“…just remember, in Italy you have to respect the ingredients. It isn’t just a tomato; it is the culmination of a season’s worth of hard work by a farmer who lives just a few miles away, whose family has been growing tomatoes for five hundred years.”

Alexander Feldman
Chef’s page
Gastronomica, Spring 2010

I re-read this quote the other day.  It belongs, eye-level, on my kitchen backsplash.  Even though there isn’t this kind of history in the hothouse-gown pile of pinkish tomatoes in my local grocery store, how grand to treat each and every ingredient as if it has.