For the longest time, I never really knew what to think of cherry tomatoes. Or what to do with them. Though I might have regarded them as more interesting and Barbie-sized than the usual, boring (and most often flavorless) Beefsteak tomatoes I'd normally encountered, I left them where I felt they rightly belonged-- at the Sizzler salad bar, carelessly splashed by a variety of commercial salad dressings.

Several (and I do mean several) years later, when God's cruel irony found me making salads to earn a living, I learned that cherry tomatoes had a very special purpose in life. From my guardian angel of a chef/boss named Jan Gardener, I learned that these tiny little tomatoes were meant to be cooked. Sautéed, braised, or (best of all) roasted.

Jan would throw them in a pie pan, add a couple of pats of butter, some fresh thyme sprigs from her business partner's farm in Calistoga, sprinkle a little salt and pepper over them and then pop them in the oven. When they emerged, they were heat-burst, saucy, and very, very tomato-y. She'd serve these precious little (exploded) angels-straight-from- heaven (or, more correctly, straight from the oven) over bowls of creamy polenta and cheese or alongside roasted chickens and grilled steaks.

Simple. And utterly delightful.

It's a busy week here at home. I haven't the time to roast a chicken and I lack the outdoor space to fire up a grill for steaks. And, since I haven't been feeling the pull of polenta lately, I needed to find another way to serve these tomatoes up. Since I'm only home durning lunchtime hours, I craved a sandwich. So this is what I came up with today:

B, L & Oven-Roasted T

It's not a mind-blowing sandwich, nor should it be. If ever I felt that a sandwich had that sort of effect on my life, I'd know that I just wasn't getting out enough. It is, however, a really, really good one. Rather than allowing the bacon to be the star, as it usually is in this flavor trio, the tomatoes take center stage. I mean this is a figurative sense, since the tomatoes are actually smeared on the bread and the bacon is at the actual center.

Oh, I think you know what I mean.

And, by the way, I am not going to give you any instruction as to how to fry bacon. For that, I'll just have to show you a cartoon my friend Lea drew.

Makes 4 sandwiches (with leftover tomatoes, which is a good thing)

Ingredients:

For the roasted cherry tomatoes:

2 cups cherry tomatoes

3 to 4 tablespoons of butter

A few sprigs of fresh thyme

Salt and pepper to taste

For the rest of the sandwich:

12 slices of bacon (your choice), cooked

A few leaves of arugula (my choice) or any lettuce of your choice if you're going to be a stickler about thing and insist upon sticking with the "l" word. In this particular case, the "l" word being "lettuce."

Mayonnaise for spreading on:

8 slices of toasted bread (your pick, pal)

Preparation:

1. Preheat oven to 375ºF

2. Rinse tomatoes in a colander. Shake dry.

3. Arrange tomatoes in an even(-ish) layer in a medium sized cast iron skillet, or cake pan, or whatever you feel like roasting the little dears in, so long as it is non-reactive. dot with butter, toss on the thyme sprigs, and sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Throw in oven. Roast for about 45 minutes, stirring them up occasionally to make them pop and release their juices. They may be declared "done" when most (but not all) of the liquid has evaporated and the tomatoes have slightly shriveled.

4. Remove tomatoes from oven and let cool.

5. To assemble sandwich (I feel like a fool for even explaining this, because I am quite certain you know how to put together a damned sandwich), spread the inside of your bottom piece of toast with roasted cherry tomatoes, lay three slices of bacon on top, then cover those in a layer of lettuce or arugula or some other green. Slather your top layer of toast with mayonnaise (or aioli or whatever you feel like, really) and close.

6. Repeat until you have fed everyone within reach who eats bacon.

7. Go outside. It's nice out.

Saturday morning, market day, is a jumble of visiting with friends, purchasing food for the week, jostling with tourists, and talking to farmers. There are some weekends when the amount of energy needed for the market -- including lugging my goods home on the bus -- takes its toll. While on wintry days the market almost feels like a whisper, on summer days the market shouts at the top of its lungs for hours on end. Summer food is amplified, summer crowds are amplified, and even the number of farm booths is amplified.

Most of the local, hard-core market goers that I know won't be seen at the market after 9am on a summer Saturday morning. I tend to gamble with that rule some weeks. Sometimes it's more important to sleep in than to be the first at the market, and sometimes I have market obligations that require me to be there later. And then, all you can do is just go with the flow and be as patient as possible.

This weekend, I was at the market late. I had interviewed Ed George of the Peach Farm for CUESA's Meet the Producer series at 10.30, and wasn't at the market early enough to shop before the interview. That meant that I was still shopping close to noon. Interviewing Ed was fun -- he's a really dedicated farmer who provides produce to some of the city's best restaurants. His major crop is heirloom tomatoes, and they were beautiful on Sunday. I picked up some very small eggplants from him that I still haven't decided how to prepare.

Even at the height of the market, farmers are usually in a good mood and talkative. I purchased fresh garbanzo beans, off the stalk, from one of the Catalan daughters at Catalan Farm. I asked her if she was the one who had to de-stalk them. It's a tedious process without much yield to show for your trouble. "No, and it's a good thing," she said. "I would just throw them at my brother. We get in fights with them."

If you blink, you'll miss Short Night Farm. They are a small booth in the front of the market, and they usually only have a small amount of produce on their table. Short Night has never disappointed me and I look forward to their produce every week, so I stopped to see what they had: beautiful melons that I didn't want to carry around the market. Deciding to take the gamble that there would be some left at the end of my trip, I passed them up. "But I'll take these," I told the vendor, grabbing some lemons. She laughed that the lemons were important enough to carry but the melon wasn't. It was no joke to me -- finding locally grown citrus in July is difficult, and they were the only vendor at the market selling lemons that day.

The Hunter Orchards farmers were in the back of the market, selling lavender and dried garlic. They are a vendor that we only see for about a month a year, when they bring their beautiful Rocambole garlic to the market. The garlic that I bought on Saturday will last until Valentine's Day, they said. I bid them good-bye until next year, and strategized a cool,dark place for my two bags of newly purchased dried garlic.

By the time I ran into a couple of bloggers, I had visions of going home for a post-market meal. "The tostadas at Primavera are really good today," Tea mentioned referring to the amazing Mexican food stand at the back of the market. "I'm going to skip it", I said. "I'm plotting a BLT." BLT's always make me think of Cookie and Cranky, my blogger friends in Marin, and I had them in mind as I ran to pick up bacon, perfect tomatoes, tiny little heads of romaine lettuce, and my BLT bun of choice.

Arriving back home, I unpacked and made my meal within 20 minutes, then sat and watched mindless television as I decompressed from my market day.

Each week when I get home, I scribble down my market list before I put it away. In addition to the produce mentioned above, I also purchased:

Orach, nopales, and cilantro from Heirloom Organics
Pasilla peppers from Catalan Farms Corn from G & S Corn
Nectarines from Blossom Bluff Orchards
Avocados from Brokaw Nursery
Butter from Spring Hill Cheese