Tag Archives: tomatoes

0817 Tomato Toast and Corn on the Cob

We had planned to have grilled chicken with another batch of that delicious cilantro pesto – but Shane and Aaron’s moped work ran long, and I ate solo instead.

I’ve never been intimidated by eating solo. I’m not sure why this is. I’ve always relished the experience of going to a restaurant, ordering whatever I want, eating it at my leisure, and lingering over a glass of wine and a good book. Sometimes it’s lonely, but most of the time, it’s a lovely and indulgent experience. I can probably say this because I’m in a relationship and eating solo is the exception rather than the rule – but this was the case even when I was single.

At home, though, solo eating is more of a mixed bag. Sometimes I’m eating down the fridge, making bizarre-o meals out of whatever’s available. Sometimes I forget to eat. Sometimes I prepare elaborate dishes. Tonight was somewhere in between – an ear of extra juicy sweet corn with a pat of butter so tempting that Mina kept stealing it, followed by tomatoes on toast with a good pinch of fleur de sel. And then, later, a small bowl of Cheerios, a convenient snack while knitting and watching TV.

0816 Tender Chicken Legs with Sweet Cherry Tomatoes

This is such a beautiful and simple meal – it just takes a little time. It was also a really good excuse to break out our new butter-yellow enameled cast iron pot that we received as a wedding gift. Into the pot went two chicken legs, a handful of cherry tomatoes from the garden and the market, a couple of huge cloves of garlic, and basil from the front stoop – with a drizzle of olive oil and a generous amount of salt and pepper.

An hour and a half later, we dug into an amazing summer dinner. The chicken was tender and flavorful, the tomatoes collapsed into a sweet broth, and the garlic cloves were caramelized and perfect for spreading on a few slices of bread. I need to remember this for next summer.

Recipe:
Tender Chicken Legs with Sweet Cherry Tomatoes from Jamie’s Dinners

0815 Pisto Manchego

Photo by zordor

Without actually realizing it, I think I’ve been making pisto manchego all summer. A Spanish take on ratatouille, it is peasant food at its finest – putting together a bit of whatever’s available to make a filling and nutritious meal. This recipe did an effective job of clearing out the crisper, using up the a handful of tomatoes, two peppers, and yellow summer squash all from our garden.

What the recipe lacks, however, is much spice. As I was sauteing the vegetables, I was concerned that the dish was going to be boring, that I’d just wasted the last squash from our garden – curse you, cucumber beetles! The recipe recommended serving the dish with tinned tuna or hard boiled eggs – we went with the former, and it made all the difference. We were both quite pleasantly surprised by the complexity of flavors, especially the sweetness of the pepper in contrast with the savory fish. I’d like to try this again with fried eggs – perhaps a Spanish improvement on the shakshuka from earlier in the year.

Pisto Manchego
Adapted from Spanish

1-2 tablespoons olive oil
1 Spanish onion, thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 medium green peppers, seeded and chopped
2 medium zucchinis, thinly sliced
3 medium tomatoes, chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
salt and freshly ground black pepper
hard boiled eggs (optional)
tuna in olive oil (optional)

Heat the oil in a large heavy pan – larger than you think you’ll need, trust me – and cook the garlic and onion until soft. Add the peppers, zucchini, and tomatoes. Season well and cook gently for about 20 minutes. If you’ve used a pan that’s too small to allow everything to make contact with the cooking surface, it may help to cover your pan with a lid for part of the cooking time. Stir in parsley just before serving. Can be served hot, topped with chopped egg or tuna, or cold with a drizzle of olive oil.

0814 22 Pints of Tomatoes

What can I say? I spent my morning setting up the kitchen – including the all-important wind tunnel formed by the stand fan in the living room and the air exchange fan in the kitchen window – then the afternoon washing jars, boiling water, peeling tomatoes, boiling jars, wiping jars, coring tomatoes, changing ice water, burning myself on the tea kettle, lifting hot jars, adjusting sealing rings, and sneaking out for ice cream. If I don’t cook anything for a day or two, I think I’ll have earned the break.

And in case you’re wondering, 22 pints of tomatoes equals roughly 18 pounds, half of which came from our garden. There would’ve been more jars, but our Romas have been affected by blossom end rot, so I had to toss a pound or more that turned out to be nasty on the inside. I don’t remember how many pints I canned last year, but I think this might be enough to get us almost all the way to next July. At least I hope so.

