Back to the Kitchen

It's cold.  Relatively, of course, because if this were March and the temperature climbed to 65 degrees I'd be frolicking outside in my sandals and sundresses.  But no, it's September; we are in the beginning slow descent to winter just after an incredibly hot summer.  We (Murray and I) sat at my desk today (he curled up on my lap) and looked outside at the dreary gray afternoon.  It's cold and ugly out there and we are warm and cozy in here.  How long ago summer seems after just a few days of this weather! 

This is all silly talk, of course, because summer food has not ended.  I still have tomatoes and eggplants doing their best to fatten up and tip my plants over with their weight.  Sadly we lost the our butternut squash and pumpkin plants to squash bugs--evil little creatures that steal the water from the vines until the plants wither away to nothing.  (I will be more prepared for them next year, if I decide to plant squash again.)  My herbs, especially the basil, oregano, and thyme, have stretched upwards and outwards.  I can't use them fast enough to control the growth.

Perhaps the garden story from this summer that I will forever remember pertains to the tomato plants given to us by my sister Amy and her husband Dustin.  They have a vegetable garden along the sides of their house and have been wildly successful growing tomatoes and summer squash.  The Roma tomatoes that they planted last year sprouted again, somewhat unexpectedly, and they didn't have enough room to keep them.  Dustin offered them to us, which we gladly accepted, and we planted them along the sunny side of our house.  We all thought that all five plants were Roma's until I noticed one of the plants had clusters of flowers in a much different configuration than the rest.

It was definitely not a Roma--and it turned out to be a red cherry tomato plant.  The funny part--Amy and Dustin didn't grow any cherry tomato plants last year.  We concluded that it must be a result of...well...bird poop.  I try not to think about it that little detail because this plant keeps on producing beautiful cherry tomatoes.  I have already decided next year I will focus more on cherry tomatoes in our garden plans because they are so incredibly useful.  We've tossed them in salads, on pizza (new pizza dough recipe coming soon!), and in my new go-to early fall dinner, Spatchcocked Chicken with Tomatoes.

This chicken is so incredibly simple; it's one of those throw-it-all-in-a-pot types where you can go back to the couch and drink a glass of wine while the oven does all of the work.  It's a quick meal too since you use the high-roast method, and the only other thing you need to do is make couscous or a green salad to go on the side.  Tim loves it because the cherry tomatoes mix with the cooking liquid to concentrate the flavor and end up tasting like little bites of fruity tomato sauce.

Truthfully, after a few months of fried egg sandwiches, grilled vegetables, clean-out-the-refrigerator salads, and carry out, I'm glad to be back in the kitchen with the oven on.  It feels good to be in a meal-time routine, to be feeding my husband, to be thoughtful about what we are eating.  And even though I've been complaining to Tim about the cold weather, I secretly like it.  It brings me back to the kitchen. 

Spatchcocked Chicken with Tomatoes
slightly adapted from Everyday Food
serves 4

For more information on how to spatchcock a chicken, read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle with images and instructions.  

No picture here of the final product (it was starting to get dark outside and the pic is dim), though you can see it over on my instagram feed if you are really curious.  Visually, you are looking for a crispy skin and the liquid to reduce down, but most importantly the chicken needs to reach the internal temperature noted.  And don't rush it to the table--it benefits greatly from resting.

Ingredients
1 three to four pound whole chicken, spatchcocked
3 unpeeled garlic cloves, smashed
1 pint cherry tomatoes (a mix of colors is prettiest, but not necessary)
1 tsp olive oil
1/2 dry cooking sherry or dry white wine
1/4 cup water
4-5 sprigs of fresh thyme or oregano
salt & pepper

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F.  Season chicken with salt & pepper and place breast side up in a heavy pot like a dutch oven or a roasting pan.  Add garlic cloves.  With the tip of a paring knife, pierce the skin of the cherry tomatoes and add them to the pot.  Drizzle olive oil over the tomatoes and season with salt & pepper.  Pour sherry and water into the pot.  Nestle sprigs of herbs around and on top of the chicken.

Roast chicken until internal temperature reads 165 degrees when inserted into the thickest part of the thigh and juices run clear, about 30-35 minutes.  Let rest 5-10 minutes, then carve into four pieces (2 breast, 2 thigh and leg). 

