In the kitchen with Kelley: BLT lettuce wrap

There just isn’t anything quite like a tomato picked fresh off the vine in the summertime — so juicy, so delicious, so refreshing on a hot summer day and so good for you, too.

I like tomatoes on salads. Caprese salad is probably my absolute favorite. I like tomatoes by themselves, sliced and sprinkled with sea salt. And I like tomatoes on sandwiches. Back in the day, I loved to eat sliced tomatoes between two slices of white bread slathered with Blue Plate mayonnaise. My British ex-husband introduced me to an absolutely delicious favorite: English cheddar cheese and sliced tomato on whole-grain toast. But my favorite tomato sandwich has always been bacon, lettuce and tomato on toasted white bread with mayonnaise.

That said, I don’t eat white bread anymore. It isn’t good for you, plain and simply. So I’ve come up with a new way to get my BLT fix. And to make it even healthier, I’ve replaced the mayonnaise with avocado.

I recommend eating lots of tomatoes, since this fruit — no, it isn’t a vegetable — is chock-full of the four major carotenoids: alpha-carotene, beta-carotene, lutein and lycopene. These carotenoids interact to provide health benefits. In particular, tomatoes contain loads of lycopene, which is believed to have the highest antioxidant activity of all the carotenoids. Furthermore, tomatoes contain all three of the high-powered antioxidants: beta-carotene (which has vitamin A activity in the body) and vitamins C and E. Tomatoes are also rich in potassium. And studies show that if you eat tomatoes with a healthy fat like avocado or olive oil, it increases the body’s absorption of the carotenoid phytochemicals in tomatoes.

So make yourself a BLT lettuce wrap or two. Enjoy! And know that your delicious treat is doing your body lots of good.