0811 Bacon Sandwiches? Yes, Please!

When we lived in Champaign, Shane used to love to get a BLRP sandwich from Persimmon and take it, wrapped in white butcher paper, over to the Blind Pig, where he would get a good beer and sit outside enjoying what could only be a described as a fantastic lunch. Persimmon, the grocery sibling of Bacaro, opened and closed in under two years, and we never found a suitable replacement for it or its sandwiches.

Tonight, though, we managed to put together sandwiches worth of Shane’s nostalgia for those Persimmon/Blind Pig lunches.

Photo by cyclonebill

No freezer excuse needed for this dinner. Just bacon, delicious thick-cut bacon. Oh, and a beautiful orange blossom tomato from the garden, sliced thin. A red pepper from the market, quickly roasted in the toaster oven. Toasted slices of ciabatta and good mayonnaise. So good.

0801 Roasted Cod, Corn on the Cob

“I don’t like fish, but I’m trying really hard.”

This statement should tell you everything you need to know about my relationship to seafood. I love shellfish. We’re addicted to fancy tinned tuna. I hate salmon, even the remarkable smoked salmon from Tracklements that the fishmonger at Zingerman’s convinced me to try. The rest of the sea remains relatively unexplored, aside from a few nice pieces of halibut or tilapia. I posed this statement at the fish counter at Plum today, though, and came home with a small slab of cod – firm, great flavor, not too fishy – or so I was told. I was also told that a pound would be just right for two of us, but that’s neither here nor there.

I had intended to bake the fish in a foil packet with lemon and garlic, but I was reminded of this recipe while flipping through cookbooks. I sliced the fish into two filets, halved some cherry tomatoes, ripped up some basil from the garden, and drizzled olive oil over the top. The recipe calls for mozzarella, but I didn’t feel like making another trip out on the moped, so I skipped that step and instead shredded a bunch of Parmiagiano-Reggiano over the tomatoes and filets. While the fish got lovely and golden in the toaster oven, I boiled a couple of ears of sweet corn for about 7 minutes.

The fish was perfect – flaky, tender, and infused with delicate flavors from the basil and tomatoes – and the corn was impossibly sweet when rolled in butter, salt, and pepper. The juices from the corn and fish mixed together on our plates, making everything even happier. Especially my tastebuds. Now to find more fish like this…

Recipe:
Roasted Cod with Cherry Tomatoes, Basil, and Mozzarella from Happy Days with the Naked Chef

0731 Things Shane Won’t Eat

I’m taking advantage of the fact that Shane’s out of town to make a couple of things he definitely would not ever eat. While I have to give him credit for trying new things and getting over several food hates in the last couple of years, certain members of the nightshade family remain outside the realm of his palate. Sweet and hot peppers are great. Potatoes are almost almost delicious. Tomatillos make excellent salsa. It’s just tomatoes and eggplant that are problematic.

Which is, I have to say, a damned shame. It’s not that I love eggplant – in fact, I’ve never used it much – but I’d like to make more dishes with it, especially this time of year. But tomatoes – I do so very much love tomatoes. I love them in thick slices with a bit of salt on toast. I love them bite-sized and consumed by the handful. I love them with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and fresh mozzarella. I love them roasted with herbes de Provence. I love the way the plants smell, and I love the crazy variety of heirlooms available at the market and in our garden.

Shane will happily eat most cooked tomatoes, but the raw product is out out out. It’s a texture issue, and one that he’s been unable to overcome, despite repeated attempts. I get it – I’m the same way about salmon – but it still makes me sad. Oh well, more tomatoes for me, right?

And more tomatoes for gazpacho:

I used this recipe, which resulted in a large bowl of vibrant – but disappointing – red soup. The problem? texture. The flavors were good, but the bread to wet stuff ratio was off, resulting in some serious texture issues. Ironic, right? I enjoyed it, but will be trying one of the recipes from this article next time. Also disappointing was the fact that I didn’t have a camera handy, and so the only photo I have of the beautiful prep bowl is from my cameraphone.

More successful, however, was the eggplant “caviar” – basically a puree dip of roasted eggplant, olive oil, garlic, and fresh herbs. I over-garlicked, as I am wont to do, and it was excellent. I ate it on toast, then dipped chips in the leftovers. I have another medium-sized eggplant in the fridge and am oh so tempted to make more, though I’m not sure Shane would be able to kiss or sleep next to me, what with the garlic and all. If you like eggplant, I definitely recommend this one.

