Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes

If you have a garden, and if you planted tomatoes, then when August hits you know that you are in for a LOT of bounty all at once.  There will be more tomatoes than you will know what to do with; there might even be more tomatoes than you can give away to grateful or unsuspecting neighbors.

All this came out of my garden in...about 3 days.  See the monster
squash in the top left corner?  And see how big the tomatoes are?
Seriously.  Bigger than baseballs, only barely smaller than softballs.

I only planted three tomato plants: two "Early Bird" and one "Cherokee Purple" (heirloom) variety.  The Early Birds have lived up to their name: they started flowering almost as soon as I put them in the ground, and now for the past month or so they've gradually sped up production.  At first, it was one or two tomatoes a week.  But this weekend, I pulled 5-6 tomatoes off of one plant and left at least that many in varying states of orange behind (they should be ready soon!).

I ate tomato sandwiches, and I sliced tomatoes into wedges and ate caprese salads, and I made a small batch of homemade salsa.  And then I still had tomatoes left over.  Since I'm on my pediatrics outpatient month (and basically have a month of vacation), I thought I'd make tomato sauce.  Turns out, that's pretty damn easy and I would've been able to make it even if I weren't on an easy rotation.  Once it was done, I portioned the sauce into single-serve containers and froze it for an afternoon, then popped them out and kept all the blocks in a freezer bag (to free up the valuable tupperware containers).

Tomatoes: into the skillet they go!  Plus some salt.

Easy Tomato Sauce: makes 3 single-serving portions

Ingredients (all fresh is best):

-tomatoes

-garlic

-basil

-salt

Method:

1. Chop the tomatoes.  I used 3-4 large tomatoes from my garden.  They each probably weighed almost a pound...they were about the size of grapefruit!  If you have smaller tomatoes, I'd use 5-6.  The amount of tomatoes I used filled a 10 inch skillet basically to the brim

2. Throw all these tomatoes in the skillet over medium heat.  Using a wide skillet is actually helpful because it gives you a large surface area for evaporation; this makes the sauce reduce more quickly.  Add a few sprinkles of salt (I used about a good pinch per tomato) to help them release their juices.

Adding salt was the right idea.  See how juicy they got?

3. Cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally, while the tomatoes start to break down.  Finely mince or grate some garlic into the cooking tomatoes.  I used two fat cloves of garlic for my panful of tomatoes, but you could use more or less to taste.

4. Next, chop the basil.  I usually chiffonade basil, then cut it cross-wise, to mince it easily.  Add this to the pot of tomatoes.  (They should be pretty juicy and watery now.  The liquid in my skillet went almost all the way to the top.)  You can also turn down the heat to medium-low at this point.

Garlic and basil have joined the party.

5. Keep watching the tomato sauce and stir it occasionally.  It needs to bubble gently (not boil rapidly or anything) and should be giving off plenty of steam, which means it's reducing.  The tomatoes will also gradually become less chunky and more like a thicker tomato sauce.  It's important to stir, too, because the thick tomato-paste-stuff will sink to the bottom while the tomato juice reduces on top, and you don't want the sauce to scorch.  Taste the sauce every now and then to make sure there's enough salt, or the basil flavor isn't too strong, or that there's enough garlic for your liking.

Now it's all reduced.  It's a little hard to tell, but it's much
thicker and more sauce-like than tomato juice-like.

6. In about 30 minutes, the sauce should be reduced enough to be finished.  The key here is to check for the consistency that you like, not to just time it.  Turn off the heat.  You can either puree the sauce and run it through a sieve to make it extra-smooth, or you can be like me and just pour it into containers.

Ready to freeze!  Now I'll have fresh tomato sauce stowed away
for the cold, bleak days of surgery rotation.  Or just winter in general.
Be sure to leave a little room for the sauce to expand when it freezes.

Tomato Sandwich

Ingredients:

-fresh tomato

-cheese (mozzarella or farmer's cheese or provolone would all work)

-basil

-mayonaise

-bread

Method:

1. Toast the bread.

2. In the meantime, slice the tomato.  I like my tomato slices about 3/8 inch thick (I know that's pretty exact, but it's more than a quarter inch but less than half an inch).

