Thursday, June 13, 2013

Hot Tomato... **Corne de Bouc**

They came off a tomato vine, they smell like tomatoes, they're red like tomatoes... but there's something curious about their shape. They look like fingerling potatoes, crossed with red hot chili peppers.

Our volunteer garden is growing wild. Tomatoes popping up wherever they may. Our spinach from self-made beds, was plentiful and delicious. Dill, and pumpkins, too. One way or another those seeds got around and made themselves at home all over our yard, including this vigorous, spreading tomato plant.

I do love our roses, but I guess I am partial to the veggies. So, when this tomato started between two rose bushes, tiny as it was, I did not pull it up with the rest of the weeds. It looked so innocent! Then the roses, poor dears, became somewhat obscured, but seeing the flowers, the fruit setting... it would have been a sacrilege to take out the tomato!

Seeing they were small and elongated, I assumed they were grape tomatoes... then pear tomatoes. As they grew longer still, I wondered if they weren't Roma tomatoes.

But these? With their curvaceous forms? Did we cross our tomatoes with peppers, or fingerling potatoes?

Are they a rose-tomato hybrid?

I am waiting to hear from you, before we add these to our salad, or slow roast them. Am I simply clueless? Are these a variety known to you? We're curious, over here! Do we have hot tomatoes?

**Update: The spell of the mystery tomato is broken, sort of...**

Janece sought the assistance of Google, and found Corne de Bouc, It means goat's horn! Rather than completely demystifying things though... I am ever more amused and confounded. I've never heard of, or seen tomatoes like these. How did they get here!? And GOATS! They have become almost synonymous with the rose bed, where they compulsively enjoy pruning our roses to within an inch of their lives! Since I have no idea how this completely novel tomato variety has popped up in our rose bed, I am actually more inclined to assume we have crossed roses, tomatoes, and goats, and developed our own firm, sweet, small, long and twisted tomato. Science. I am totally on this.

5 comments:

momto5 said...

are the spicey? how exciting maybe you made a salsa tomato, no need to peppers, just grow these beauties. :)

nikkipolani said...

They look cute and eminently edible. I'd go for it! I wish I had tomatoes popping up at will..... My rogue roses are doing that.

Miriam said...

How exciting - a vegetable mystery. I think you should just go ahead and taste one!

Carolyn said...

We had some come up this year and are so strange looking! We've picked some ripe ones but haven't tried them yet.

JBee said...

I'm entering them in our Summer Show. They taste great, good for eating in salad or sliced with chopped basil or for roasting. I saved the seeds last year in France.