W4DW-Cherry Tomato Salad

What's For Dinner Wednesday?

 

The gardens around here are producing like crazy right now.  Well, every garden but mine.  The tomatoes were pretty well neglected during wheat harvest and had tomato worms attacking them this week.  The boys and babysitter tried to find all the tomato worms today.  They found eight!!  Anyway, I have amazing parents that were gracious enough to share some of the garden bounty with me.  Maybe that is because my boys helped plant most of the garden.

So What's for Dinner this Wednesday?  A Cherry Tomato Salad.  When visiting a chicken farmer friend of ours a few years back, his wife prepared this salad and we were hooked.  If you have one cherry tomato plant in your garden, you have a lot of little tomatoes.  This is a quick, easy and tasty way to use them.  In fact this is a Cherry Tomato Salad prepared by my 6 year old son.  Do any of you have a second child that thinks they can do anything?  Well, here is mine doing all the work and he couldn't have been happier.

To make this salad, you will only need 3 ingredients: cherry or grape tomatoes, Mozzarella cheese and Italian salad dressing.

Start with cherry tomatoes and wash them thoroughly.  He did this using the vegetable sprayer and my favorite orange colander.

Next, take the stems off the tomatoes and cut them in half.  We tried to use the safety knife I bought him, but it had a hard time piercing the tomatoes.  

I have found that a steak knife works the best to cut tomatoes and not smash them.  Yes, I was watching closely that he did not cut off any fingers.

 Most of the cherry tomatoes, he just cut in half, but a few had to be quartered.  You want them to be in bite sized pieces.

Since it is still June and still National Dairy month, we had to have some cheese.  I use Mozzarella cheese.  Again, I like bite size pieces.

Mix the tomatoes and cheese together in a bowl and toss.  

Add Italian salad dressing and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.  After the dressing has time to marinate the tomatoes, it tastes much better.

I hope you enjoy this quick and easy recipe.


A note about my chicken farmer friend.  I never realized how hard it was to grow large numbers of chickens.  He works very hard and really can't go anywhere if he has birds in the barns.  He has a thermostat system that calls his cell phone if the barns get too hot or too cold.  The barns are supposed to regulate themselves by turning on cool cells, fans or heaters, but as with all things mechanical things go wrong.  He has so many chickens in  buildings that he doesn't go more than an hour away when they are full. I appreciate the fact that my cows can find feed, water and shade on their own most of the time and I can go on vacation occasionally.