If you have a kitchen garden, I hope you're growing tomatoes. There is nothing you can grow in a garden that is more dramatically better than its store-bought counterpart. With luck, you've reached late summer with a decent crop of those shiny red orbs, as well as with a crop of fresh basil... and, perhaps, even with a bunch of sweet onions ready to eat. Let's have a nice salad.

This salad is my main motivation for planting tomatoes and basil in my small kitchen garden each spring. When the first tomatoes come ripe on my dining room table, I make up a bowl, we eat it at several meals till it's gone, and then I make up another bowl. This sequence continues until the last tomatoes leave the garden. To me, this stuff is as good as candy.

As I mentioned, this salad uses tomatoes and basil from your garden. If you must, you can buy fresh basil in the grocery store, but it's nearly impossible to find grocery store tomatoes as a substitute for home-grown; if store-bought is your only option, have a lettuce salad instead.

Prepare this salad and store it in the refrigerator for several hours before you serve it.

• 5 medium-to-large (about 8 oz apiece) dead-ripe tomatoes
• 8 sprigs of fresh basil
• 1 sliver of sweet onion
• 8 oz fresh mozzarella (make sure you use fresh mozzarella, usually found in or near a grocery store's deli counter)
• ¼ cup olive oil
• ¼ cup balsamic vinegar
• Salt and pepper to taste

There are several steps to making this salad. I wish I could tell you it takes longer to describe than it takes to make. Not so. It takes me twenty minutes or longer to assemble a bowlful, and I've done it more than fifty times. Here's how:

Use the point of a knife to cut the stem scar out of the tomato. Push the point of the knife through the skin next to the stem scar, then gently saw a circle around the stem scar, keeping the knife's tip angled toward the center core of the tomato. You're cutting a cone out of the top of the tomato... that's the toughest, least appetizing part of the fruit.

Trust me, it's worth the trouble. Slip the edge of a paring knife under a corner of skin left by your coring operation. Pinch that skin between the face of the knife and your thumb, and gently pull with even force. If the tomato is properly ripe, a reasonably large piece of skin should pull away easily from the flesh (if you can't peel the tomato easily, you may not want it in your salad). Continue slipping the knife under tomato skin, pinching with your thumb, and pulling strips of skin clear until there is no skin left on the tomato.

After you peel a tomato, cut it in half at its equator and use your pinky finger to squish the seeds out of the chambers that hold them-you're tossing the seeds, so do this over a bowl you can dump into your compost pile... or do it into a waste container you can dump in the trash.

Cut the de-seeded tomato halves into bite-sized chunks and put them into a 3-quart or larger glass bowl. Don't fill the bowl to the rim; leave room for the cheese and onion.

If you have a small onion, you can use the whole thing. I have only very large sweet onions, so I cut out a wedge of about one-fifth of the onion. Then I slice the wedge lengthwise, and cut across the resulting slivers to end up with about a third of a cup of diced onion. Toss your diced onion onto the cut-up tomatoes.

I had really tiny basil plants when I made the salad in these illustrations because I grew the basil in a pot with very poor soil. For some reason, this resulted in the stems being very woody while the leaves remained small. So, I pulled the leaves off the stems and prepared only the leaves. Had my basil stems been tender, I would have left the leaves attached, and used the leaves and stems together. In any case, I've never put too much basil in this salad. I think you could put in too little basil, but it would be hard to put in too much. When I suggested 8 sprigs of fresh basil, I was looking at my miserably small plants. From each sprig, I pulled, perhaps, 8 leaves. By the time I chopped them up, they filled a 2 ounce measuring cup (one quarter cup).

I planted more basil in my small kitchen garden about three weeks ago, and it looks ready for some thinning... I'll make more tomato and fresh mozzarella salad tonight using the better basil, and the chopped leaves and stems together will come to about three ounces.

To chop basil, I gather the leaves together and pinch them tightly between my fingers and the cutting board. At this point, it doesn't matter if I bruise the leaves because I'm about to chop them into little pieces anyway. Next, I cut thin strips of leaves from the ends that stick out from under my fingers. I feed the scrunched up leaves forward... or inch my fingers backward as the knife gets closer. Finally, I roll the knife blade from tip to bolster (a knife's bolster is the thick metal at the back of the blade where the handle is attached) repeatedly across the already chopped basil until the pieces are quite small and damp from the sap that oozes from them.

Scrape the chopped basil off the cutting board onto the diced onions in your salad bowl.

Fresh mozzarella is awesome cheese. Please don't use anything else. If the mozzarella you're looking at in the store doesn't specifically mention that it's fresh mozzarella, save it to make pizza... but don't put it in this salad!

When you open the cheese package, expect some liquid to spill out. Dump all of it. Cut the cheese into bite-sized chunks... if you got the ciliegine-style fresh mozzarella, it's already in small enough chunks (marble-sized). Put all the bite-sized cheese chunks on the tomato chunks in the bowl.

Sprinkle salt to taste over the mozzarella cheese-a quarter to half a teaspoon, then sprinkle as much black pepper. Drizzle a quarter cup of olive oil over the cheese, and then drizzle a quarter cup of balsamic vinegar. Finally, use a large spoon to fold the contents of the bowl gently over on themselves. In other words, slide the spoon down between the salad and the side of the bowl, then lift tomatoes and cheese up, turning the spoon over toward the center of the bowl. Continue this mixing until the cheese, is coated with liquid and evenly-distributed among the tomato chunks-along with the diced onions and basil.