First Tomato (Sandwich)


Libby’s recent column over at Literary Mama brought me back to one of my favorite series, the Bunny Planet books by Rosemary Wells. In each one, a bunny is having a pretty lousy day until the Bunny Queen, Janet, whisks the animal off to the Bunny Planet for “the day that should have been.”

I’ve always identified most with the hapless Claire, who doesn’t get a good breakfast and whose shoes fill with snow on the way to school; she has to sit through two hours of math at school (no matter how long the math lesson was, it always felt like two hours to me), is served baloney sandwiches for lunch, and then is the only girl in her gym class who can’t do a cartwheel: this sounds like any number of bad days in my childhood!

Luckily, in the Bunny Planet, it’s summer and Claire is home, where she can pick vegetables from her garden and then hang out in the kitchen watching her mother cook — this, in turn, sounds like any number of good days from my childhood.

Claire’s mother makes her soup from the summer’s first tomato, but I think my mother would agree that the best thing to do with the very first tomato is a sandwich, and that’s what I made today: just one sliced tomato, on toast, with some mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Yum.

I ate mine too fast to take a picture; this image is from Out of the Garden

4 Comments

  1. Margaret says:

    I definitely agree, and would add a few very tender baby lettuce leaves, plucked at the same time as the tomato, to add a bit of spice to the tomato!

    Love,

    Mom

  2. Stacey says:

    So fun! We returned home from vacation today to find tons of tomatoes had grown while we were gone… fun to have a new idea of how to enjoy!

  3. Maria says:

    Yummy! We grew up having “tomato toast” — swap the mayo for a drizzle of olive oil and add some dried oregano to the spices.

  4. Margaret says:

    Or snip some fresh basil from your window box on it!