It is one of key purposes of this website to introduce you to the wonderful world of fresh produce and the endless ways it can be incorporated into your family meals. Fresh produce shall takes inches from your waist and put more dollars in your wallet. From veggie pancakes to fruit-topped homemade waffles, veggies will surprise you with their amazing versatility! Tomato is my produce pick of the week. I have probably used tomatoes more than any other produce. It is not really a vegetable–botanically tomatoes are a fruit. Winter is not the best season of the year to flaunt the virtues of tomatoes but it is the time of the year when extra vitamin C is a plus.
The tomato is one of our best food values. Used in vegetable soup it enhances the other vegetables and provides an easy way to get the USDA’s 5 recommended daily Vegetables. You can find tomatoes in paste, puree, tomato sauce and many forms of canned tomatoes such as plum tomatoes, crushed and quartered. They are excellent in pasta sauces, chili, Swiss steak, home made pizza and salsa.
But the real bonus of tomatoes is their anti-oxidant content. Anti-oxidants are responsible for attacking the free radicals in the body which eventually can cause cancer. The most frequently mentioned is lycopene. However, what is not mentioned it the most lycopene comes from the cooked tomato and there is much less in the raw tomato. Forget raw tomatoes in the winter. So-called “ripe on the vine” tomatoes, while looking wonderful, are hard and tasteless under that blushing beauty. When summer comes you can truly enjoy what a genuine ripe tomato tastes and looks like at your local Farmers Market. Locations are listed on the Internet. www.farmersmarketlocations.com
For the interesting history of the tomato and other curious facts log on….www.tomato.org.