I have a question, a simple one at that:
If you're a restaurant and the tomatoes at your disposal are pink, lifeless, hard and taste like cardboard...why do you put them in your salads? WHY!?!?!?! I demand an answer!
Are there people who actually enjoy these things? Are wedges of tomato such a mandated ingredient that must appear in any salad, regardless of season and geographic location?
I know. Not every restaurant can afford or gain access to locally grown tomatoes year round. I'm not a complete food snob and I really do understand that. But, if you can't get a decent tomato, please don't serve it to me.
It's the strangest things. No restaurant (at least not the ones worth going to) will knowingly serve brown lettuce or rotten steak...but these corrugated-tasting tomatoes make it through for half the year.
Stop the madness. If you want some non-green color in a salad, use a radish or some roasted red peppers. Maybe a dried cranberry or something. Just stop serving me tomatoes that would be more useful on a baseball diamond.
Sorry to rant...but the only thing annoying me more than this lately is the magazine subscription inserts...in magazines I already subscribe to. You know who you are.
Oh, man! You just hit on my pet peeve! Winter tomatoes are useless... I refuse to eat them.
Excellent rant.
Posted by: Irene | March 24, 2005 at 12:55 PM
I am so with you on this! Tomatoes are one of my favorite things but I don't even eat them at home in mid-winter! I am happy to say that some on-the-vine varieties are tasting better, but even with those I normally roast them to concentrate the flavor to make them more "tomato-y". :-)
Posted by: Culinary Fool | March 24, 2005 at 01:19 PM
We are so close to tomatoes being back in season...well, at least to planting them In the midwest you sense the change in the air just within the last few days. By the way, if you are complaining about tomatoes like this, you are a food snob. But who cares? I am reading this because I am too!
Posted by: Scott | March 30, 2005 at 08:48 AM