Category Archives: tomatoes

Romesco sauce

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romesco sauce

Everybody loves romesco sauce! (Well, everybody except my 6-year-old son, but he claims to have eaten earthworms, so his taste is suspect. Shocking, I know! We’re vegetarian!) When people first taste romesco sauce, their faces instantly light up, and they have to eat some more and they say, “What is this? It’s delicious!” I’ve seen it happen many times!

Romesco sauce is a combination of roasted red peppers, roasted tomatoes, hazlenuts, almonds, bread, and lots of paprika. In an ideal world, you’d roast the peppers over an open fire, and roast the tomatoes for hours in your oven. In a slightly less ideal world, you’d roast the peppers on the flame of your gas burner. Sigh. I don’t have a gas stove, so I broil my peppers, and they turn out fine. And this time of year, I cheat and use roasted tomatoes from a can. (Hunts fire-roasted diced, as it happens). You could also use peppers from a jar. This sauce will still taste good!

It’s a very versatile sauce. Good with roasted vegetables, good as a dip for chips or crackers, good on sliced baguette, good as a pizza sauce, a pasta sauce, a sauce for savory pies (particularly those with lots of greens) or croquettes.

Here’s Art Pepper’s Red Pepper Blues.
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Fennel in a sherry & green peppercorn broth

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Fennel in a sherry green peppercorn sauce

Sweet fennel in a spicy, smoky, buttery broth. Garnished with toasted slivered almonds and gorgonzola. Delicious, but what is it? Whatever you want it to be! We had it over basmati rice. It would be good with couscous or orzo, or any other kind of pasta you like. If you add white beans or chickpeas it could become quite a hearty stew. If you cook until the fennel is very soft and the liquid quite reduced, you’ll have a delicious compote that would make a nice vegetable side dish. I was in the mood for something light and brothy (post thanksgiving search for clarity!). So I had mine by itself, with several large handfuls of baby arugula tossed on top and stirred in to wilt very slightly. And some toasted ciabatta bread. I think there’s something so pleasurable about combining ingredients, giving some thought to the flavors of the vegetables or beans, and choosing herbs and spices that match. And then tasting a spoonful of the broth, and finding it wonderful! Such a feeling of achievement! Such anticipation of the meal about to be eaten!

Here’s JJ Barnes singing about Sweet Sherry. I used dry for this, but we don’t need to tell him that.
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Simple tomato sauce

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Simple tomato sauce

This recipe is so easy, so tasty, and so versatile, that you will never buy a bottle of pasta sauce again! In the summer I use fresh tomatoes, but the rest of the year I use canned, and, honestly, it’s just as good. I use fire-roasted diced, in a can, for extra smokey flavor.

You can season this any way you like – you can make it spicy with cayenne or red pepper flakes or chipotle puree. You can add oregano, basil, rosemary, thyme or cilantro. You can add olives and capers to make a sort of puttanesca. You can add roasted red peppers and paprika to make it nice and smokey. You can add ground almonds or hazelnuts. You could add curry spices. You could add grated toasted beets. And of course, you could add any vegetable you’re fond of. Anything you like! My youngest son likes to eat it as though it was soup, which it would be, if you thinned it down a bit with water or milk.

Here’s Sly and the Family Stone with Sing a Simple Song, to show you how it’s done.
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Potatoes, sofrito, fennel, mmmmmm

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Potatoes, so mild-mannered and comforting, meet some spicy, vibrant friends in this very pleasing, intensely flavored dish. The potatoes are sliced thinly, and layered with sofrito, olives, capers and fennel, and they all combine to create wonderful tastes and textures.

I just discovered this song, but I really like it! Tony Touch, the Beanuts and D’Mingo with Sofrito Mama.
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What are we going to do with all this vegetarian paella?

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I’m calling this a paella because it has a rich, saffron-infused broth. If you’re a paella purist, however, you can call it fennel-artichoke heart-white bean stew. Either way, it’s a warm and flavorful meal for a chilly fall evening. I serve it with basmati rice, because that’s my favorite, and some nice crusty bread.

Here’s La Paella by Conjunto Yumuri. Don’t know much about it, but I love it!


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Green tomato tarte tatin

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green tomatoes

I made a green tomato tarte tatin at the very end of summer, about a month ago, with big, plump green tomatoes from our garden. (We had so many this year, and so few nice ripe red ones!) It was surprisingly delicious – the tartness of the tomatoes offset by the touch of caramelized brown sugar. I made another last night with the very last of the green tomatoes – small, hard, very green tomatoes, and I have to tell you, it was almost too tart, this tart! No amount of sugar or cooking would sweeten these little tomatoes. I’m going to tell you how I made it, because it was so tasty, but I’d use the bigger, slightly softer tomatoes, that are more likely to succumb to your sweetening advances.

Cooking with green tomatoes signals that bittersweet time of year when summer fades into autumn, so we’ll let Booker T’s Summertime melt into Jackie Mittoo’s beautiful Autumn Sounds.
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Black bean & tomato soup

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This is basically a two-can soup (can of beans/can of tomatoes), but it’s got a deep rich flavor, and a lovely, deeply richly colored broth (black bean soups can be so drab-looking sometimes, but this has a warm mahogany hue). Simply made, but complexly flavored.

Here’s JJ Allstar’s Soup. I found a surprising number of songs about soup. Can you think of any that you like?

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Sofrito!

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Sofrito…it’s fun to say and delicious to eat. It’s also one of those foods that turns up all over the world in different guises. In Spain it’s a slow-cooked, intensely flavored tomato paste. Where different versions of sofrito show up – in the Carribean, latin America, the mediterranean – you’ll find different ingredients added or taken away. You’ll find green peppers, pork, cilantro, olives, capers, chilies, different seasonings. A sofrito is usually a base for another dish. You can add it to a soup or stew at the end to deepen the flavor, toss it with pasta, use it as a condiment. And it is the main ingredient of the empanada gallega, which is the mother of all empanadas.

paste tomatoes

I picked these paste tomatoes from our local CSA, but you can just as easily (well, more easily, really!) make them from a can of tomatoes. But use a can of good tomatoes – fire roasted is nice!

This is my version of a Spanish sofrito. I keep the seasonings simple (rosemary and beautiful smoked spanish paprika) because the sofrito will probably find itself in another dish, mingling with other flavors. I’m not sure this is authentic, but it is delicious!

Recipe after the jump.
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Tomato songs

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Here are some songs to listen to while you cook.

This is dedicated to the truly tiny tomatoes on the farm, gamely hanging onto their plants in the face of oncoming winter…

And this is just juicy…

Any other tomato songs out there?

Autumn Tomatoes

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Last week I went to our local CSA to pick tomatoes and herbs. It was a beautiful, glowing fall day, seeped in the bittersweet feeling that summer is really over. Many of the herbs were dried and done, but I found rows of purple basil, which I picked in such quantities they wouldn’t fit in my pail. The tall heirloom cherry tomato plants were full of fruit, and glowed like stained glass – walking through them was a giddy experience, with the buzzing of the bees, and the lovely smell of tomato leaves.

I came home with tomatoes of all different sizes and colors – some as small as a raisin and bright red, some larger, yellow and pear shaped. How to preserve their pretty, unique shapes and colors? I sauteed them quickly in olive oil and garlic, till they had just started to wilt slightly, and then tossed them with some diced mozzarella, and copious amounts of shredded basil.