I am a very spoiled tomato-eater.  Once you have tasted a summer tomato straight from the vine, you can never ever eat one out of season.  Tasting a flavorless, hard, mealy tomato is about as disappointing a culinary experience as you can get.  I used to go out into my father’s garden with a salt shaker, pick a tomato, shake the salt into my mouth for the first bite (because salt won’t cling to an uncut tomato), take a juicy bite and keep eating until I got a stomachache.  All worth it.  And if we were in Italy in the summer visiting family, forget it.  I was out of control. Because the only thing better than a tomato from my father’s garden is a tomato from a southern Italian garden.  The sun and soil do something magical to those tomatoes.

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