3. Slice up your cheese of choice.

4. Make sure your basil is ready to go (leaves picked off stems, chiffonaded if you prefer)

5. Spread mayo on your toast, thinly.  This protects the bread from tomato juice.

6. Assemble the sandwich: toast-mayo-cheese-basil-tomato-mayo-toast.  Oh, and you can throw some S&P on the tomato before you close it up.

7. EAT very messily and think "YUM THIS IS WHAT SUMMER TASTES LIKE!"

Enjoy the tomatoes while you can!  THIS is when they absolutely taste the best--forget fresh tomatoes in December, you don't even want to know how far they've traveled (you can taste it in their mealy texture).

Go!  Make sauce!  Or Bloody Marys! Or just eat them sliced and plain!

Things to Eat when It's Hot Out

Even in an air-conditioned apartment, summer heat leaks in through windows and the cracks under the door and the closets under the eaves.  So, having moved in the middle of summer, I have hardly given my new kitchen a proper christening.  Yes, I've cooked a few times, but really I've been eating lots of cold meals.

Here's what I eat when it's too hot to stand by the (turned off) oven or stove:

-Peanut butter sandwiches and milk

-Crackers and {peanut butter, cheese, hummus, tuna salad}

-Salads

-Cherries (yes, sometimes just cherries for dinner)

-Cottage cheese and nectarines

-Cottage cheese and walnuts and a drizzle of honey

-Cheese roll-ups (large tortilla with some shredded cheese, microwave for a minute until gooey)

-Yogurt

-Cereal (even for dinner)

-Pasta with a no-cook sauce (minus points for boiling water, bonus points for no-cook sauce). I like a creamy yogurt + pesto combo, or carbonara (shredded parm, garlic, and a beaten egg, plus a tiny bit of pepper and pasta water), or chopped tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil.  Throw in a big bunch of arugula and it's like pasta and salad all together.

-Peanut butter (yes, it's on here again.  I eat lots of peanut butter.)

-Ice cream

I love to bake my own bread, but when you don't want to turn on the stove, setting the oven to 450 degrees for any kind of bread is madness.  I did find this recipe for Crock Pot Bread that actually worked like a charm--the end result was really tasty and I didn't heat up my apartment hardly at all.

Here's to staying cool, even in July!

End-of-summer galette

Nothing says summer like stone fruit: peaches, plums, nectarines--as soon as they hit rock-bottom prices at the store (and once the air hangs heavily with summer humidity), it's time to make pies or smoothies or just eat as many as you can out-of-hand.  My favorites are plums and nectarines.  (Peach fuzz still kinda weirds me out, you know?  But really good peaches are a mess to try and peel...thus, the nectarine.)  I was trying to find something easy to do with some nectarines because I just had tons of them and--much as I love them--I wanted to do more than just quarter them and munch on them as a snack.

My first creative use: salsa.  I forgot to take a picture of it.  (Shame on me, I know.  But I'm new at this!)  My summer research project involved working at a community garden, where they have a weekly cooking demo.  Last week's was fresh salsa, and I was inspired to make a fruity-spicy combo that went really great with plain tortilla chips.

Nectarine salsa (makes 1 bowl, serves 1 for dinner or a crowd at a party)

1 nectarine

1-2 banana peppers

half an onion

half a lime

salt

herbs of your choice

Method:

-Quarter the nectarine, remove the pit, and peel.  Dice medium to fine, depending on how you like your salsa.  I like this one pretty chunky.

-Dice the banana peppers the same size as the nectarine.  Be sure to remove the seeds before you dice them!

-Dice the onion and add it to the nectarine and peppers.  You can use red (a little sweeter, probably better) but I used white in a pinch and it worked fine.

-Juice the half a lime into the bowl of diced fruit and veg and add a pinch of salt.

-Mince some fresh herbs and add to the salsa.  I used a green onion and a few leaves of mint because that's what I had on hand, but the next time I made it I used a little basil and some chives--still good!  They just add some freshness and a brightness to the salsa.

-Mix everything up together and let it sit for a little if you can, or if you're like me just go ahead and eat 2/3 of the bowl right away with chips.

