Tomatoes with salt

aka: don't overcomplicate what you need

At the start of the year, I wrote my 25 in 2025 — 25 things I wanted to work towards before the end of December. In amongst vows to go through at least 4 rolls of camera film this year, sew more, drink more water and go to the cinema at least once a month (January’s cinema trip was Babygirl…and I heavily enjoyed), there’s one bullet point that comprises just three words:

sewing more is also going well, so far: here’s a shirt I made inspired by my pal Sophia Katyea

My original intended meaning was the literal one: to eat more tomatoes with salt as a snack, because they’re delicious. Consider this your reminder that it exists: you’re welcome.

But it can also be taken more metaphorically. The reason I need to remind myself of tomatoes with salt — the reason that it deserved a precious space on my 25 in 2025 — is because I always dismiss it as too simple.

When I’m hungry, a bit peckish, or, let’s be honest, bored, I always think I must want a more complex, more impressive snack. A handful of those delicious Forest Feast dark chocolate almonds (a bag of which would require us to remortgage our flat). A couple of yummy TruFru raspberries (a bag of which would require us to remortgage our flat twice: once for the bag and once for the dentalwork, because frozen raspberries are COLD and my teeth are SENSITIVE¹). But the answer is, and should always be, a sliced up tomato with chunky salt crystals on it. Sometimes, we overcomplicate what we think we need (or what we want to think we need).

I was reminded of this pledge for 2025 because I was at home home² this weekend. On Saturday, we popped in to see my uncle and Grandad. Food has become an unexpected but lovely source of connection for us the past few years: starting with a Pasta Evangelists box for my uncle’s birthday in lockdown and culminating in a selection of delicious pastries from my pal Roxy at Flour & Feast every time we go round (it’s a hard life, but somebody has to eat this delicious viennoiserie!!)

flourandfeast

A post shared by @flourandfeast

Whilst watching my uncle making tea — in a mug older than me, plucked from a mug tree made by my dad in woodwork when he was 13 — I spotted a dish of juicy cherry tomatoes. When I popped one in my mouth as we talked, he responded with abject horror.

“Aren’t you going to salt it?” he asked.

“Ideally, yes, but I didn’t wanna faff around getting a knife out just for one tomato”, I (a martyr, a saviour, a reluctant yet ultimately expectant hero) explained.

With a look that screamed sweet summer child, he explained that the best thing to do was lick the outside so that the salt stuck (and I ate about 7 in quick succession, licked like a stamp and salted like the sea).

Maybe there’s a metaphor in that tomato lesson too?

1. worth it

2. going home = going back to London; going home home = going back to where I grew up