VeggieDag Thursday: In-season tomatoes

VeggieDag is a series of occasional Thursday posts on
vegetarian cooking and food issues. Why the name: Here.

Suggestions and submissions from chefs and homecooks welcomed: Here.
Before a recent beer dinner, I talked with Evan Buchholz, chef at the American Flatbread in Clarendon, Virginia.


I asked why, in a restaurant devoted to flatbreads, why there was no margherita pizza option.

"Well," he answered. "I can buy locally-produced mozzarella year-round, maybe even hot-house basil. But tomatoes? I wait until they're in-season."

A stance to eat by.



For the 'beer dinner', the restaurant invited Hugh Sisson of Heavy Seas Brewing of Baltimore, Maryland to be the guest host. His beers were matched with several courses from the restaurant. In other words, local ingredients paired with local beers.

Here, it's a flatbread of oven roasted fennel, toasted pine nuts, kale, locally-produced feta cheese, mozzarella, and lemon zest.



In staying with the fresh theme, the flatbread was matched with pours from a cask of Loose Cannon Hop3 IPA. Properly prepared, cask-conditioned beer is the freshest a beer can be served.



I had to ask him, so I did. "Why is it called flatbread, rather than pizza?" "It's Italian pizza," Evan suggested with a laugh. "It's American flatbread."

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• More photos from the dinner: here.
• More about the freshness of cask-conditioned ale here.
• Caveat lector: As an employee of Select Wines, Inc., a wholesaler in northern Virginia, I sell the beers of Heavy Seas.