When we heard news of the late blight that swept much of New England and the mid-Atlantic this summer, our hearts just about fell out of our chests for the farmers up there.  Late blight is a fungus that destroys tomato plants and can also spread to potatoes; it spread like wildfire in the Northeast this summer.  It’s awful to imagine a summer without tomatoes.  And tomatoes are quite often a vegetable farmer’s bread and butter — a summer without tomato income is a very, very scary thing.

Luckily, Virginia seems to have been mainly spared, and we’ve got some gorgeous ones for you in the CSA and at market right now.  I always say you should eat tomatoes like there’s no tomorrow.  Nothing tastes like a vine-ripened tomato in the thick of summer, and their season comes but once a year.  This year, I’m eating them with an extra grateful heart.

We’re growing eight kinds of tomatoes at Frog Bottom this year, a mix of heirloom and home garden hybrid varieties.  All are thin-skinned and delicious.  I really am hard-pressed to pick a favorite — but if I must, I’ll always reach for a Cherokee Purple first.  That’s the purple one I’m touching in the photo above.  Let it ripen as long as you can stand it (at room temperature — never in the fridge), till it’s a deep dusky purpley-pink.  It’s amazingly sweet but with a nice balanced acidity.  It’s a natural for slicing and eating as is or in a sandwich.

Stop by the farm any day at lunchtime and you’ll likely find Ali and me both with sticky tomato juice running down our forearms and a bit of a homemade mayonnaise mustache.  Can you think of a better way to celebrate the season?

Here are our favorite ways to eat tomatoes right now; all require pretty minimal preparation and let the natural intensity of the tomato shine through.

Sliced and doused with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sea salt, and freshly ground black pepper. When we want to gild the lily we add basil leaves and fresh mozzarella.

Sliced and stuffed into a simple sandwich of toast slathered with homemade mayo. We haven’t bought mayo in ages.  It’s fast and easy to make your own, and once you start, you’ll wonder who kept this secret from you your whole life.  To make your own mayo: Blend one room temperature egg, some dried or jarred mustard, the juice of one lemon or a roughly equivalent amount of vinegar, and a bit of salt in the blender or food processor for a minute or two.  Then add oil (we usually mix equal parts olive and canola, but experiment to see what you like) — usually about 3/4 cup — in a very slow stream while still blending, until everything is emulsified.  Our mayo tends to be thinner than storebought, but you can add more oil if you’d like it thicker — or a bit of water or milk or cream if you want it thinner.  You can also stir in more lemon juice, mustard, salt, or pepper at the end to taste if you want.  Put whatever you don’t use right away into a tightly sealed jar in the fridge and use within a week.

Coarsely chopped and roasted in the oven with olive oil and salt for an hour or two or three. It can be hard to turn on the oven these days, but we’re always glad we did.  Slow roasted tomatoes are like candy.  Toss them with pasta, add them to a salad, smear them on toast with goat cheese, or just stand there at the stove and eat them all right out of the roasting dish.  Roasted tomatoes freeze very well.

Tomato bread salad. Tear or slice some chewy, slightly stale bread into rough 1-inch chunks, toss with olive oil, and bake until crispy.  Toss with halved garlic cloves, chunks of tomato, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and some basil or other fresh herbs.  Let the whole thing sit for about ten minutes and then dig in.  Avoid the garlic cloves.  Or not.  We first started making it when we read about it several years ago on Molly Wizenberg’s food blog Orangette.  We can’t recommend this website heartily enough for its wonderful storytelling and its no-nonsense, always-delicious recipes.

Panzanella. Tomato bread salad’s slightly fancier cousin — a bread salad that originated in central Italy.  Here are two delicious versions, one at Kitchen Parade and one at Chocolate & Zucchini.

And if you can’t eat  your way through all the tomatoes: freeze ‘em!  They’re slightly more accommodating when you use them later, if you blanch, peel, and coarsely chop them first.  But when we don’t have time for that we throw them into Ziploc bags whole.  Then we use them in sauces and casseroles in the winter.

And what about y’all??  Please leave a comment and tell us how you eat your tomatoes!