Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Ol’ Robbo learns that on this day in 1820, it was conclusively proven that tomatoes are not poisonous, and that therefore some folks have dubbed this International Tomatoes Aren’t Poisonous Day.

Well, not to me.  You can keep your Red Death, and have mine as well.

Although Ol’ Robbo likes many things in which tomatoes are an ingredient – tomato soup, pizza sauce, veal parm, salsa, etc. (but not ketchup)- he loathes the fruit itself.  The combination of taste and texture just gives him the willies.

The Mothe used to do a stuffed tomato recipe – baked (I think) and filled with bread crumbs, parsley bits, and spices – at which I became so expert at fishing out the last bits of stuffing without getting the icky casing that I could have become a fine neurosurgeon.

The Old Gentleman used to grow tomatoes in the South Texas of my misspent yoot.  (The claim that a fresh tomato right off the plant will change a mind prejudiced by only store-bought experience is a vicious lie, by the bye.  I still remember the dinner when he tried to prove it to me.)  We had a big, dumb pointer in those days who had a habit of delicately plucking the fruit off the plants just as they achieved ripeness, much to the Old Boy’s ire.  He (the dog) didn’t even bother to eat them.

Anyhoo, in honor of the day, how about the helicopter crash scene from “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes“?  The story is that the chopper really did crash and that the movie simply adapted itself to the calamity: