Tomatoes are on our minds because of the second annual You Say Tomato cooking competition last week in Hilo. The dishes, as prepared by culinarians at Hilo Community College, looked ready for a close-up in Food & Wine magazine.

So we got to thinking about the 10 best things about tomatoes:

1. You can always find one (the world grows 60 million tons annually). And if one type isn't at its taste best, there's always another that is.

2. You can do anything with a tomato. Eat it raw, bake it, roast it, stew it, sauce it, stuff it, dry it, stir-fry it, can it, freeze it, juice it, pickle it, bread it and fry it, chop it up for salsa, bake it in a pie, stir up some ketchup or shake up a Bloody Mary.

3. Even a black thumb can grow a cherry tomato plant in a pot. And nothing jolts your taste receptors awake like bursting through the taut flesh of a sun-ripe tomato you grew yourself — peppery but sweet, crisp then melting.

4. Tomatoes are pretty; they wear coats of many colors, from pink to purple to zebra-striped.

5. They're full of lycopene, a powerful antioxidant believed to have cancer-fighting properties.

6. A properly ripened tomato offers the perfect blend of acid to sugar, so useful in cooking.

7. Rotten tomatoes make great weapons.

8. Even though Solanum lycopersicum is a relative of deadly nightshade, tomatoes won't kill you, no matter what European explorers first thought.

9. Without tomatoes, there'd be no ketchup, chili, pork and beans, barbecue, spaghetti sauce or beef tomato.

10. But — and this has to be a tie — the very best thing about tomatoes is either southern Italian food or one of the Deep South's great contributions to American cuisine: a home-grown beefsteak tomato, thickly sliced and slapped between two pieces of white bread slathered with mayonnaise — bacon and lettuce optional.

Oh, there's one more great thing about tomatoes: the recipes from last week's You Say Tomato recipe competition in Hilo, sponsored by Hamakua Springs Country Farms and Richard and June Ha and family. Find them here.