I agree, it looks delicious and would keep me going for most of the day. I like your serving dishes too. Annie

I much prefer bruschetta to BLT, especially if the bread is grilled. Did you brush the bread with olive oil before grilling? I usually use a mixture of butter, olive oil, and garlic. I finally have a tomato plant that is growing well ( as well as a few basil plants), and so I should be able to make this with home-grown ingredients in another month or two. I get tomatoes late in the season, but I get a long season. We have a cherry tomato plant growing in the ground, and it is doing a lot better than the tomatoes I have started from seed in pots. One seedling is doing fairly well, but I am afraid to transplant it yet. The cherry tomatoes do very well in my soil here, and the last plant I had growing next to the grape vine lived for over a year and produced lots of tomatoes throughout January, although they were fairly small. I should check the Farmers' Market in Playa Vista tomorrow for tomatoes! Lars

No, B.Smith's is not so good. Great spot, and you did have a beautiful day, but more a tourist attraction. Tate's Farm (Kathleen's dad) where K started selling her cookies as a kid is in walking distance from me. Last year there was an article about him in the local paper. He has chickens and turkeys, and this was about getting your fresh killed turkey. Someone wrote a letter calling him a murderer!! He is a very kind and generous man, and that letter raised a lot of outrage!!! I don't shop at Tate's, formerly Kathleen's, VERY pricey and overly sugared for my taste. Sag Harbor is lovely, where did your dh live? Have you ever tried to find a recipe close to her Polish Tea Cookies? I bet someone on here has a good one. There's really nothing she makes that you couldn't. You are paying for her high rent.

Soapbox here - Tomatoes grown in hoop houses (or green houses, hot houses) or grown hydroponically can easily be ready in June and can be considered locally grown. Perfectly shaped because they can be manipulated sun-wise with grow lights to get the right light all they way around - different than open field grown, and are bug/virus/critter free. Why they are not quite ripe depends on when they are picked. If a Market is on Saturday they have to be picked Wed to Fri. If they are perfectly ripe on Tuesday they will be mush on Saturday. I have also watched people pick up every single fresh tomato of 200 or so on a table, turn each one over, inspect it, put it down, then walk away. Figure 100 people doing that per hour and that poor ripe tomato is mush. Under ripe are sturdier. Just saying. On the subject of "perfect" - a question I'd like to put to my customers who want their piece of pie "perfect" I should ask (but I am too polite) - "Are you going to photograph it or eat it"? Homemade is not picture perfect because a machine didn't make it!!!!! Same for produce. A few shot holes in beet greens do not make them less tasty, a wriggly carrot might just be a lot sweeter than a perfectly straight one, an asymmetrical potato grown in a field 10 miles away tastes better than a perfect one shipped from Idaho 2,000 miles away and chemically treated to not sprout so you get to eat that stuff too. As for "locally grown", please ask the farmer where his/her farm is. But, 75 miles is acceptable for my Market which means my 7B can easily be almost zone 8 and a full four weeks earlier in warmth then here! It's OK for me. Ask if you could visit their farm, to drive-by, not inspect. Ask the Market Manager if they visit their vendor's farms to verify where the produce they offer comes from. If they don't it means that the Market is a free-for-all. Produce could be shipped in from China or Brazil or Mexico - not local but selling locally. We have a State Farmers Market and before it opens the sales people line up in the way back to buy bushels of produce that were grown all over the State - mostly by high production commercial farms, not mom and pop ones. Those behind the table taking your money may never have set foot on a farm - they are just employees and what they offer is exactly the same as what the grocery store offers, they get it from the same commercial farms. So, local is relative - it only means from the State of NC to that Market here. If you find a local Market vendor who is the farmer (as my Market verifies) then bypass the grocery store with the perfect-perfect produce and buy the slightly imperfect from your Market. We can't grow rhubarb, lemons, or bananas in NC. If your Market has vendors offering things that don't grow in your State, then go to the grocery store. Donna - I am with you. Importing food and eliminating local farming with the lost knowledge of how-to farm puts our food supply at risk, just like Venezuela. 80% of small farms have disappeared. Here is the reality of farming in the US. Farming Changes in US And, here is why: Small Farms - Young People Not Interested When was the last time you heard some little one say they wanted to grow up to be a farmer? I support the farm vendors at my Market for their small local farm products whose prices are higher than the grocery store.