Recipes:
Chilled Gazpacho Andaluz in the Style of Pedro Almodóvar from The Kitchn
Eggplant Caviar from David Lebovitz

0729 Impromptu Pasta

I’m not sure what I had in mind tonight. Our planned meals got all switched around this week by my moods and our lack of interest in things that seemed fantastic a few days previously. To some extent, this worked out in our favor tonight, as we had a bit of a lot of things to use up.

I suppose this could also be appropriately called ‘End of the Fridge Pasta’, as that’s what it contained. A few leftover sausages from Sunday’s breakfast. A handful of 2nds tomatoes, too ripe to leave on the windowsill amidst the onslaught of fruit flies. A quarter of an onion. A few spoonfuls of ricotta, purchased for pasta we never made. The last of a box of whole wheat angel hair, tossed into boiling water when I realized the sauce wouldn’t wait for farfalle.

The end result? Two bowls of creamy, hearty pasta studded with bite-size pieces of excellent pork sausage. Two happy faces and full tummies.

0719 Albóndigas con Salsa de Tomate

Oh my gosh, you guys. Tonight’s dinner may have redeemed the Spanish cookbook experiment. Now why couldn’t I have just called this dish ‘meatballs in tomato sauce’? Because then I would miss out on a perfectly good excuse to pretend that I can speak, well, any Spanish at all. I mean, I can ask about the location of the bathroom, and I can say that I want more of something, but that’s about it.

Anyway, this was super easy and definitely worth heating up the kitchen on an already hot night. I could walk you through the process, but I actually have photos for once, and the whole recipe is at the bottom of this post. So, albóndigas from start to finish:

These were excellent meatballs – sorry, albóndigas – and I loved the bright orange-yellow of the tomato sauce – sorry, the salsa de tomate – over the creamy polenta. I have a feeling we’ll be making this one again soon.

Albóndigas con Salsa de Tomate
Adapted from Spanish

8 ounces minced ground pork
4 green onions, thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 tablespoons grated fresh Parmesan cheese
2 teaspoons fresh oregano
1 tablespoon olive oil, more if necessary
3 tomatoes, chopped
2 tablespoons red or dry white wine
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Combine the pork, green onions, garlic, cheese, oregano, and plenty of salt and pepper. Form into 12-14 small firm balls. Heat the olive oil a large heavy frying pan over medium-high heat, then add the meatballs and cook for about 5 minutes, turning frequently, until evenly browned. Add the wine and quickly deglaze the pan, then add the remaining ingredients and cover, lowering the heat to medium. Cook gently for about 15 minutes until the tomatoes are saucy and the meatballs are cooked through. Excellent served over polenta or with crusty bread.

0702 Ratatouille, kind of

As we enter July, we’re starting to reap the benefits of the community garden plot. We’re also starting to experience mid-summer gardening woes: mosquitoes, sunburn, weeding, excessive kale. I’ve taken a few pictures, but I’m not sure if you can really get a sense for what we’re working with – or what our garden neighbors are producing in similar spaces.

And so it happened that we found ourselves facing down a fridge full of produce on the eve of leaving for a weekend trip. Inspired by this week’s SELMA menu, I decided to use up the zucchini, tomatoes, and rapini in a sort-of ratatouille. And I have to say, it turned out way better than I expected.

I sauteed a couple of cloves of garlic (minced) and an onion (finely diced) in a tablespoon or so of olive oil over medium heat, then added 3-4 small tomatoes (diced) and let the whole thing go saucey while prepping the rest of the veg. I chopped a medium-sized zucchini into bite-sized pieces, then added it to the sauce once the tomatoes had cooked down a bit, tossing to combine and to ensure even cooking. While the zucchini was going golden, I washed, trimmed, and chopped a handful or two of rapini from the garden, and tossed it in to wilt for a few minutes.

We’d picked up a couple of loaves of bread at Plum Market last night - baked goods go half off or more at 8pm – so I sliced half a ciabatta in half again, then put it in the toaster oven for a few minutes while rounding up Shane for dinner. I had initially thought about serving the ratatouille over polenta, but that was just too much heat for an already hot night – and the ciabatta turned out to be just right.

The only thing I’d change for next time is the rapini – it was, well, like eating a bunch of rapini-flavored sticks. After one bite each, we carefully removed the stick-y parts, and proceeded. We ate this pile of goodness with fork and knife, pulling away bites of toasty bread, sweet red-gold sauce, and tasty veg topped with shaved Parmigano-Reggiano.