After I made the salsa (twice in two days), I decided it was time to go a little more traditional and make a dessert.  Pie always sounds like too much work, but I remembered that galettes are like pie but without the pan and are a little more forgiving.  I borrowed the base recipe for pie dough and general method from smitten kitchen, but I skipped the complicated parts (the ground almonds and the flour on the galette before I added the fruit).  

So...I couldn't wait.  I had to try a slice right away.

This galette used 2 1/2 nectarines...so almost 3, but I snacked on the scraps.  Basically, I think galettes are my new favorite dessert.  You make a pie dough, you roll it out, and then you slice and arrange your fruit in a pretty circle in the middle.  Leave about 2 inches or a little less around the circumference of the fruit so you have enough to tuck over the sides.  Then, I drizzled some honey over the top of the fruit, folded up the sides into pleats, and brushed the crust with egg.  A quick sprinkle of vanilla sugar and the whole thing went into the oven for I think 45 minutes.  

The directions said to transfer the galette right away to a cooling rack, which I did--the crust stayed nice and firm, with a hint of crackle as I bit into the sugared pastry.  It also said to wait 20 minutes before slicing, which I only barely managed to do.  But then I definitely had a slice.  Or two.  And I may or may not have eaten a big chunk of this for breakfast the next day.  (What?  It was around brunch time when I got up, anyway...)

This was the perfect way to end the summer.  But now it's off to school again...second year and the board exams looming!  

Enjoy the stone fruit while you can!

~Lindsey

Say it with me: Rat-ah-too-ee

Ratatouille.

Is there another more enigmatic food word?  For me, (thanks, Disney/Pixar) it conjures up visions of a happily contented foodie-rat who moves to Paris to pursue his dream job as a chef.  It also makes me think of summer vacation, hot and humid days, and the south of France.

Ratatouille is a Provençal dish that really says everything summer: fresh as can be produce, thrown together with a few glugs of olive oil and some s&p, and baked until everything's tender and simmering in their own juices.  Sometimes when I want a quick pasta sauce, I do a riff on ratatouille in a saucepan and throw in some spaghetti or linguine and toss it around.

This ratatouille was inspired by smitten kitchen's excellent recipe for it here. If you are moderately good at slicing things, you're good to go.  If you have a mandoline, even better and you won't have to meticulously cut every slice yourself.  If slicing things carefully and consistently isn't your thing, dice everything the same size and throw it on a baking sheet or in a casserole and cook it anyway!  The original dish from Provence is pretty rustic and forgiving.

Ingredients:

1 baby eggplant

2 small or 1 large summer squash

1 medium zucchini

2 roma tomatoes

1 yellow onion

1 large or a couple small garlic cloves

olive oil

thyme

salt & pepper

I was feeling stripey.

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375.

2. Slice the eggplant, squash, zucchini, and tomatoes thinly into rounds.  Cut the onion in half (or quarters) and slice the same thickness as the other veggies.
3. Pour 1-2 T of olive oil in the bottom of your casserole.  Grate a clove of garlic into the oil (thank you, microplane! or you could mince it.) and smush it around with your finger (or a spoon, I guess) so it gets into the olive oil and all over the bottom.

4. Layer the veggie slices in concentric circles in the baking dish.  

See how pretty?  I love the bright colors and the pattern the veggies make.

5. Drizzle a couple tablespoons of olive oil over the top, sprinkle with dried thyme or a few sprigs fresh if you have it, and salt & pepper generously.

6. Bake for 45-55 minutes until vegetables are tender and just starting to release some juices.  Bake covered the first 25 minutes and uncovered for the rest.

Voilà!

That's it!  Really, the hardest part is slicing the veggies thinly, and even that isn't that bad.  Plus, it looks so pretty as you arrange it in the dish that everyone will be impressed when you put it on the table.  I made this for a community potluck on Tuesday night and got so many compliments that I'm taking it tonight for a potluck with friends.

Update: There was just a little left over, so I saved it and had it for lunch over quinoa with another tiny drizzle of olive oil.  Yum!

Enjoy your summer veggies!

Love,
Lindsey