes that most catch my eye, and I always think: Wouldn’t it be easier to mark the ones I’m not going to cook immediately? I tell Sami that his tomato salad with za’atar and sumac (which I include earlier in this newsletter) is high on the list, especially since it’s peak tomato season in the mid-Atlantic (and the rest of the country) right now. He approves.

Palestinians, he tells me, “really celebrate the seasons, and the seasons sometimes are really short like for figs and tomatoes, which come and go very swiftly. So they just want to make the best of them. They don’t buy one or two tomatoes. They buy 25. Because they know they're gonna disappear, and they just make the best out of cooking them in different ways. But the best way is probably just to cut tomatoes and put them in a plate with a bit of onion and sumac and fresh za’atar.”

I knew he was right, and when I made the salad, I felt like I was in his kitchen as he told stories from his grandparents’ boustan. I started planning when I’d make it again — and when I’d make sumac onions with the three-quarters of a red onion I had leftover from making the salad, and when I’d make the sumac-roasted plums. What can I say? Like many a Middle Easterner, I have a thing for sumac.

After I got off the call with Sami, my mind was filled with thoughts of abundance versus hunger, of the particular pain that must be felt by people so closely tied to the land who are being pushed out of it. “You say Palestine, and people think of people killing each other, mass starvation,” he tells me. “But the average Palestinian person just wants to live and enjoy life, to invite people over and cook.”