sad tomato

we were grilling up a few burgers. nothing fancy. i picked up the tomato we bought two days before at the grocery store. ordinarily, we buy our tomatoes from farm markets because they taste like tomatoes, but we weren't sure we'd make it to the farm market so we grabbed a few at one of those fluorescent light stores. i put them in the window because they didn't look quite ripe.

but we needed a tomato, so i took one from the window, put it on the cutting board and sliced off the stem end. i'm sure that's not how you slice your tomatoes, but i'm less likely to lose a finger if i do it my way. at first, i thought it was full of worms. let me tell you, you do not want to slice open a tomato and find it full of tiny white worms. mostly, this is because my own experience of tiny white worms suggests that if they're tiny, white, wormy and on food, they're maggots. it didn't matter that the tomato was blemish-free on the outside. maggot swarm was my first thought. but i looked again. they were sprouts. like bean sprouts. how on earth would bean sprouts get into my tomato? i know. i know. but bean sprouts in a tomato was a bigger problem for me than how the maggots might get in there because at least maggots would make sense. it took me a second to realize the tomato seeds had all sprouted. how old was this thing? i sliced again. it was sprouts all around and stem end to whatever is not the stem end. it was like a little chia tomato turned inside out.

so we sat on the front porch during a spectacular thunderstorm and ate our burgers. nice slices of red onion. home made cheese from the farm market down the road. corn on the cob. no tomato.