Easy Tomato Avocado Salad

Summer 2025. The garden on the land was its third full year and had reached a kind of maturity—I knew the soil's tendencies now, where it ran dry in August, where it waterlogged in May, which beds needed amendment and which were sustaining themselves on the compost I'd been adding since year one. The Cherokee Purple tomatoes were always strongest in the east bed where the afternoon shade came early. The beans did best on the south slope. The squash would take over everything if you let it.

I'd been canning more this year—tomatoes, beans, pickles, relish, the sumac vinegar I'd been developing for two seasons now. The root cellar space under the barn was filling up. Hannah had taken to calling it the bunker, not as a criticism but as a description. It was deeply satisfying to look at it in June and know what it meant for winter.

Lily came up for a week in June and spent most of it on the land, gathering data for her second paper, which she was calling a case study in living food sovereignty practice in a single Cherokee community. She sat in on the garden work, helped with some of the canning, and asked good questions about process and decision-making. At one point she said: you're doing what Danny did. I said: I'm trying to. She said: no, I mean you've become the person he was for this place. I had to look at something else for a moment to hold that properly.

The pawpaw fruit had set. Six fruits on the two strongest trees. August would tell us if they'd come to full maturity.

When Lily said what she said that afternoon in the garden, I didn’t know what to do with it, so I went back to work—pulling suckers off the Cherokee Purples, checking the set on the paste tomatoes, just moving my hands through familiar things. That evening I brought in a handful of the first ripe ones from the east bed, the ones that had been blushing for two days, and I didn’t want to cook them or can them or do anything complicated. I just wanted to taste them where they were. This salad is what came of that—barely a recipe, really, just a way of sitting with something good while you still have it.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 0 min | Total Time: 10 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

3 large ripe tomatoes (heirloom or Cherokee Purple recommended), cut into wedges or thick slices
2 ripe avocados, pitted, peeled, and sliced
1/4 red onion, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons fresh cilantro or flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
Optional: 1 teaspoon sumac or sumac vinegar for brightness

Instructions

Prep the produce. Slice tomatoes into wedges and arrange on a wide, shallow serving plate. Slice avocados and lay them alongside or over the tomatoes.
Add the onion. Scatter the thinly sliced red onion evenly over the tomatoes and avocado.
Dress the salad. Drizzle lime juice and olive oil over everything. If using sumac vinegar, add it here in place of or alongside the lime juice.
Season and finish. Sprinkle with salt and black pepper. Taste and adjust seasoning. Scatter chopped herbs over the top just before serving.
Serve immediately. This salad is best eaten fresh while the tomatoes are at room temperature and the avocado is just cut. Do not refrigerate before serving.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Tomato Avocado Salad — When the Cherokee Purples Come In