[ooqr]

I thought I disliked tomatoes as a kid, eating around them as you describe. Only when I discovered garden-grown cherry tomatoes did I flip the other way. So far the other way I'm surprised I didn't get sick eating so many of them. They're incredible.

[radicality]

My family has a countryside house with a small greenhouse. Whenever I visit over the summer when the tomatoes are getting ripe, I go to see it. On a sunny day, opening the doors hits me with such an incredible fragrant tomato aroma followed by a eating a fresh off-the-vine tomato, that buying any tomato in a supermarket now just ends in big disappointment with how flavourless it is.

[jcoffland]

Have you tried sungolds? They are a little smaller than cherry tomatoes, yellow-orange and even better, IMO. They are sweet but still retain a ton of tomato flavor. They also grow like crazy. If you give them something to climb on, plenty of sun and water the plants get huge. Here in CA I had them fruiting this year from May all the way into December. Finally the frost got them.

[ooqr]

Oh man! Those are actually what I was thinking of. I used to live in CA and my folks had a plant. The thing got out of control huge.

[Eric_WVGG]

When people say I'm full of it or delusional, I ask them to try one of the tomatoes and tell me if it tastes anything like spaghetti or pizza sauce, or simple, un-seasoned tomato sauce, or even goddamned ketchup.

I could totally be delusional about the popcorn, though — I'm not that old. But one could do a taste test: 5600 year old kernels were shown to still pop.