Perhaps it’s just prejudice, but I am immediately wary of tomatoes in winter.

I see little grape tomatoes on salads, or sliced tomatoes on sandwiches, and I shove them aside, peel them off of buns, turn my nose up and dismiss them as “winter tomatoes” – tasteless and unnatural. There’s something not-quite-right about picking out tomatoes while wearing a wool pea coat.

Viva Roma (tomatos) (Pic | foodcourting.blogspot.com)

It’s a relatively new phenomenon for me to eat tomatoes, let alone enjoy them, and furthermore to have any sense of discerning taste for them. Tomatoes are one vegetable I was never forced to eat as a kid because my mother hates them. The story she tells me is this: her father, the County Agricultural Inspector in her hometown of Orlando, Florida, grew oranges and tomatoes when she was a child. On a regular basis, he loaded up her little red wagon and made her and her brother peddle tomatoes to the neighbors.

This is the story she tells, the childhood trauma that turned her against tomatoes, and that made her comfortable with never forcing her children to eat “that nasty vegetable,” as she calls it. Even once she married my step-father, a quintessential Southern man who grows tomatoes in pots on the back deck, who slices said tomatoes and sprinkles them with a little salt and pepper, maybe a little pepper juice, and eats them raw… even once my step-father began his campaign of shaming us into liking tomatoes by poking gentle fun at mine and my brother’s inherited aversion to tomatoes – I held strong. I stood by my mother.

No one would force us to eat tomatoes. As God was our witness, we would never buckle under the pressure, weaken our resolve, and eat that dastardly vegetable.

In a discussion a few months ago, I confessed my sin to my mother: I’m a turncoat. I like tomatoes. I eat them cooked or fresh, on salads and in pasta. I intend to grow them this summer. Forgive me mother, for I have sinned.

She merely shrugged and shook her head.

And so in the relatively short amount of time that I’ve been eating and enjoying tomatoes, I have come to one absolute declaration, one I share with many growers and lovers of tomatoes: winter tomatoes don’t taste like anything.

This week, in the Five Points CSA, I got eight Roma tomatoes. I stared them down, wondering what in the world to make with them. I’m still not quite enough of a tomato badass to just cut one open and start munching on it the way many members of my family do. So I turned to The Joy and looked for a recipe.

I wanted something warm and bubbly, something with herbs that would meet my need for comfort food. I turned on the Amalie soundtrack (okay, that’s French, but it made me feel like cooking something Italian), and I set about learning new tricks with tomatoes.

The recipe I chose was for scalloped tomatoes, a new recipe I had never tried before. And here’s why I’m sometimes the worst CSAcationer: I go off book. Constantly. I see a recipe, I read it carefully, and then I start looking for all the ways I can tweak it. I disregard essential elements (like how many tomatoes to use for scalloped tomatoes). I talk on the phone or dance around the kitchen and imagine I’m riding a bicycle through the Italian countryside, and I’m in love and wearing an adorable sundress, and at the end of my bike ride, there’s a warm, decadent plate of food waiting for me. And it’s perfect.

Sometimes, this fantasy goes wrong. Like yesterday. Because the dish I made was definitely not perfect.

Here’s the recipe from The Joy of Cooking:

Scalloped Tomatoes
8-10 servings

3 lbs tomatoes (4 cups)

5 tablespoons unsalted butter (divided)

1 ½ cup fine dry breadcrumbs (I used Italian breadcrumbs)

1 cup finely chopped onions

1 large red or green bell pepper (I used a red one from last week’s CSA)

1 tablespoon sugar

¾ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

Salt and pepper to taste

Position a rack in center of oven and preheat oven to 350. Lightly butter a shallow, 10-inch round baking dish, quiche pan, or pie pan.

Peeled and seeded

Peel and seed the tomatoes. According to The Joy, to peel tomatoes, bring a pot of water to a boil. Have ready a bowl of ice water. For each tomato, make two small incisions in the bottom of the tomato, making an x. Slowly place the tomato in boiling water, letting it stay for one minute. Then remove the tomato from the boiling water and place in the ice water to stop the cooking process.

Once the tomato is cool enough to handle, peel back the skin from the x pattern on the bottom. If the skin is hard to peel, try using a knife to guide the peel along, or place the tomato back in the boiling water for 15 seconds, remembering to dunk it in the ice water to stop the cooking process. To seed the tomatoes, once you have peeled them, cut the tomatoes in half, lightly squeeze to loosen the seeds, and then use your fingers to flick the clump of seeds and pulp out.

Other sources online suggest that you not cut the tomatoes before boiling. Other sources also suggest that you can seed the tomatoes just by squeezing. I think this is a matter of feeling. Whatever method works the best for you, go with it.

Once your tomatoes are peeled and seeded, cut them into a ¼ inch dice.

Next, melt 2 tablespoons of butter over medium heat in a large skillet. Stir in the breadcrumbs and cook, stirring constantly, until fragrant and nicely toasted, 3-6 minutes. Scrape the crumbs into a mixing bowl and set aside.

Return the skillet to medium heat and add 3 tablespoons of butter, heating until the foam begins to subside. Then add the onions and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are tender and just beginning to color, about ten minutes.

Add the vegetables to the crumbs along with the sugar, ¾ teaspoon salt, and ½ teaspoon pepper. Mix well.

Scalloped (not-so-bubbly) tomatoes

Distribute half the crumb mixture over the bottom of the baking dish. Cover evenly with the tomatoes and sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper to taste. Then sprinkle the remaining crumb mixture evenly over the top. Bake until the tomatoes are bubbly in the center and the top is richly browned, about 40 minutes. Sprinkle with fresh parsley and serve warm.

The dish sounds delicious, and it actually was. The flavor is robust and fresh, the pepper, onion, and tomato playing off each other to create a dish that is zesty and flavorful. You’ll notice, however, in the picture, that bubbly is not a word to describe this dish.

Let me explain something:  I majored in English because I don’t do numbers. So when I read “3 lbs tomatoes,” in my mind, I think, oh, that’s probably five tomatoes. Wrong. Five Roma tomatoes does not equal three pounds. And since I skimped on the tomatoes, but not on any of the other ingredients, the zest and full flavor of this dish was hindered slightly by a surplus of salt and breadcrumbs.

When I was in high school, I wanted nothing more in the world than to be a pastry chef and own a small town bakery. I discovered quickly, however, that I don’t cook well under pressure. Also, I make a lot of mistakes. The difference between the low-stakes cooking I do in my home kitchen and the professional pressures of the culinary business is that, when I screw up a recipe in my kitchen, it’s only me and my highly indulgent roommates that suffer, not a dining room full of people. So I submit this recipe to you, my fellow CSAcationers, with the caution to follow the recipe as it was written. To respect the ideal represented by the requirements of “3 lbs tomatoes.” And to join me in one surprising revelation: winter tomatoes can be tasty. In fact, they can be downright delicious.

Forgive me, mother.

Eat well, friends, and take care.