Winter Tomatoes

Smitten Kitchen recently posted a recipe for Pasta with Baked Tomato Sauce that sounds fabulous. In the post, she made a comment about cherry tomatoes:

The best part, if you ask me, is that you can even make it with those cherry or large grape tomatoes that stay eerily fantastic — I try not to question it — through the winter.

I understand that completely - I'll buy those eerily fantastic grape tomatoes in the winter time to toss happily into a salad (well, until my conscience gets to me and I decide that buying Florida tomatoes in January is a waste of fossil fuel).

So, last weekend, we found some of the now-allowed-to-leave-Florida UglyRipe tomatoes in our local A&P - so we bought one, out of curiousity. It looked good. It had a nice texture. It had zero taste. No flavor. Oh, and it was $4.99/pound, so one tomato set me back $2.84. I think perhaps the USDA ruling was unnecessary. Oh well. Back to the eerie grape tomatoes.