The Tomato That Ate the World

I hate tomatoes.

Well, in actuality I am allergic to them, and therefore I hate them. Truly, I don't know which came first, the disgust (all those seeds! the mushy texture!) or the allergy, but it's kind of a moot point. The general response to my declaration of tomato-disdain is, "But you've never tasted a tomato from my garden. If you just had one from my garden, fresh and vine-ripened, you would change your mind." This is usually followed by the tomato-lover actually making me eat a tomato from their garden, which I did many, many times before my allergy became too severe to do so. My response was always the same...yuck.

However, I am trying to be a good wifey, and Eric loves tomatoes. So I grew some in the garden; just one plant of the big slicing variety. A tomato started to grow right away, pretty much as soon as the plant was in the ground.

And it grew. And grew. And grew.

It is a BEAST. I have been keeping an eye on it, waiting for it to turn red (or for it to try and kill us in our sleep) and it had gotten so enormous that it was bringing the entire plant out of the tomato cage and onto the damp ground. I finally picked it today, at the request of several resident tomato experts who said it will ripen off the vine. I will give it a while to ripen inside, but after that, it's going to get fried up green. And I am still keeping an eye on it, just to make sure I don't find it stalking the cats or watching me out of the corner of its beady little eye.

Friend or foe? Here is the beast next to a quarter. Disgusting.