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I did bruschetta last night with the few tomatoes I mangaged to pick from my garden, basil from the garden, garlic from my CSA and some local mozz cheese. Yummy. If only I had had the forethought to make the bread myself.

You mention "bucatini mozz." Do you mean bocconcini? They are about the size of a large meatball. The tiny fresh mozz are called fior di latte or "flowers of milk." Those are about the size of cherries.

I love lemon fair's suggestion! LOL.

While it's true that perfect tomatoes should be embellished as little as possible, I'm hard pressed not to enjoy at least a few slices as bruschetta or sliced with mozzie and basil as a caprese.

Whatever you do - don't cook them. There's no real benefit to cooking perfect heirloom tomatoes as they can't be visually appreciated for their beauty when roasted or pureed as for soup or sauce.

in a large bowl, big enough to hold 3/4 # of pasta (or a lb - depending upon how much pasta you like to eat):

chop the tomatoes into bite size pieces
lots of fresh basil
about a 1/2 cup of olive oil (or more if you like it rich)
2-3 cloves of fresh garlic chopped
bocconcini - fresh mozzarella cut into quarters (or more or less the size of
the tomatoes
salt & rep pepper flakes to taste

let this sit and marinate for an hour or more...

make your pasta (i like orriechette or med shells).... drain and stir into the tomato mixture.....

if this doesn't say "summer" ... i don't know what does.

Okay, some of you seem to know quite a bit about tomatoes....at least more than I do so tell me where are the good "old" tomatoes?
I remember how they used to taste years ago when I grew them at home, but they sure don't come close to that these days.
I'm gettin them at the little market I go to and one week the sign will say "home grown from Arkansas" then the next time it wil say "grown in Florida" then "home grown in Missouri".
NONE of them have near the flavor they used to have....what's the deal? Have soil conditions changed that much over the whole country?
When I used to grow them, I would ask the guy at the store which type should I get? He would give me two different types/brands and say this way you will have tomatoes all summer long. Whatever types they were, they all were "eat over the sink" good.

Every good tomato deserves a good burger (0= yum!

Sliced with a little cracked pepper and sea salt... buy a couple of other tomatoes for your capri salad... BTW, FYI... a lot of the so called Mozz bocconcini are just cheap cheese curds formed into little balls and arent really mozz at all... but they are still yummy, so enjoy with regular tomatoes and some nice fresh basil.

@tusti - my guess is that a lot of those "old" tomatoes aren't grown commercially - even for market gardens - at all, because they don't look like heirlooms, they look like any other "regular" tomato. For some reason we have come to associate heirlooms with misshapen tomatoes with unusual colors. But there were a lot of standard varieties - meaning nonhybrids - that were smooth, red tomatoes. But they were still somewhat less productive with poorer shipping qualities, so you're not going to get them from across the country, even if the tomatoes really were home grown.

If you've got somebody who can grow tomatoes for you I've got two suggestions for varieties:

Rutgers, a standard, (nonhybrid) tomato that was widely grown at one time, and the seed for which is still available and very inexpensive. This link to Rutgers university says it accounted for 75% of tomatoes grown commercially at one time. You can be very sure that some of those great tomatoes you remember were rutgers, and they taste more like what you remember as tomatoes than the heirlooms that are most widely available now. The tomatoes are about the size of the "tomatoes on the vine" that we get in the supermarket. http://www.njfarmfresh.rutgers.edu/WhatabouttheRutgersTomato.htm

The other tomato you might get someone to grow for you is Burpee's Big Boy. It's a hybrid with the high productivity of hybrids, but as an early hybrid it has many of the great eating qualities that were prized in tomatoes when it first came out, in 1949. In particular, it has an unbelievable aroma which makes it taste even better. All the other "boys and girls" that Burpee and others developed added some quality but - I think - diminished that old time tomato flavor.

My dad was took a lot of pride in his garden, and bought big boy seeds soon after they first came out, in the mid 50's. They cost 10 cents apiece. He asked a friend with a greenhouse to grow them for him, and all his customers wanted to buy those plants, which of course he couldn't let them do. But then next year he bought the expensive seeds to grow for his customers too. The seeds are still probably about 10 cents apiece.

Wow, thanks everyone for the suggestions! I can hardly wait for this afternoon to get busy with my heirlooms.
I know they are overpriced, but I've never sprung for such expensive tomatoes, and thought, what the heck...
I definitely won't cook them; thanks for that advice.
The mozz are little balls about an inch across. All the label says is "Fresh Mozzarella".
I'll probably do the oriecciete(sp) thing or stick with the fresh salad.
Thanks again!

@janaatwg: Thanks for asking. Yes, got the late blight - a complete surprise here in Northern Vermont. The first time I ever remember in all the years I or my family have gardened here. I garden in a community garden and mine were actually some of the first to get the blight in our gardens, but some commercial organic farms had already gone down the previous week (A friend of a friend even lost all her tomatoes in her greenhouse.) There were other gardeners who had tomato plants that looked better than mine, but ultimately they have had more of a problem than I did with the blight. I sprayed with copper sulfate right away, paying particular attention to spray the tomatoes themselves. I'm going to check with UVM's plant pathologist to see if I'm right that the tomatoes have gotten blight from the spores landing on them, rather than systemically from the plant. The copper seemed to arrest the disease and the weather warmed up, which also helped. (Copper sulfate is acceptable on most organic programs). This is a disease where cultural practices aren't going to make a sufficient difference - but fortunately it needs living tissue to survive the winter, so we're hopeful we won't have it next year, as long as potato growers get all the little potatoes out of the ground. It's certainly given me a lot to think about, remembering our Irish ancestors.

The interesting thing is that although the sun gold plants got the disease pretty badly the sun golds themselves have mostly ripened as usual. (I saw someone else say that on another blog, too) I'd have a very hard time doing without my sun golds. I have 78 tomato plants, about a dozen varieties, and of the 65 non-sun golds I'll only get 3-4 dozen unblemished ripe tomatoes. I'd been expecting about 400 pounds to give away and preserve for the winter. sigh. But at least I'm not trying to make a living from it. Besides the sun golds I have one Big Boy that survived relatively okay. It was nearer to having ripe tomatoes when the blight hit. The UVM pathologist said the blight came in on a storm, because the whole northeast got it at the same time. I've only heard of a few isolated tomatoes that didn't get the blight.

@ocarol. Thanks. How nice it must be to be able to plant tomatoes in the fall. I sympathize with the hornworm problem. We once went away for the weekend and they had significantly denuded the growing tips by the time we got back. But the moths are so beautiful.

I agree with lemonfair re: eaten whole.

If they're of good quality that is the best way to appreciate it.

The last time I had some really nice heirlooms I just sliced them, topped with good quality evoo, fresh cracked pepper, sea salt and a bit of my favourite krauter salz (not too much tho!)

BBMT: Bacon, basil, mozz, & tomato on lightly toasted focaccio or ciabatta

@beano: ooooh i'll have to put bacon in next time!