For the first, oh, 35+ years of my life I did not eat raw tomatoes. Loved tomato sauce, ketchup, even tomato soup, but I couldn’t do a raw one. Maybe it was the texture, maybe it was the seeds, maybe it was hanging on to old ideas; but I took countless raw tomatoes out of salads and off sandwiches.
Then one day I was at a work lunch, packed into a room like sardines. I had a salad with grape tomatoes in it. Rather then try to put them aside I just ate the darn things. You know what? Not bad. So I decided I was okay with grape and cherry tomatoes-the little ones. Not so scary.
This soon led to eating the big ones, and loving them. As every tomato eater knows the best are garden grown and ripe on the vine. One of these beauties was sliced on top of grilled hamburgers last night. The day before another was in a salad.
I have several bags in the freezer waiting to be cooked down for sauce.
By the way: the easiest way to skin tomatoes-freeze them and them run them under hot water. The skin literally falls off.