I've Got a Birthday To Celebrate

On my 16th birthday my sister left for her freshman year of college.  I stood in our kitchen at six o'clock in the morning, surrounded by her packed bags, with the members of my family rushing around the house to make sure nothing was left behind, and it didn't feel like a birthday to me.  Of course, it wasn't the norm for how my birthdays were spent, but it can be hard to have a birthday so close to the back-to-school rush.  Even now that I'm out of school, I still sometimes want to tell everyone to wait-just-a-minute and stop rushing through August! because I've got a birthday to celebrate. 

Tim understands this because his birthday falls near Labor Day so there is the same guilt associated with wanting to make a to-do about getting a year older.  There are always friends on weekend trips away or spending time with family.  It's hard for either of us to assert ourselves and ask for attention.  So we do that for each other.  We get how the other feels. 

For my birthday, Tim went overboard.  He bought me a beautiful fragrance to replace the one I broke (dropped it on the bathroom tile) and he made dinner reservations somewhere he knew I'd want to go.  He didn't tell me at first where we were going, but he's terrible at keeping a secret and eventually confessed.  We were going to Jean-Robert's Table, and I was so excited.  Back when I worked in wine sales, I met Jean-Robert de Cavel at a few parties a mutual friend hosted.  He is jovial and interesting to talk to and everyone flocked to him.  That kind of personality can draw a crowd at a party or to his restaurants, and it makes you wonder why this French ex-pat has chosen Cincinnati as his home. But he came here along while ago and never left.  I'm especially grateful now that I've eaten at Table.  I will go back there again and again.

We had an excellent dinner, and perhaps Tim encouraging me to finish the bottle of wine is partly to blame for no documentation of our food.  Everything we ate was fantastic (Tim had steak and I had duck), but trust me when I say, I didn't need pictures to remember our Heirloom Tomato Salad appetizer.  It was a special, not on the regular menu, and as soon as our waitress began to describe it I had already decided to order it. 

I recreated it at home simply because I needed to eat it again.  The soft cheese served with the salad was the perfect foil to the acid.  This salad is for all of the summer-tomato-lovers out there, and tomato discrimination is not allowed; you'll need a good mix of types and sizes to capture the essence of it.  Also, everything added to the tomatoes is merely there to make it all more tomato-ey.  It's simple.  It's fresh.  It's summer.  Tomatoes will now always make me think of my birthday.

I owe Tim for helping me create new, positive birthday memories--it's harder to do than it seems and he excels tremendously at it.  

Heirloom Tomato Salad
inspired by Jean-Robert's Table
serves 4-6, depending if it is served as a light lunch or an appetizer/side dish

I purchased all of the tomatoes for this salad from the Landen Deerfield Township farmer's market, which is held every Saturday during the summer and continues on occasionally throughout the winter.  For heirloom tomatoes, I am particularly drawn to booth hosted by That Guy's Family Farm.  Guy seems to have the biggest variety of heirlooms, including little yellow plum tomatoes, beautiful multi-colored cherry tomatoes, and an incredible green-striped salad tomato that I wish I could remember the name of.  We also sliced up a big Mr. Stripey from our garden for even more size variance and sweeter flavor. 

If you can't find herb goat cheese at your local market, you can always chop up fresh herbs and mix them in with plain goat cheese.  I'd recommend soft-leaf herbs like parsley, dill, basil, and oregano; add no more than a tablespoon total of herbs. 

At Table we had this salad with French bread but at home I decided to make Flatbread with Honey, Thyme, and Sea Salt from a recipe I found on Smitten Kitchen.  It was really simple to make and I highly recommend it. 

Ingredients
~3 lbs of heirloom tomatoes, a variety of sizes and colors
1/2 tsp kosher salt
fresh ground black pepper
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
4-5 leaves of fresh basil
3 oz soft herb goat cheese
crusty bread like baguette or flatbread

Slice the largest tomatoes across like thick sandwich slices.  Cut the medium size tomatoes into quarters or sixths so that you have wedges.  Depending on the size, halve cherry tomatoes or leave the littlest ones whole.  Put all tomatoes in a medium size bowl and toss with the salt and pepper.  Allow to sit for 10minutes to draw out some of the juice of the tomatoes.

Add the olive oil and vinegar and lightly toss.  Transfer mixture, including accumulated juices onto a serving tray.   Chiffonade the basil and sprinkle over salad.  Serve the herb goat cheese on the side with bread.

Build the best bite by putting a smudge of the goat cheese the bread with a juicy tomato on top. 

Red

Well...almost.

Secret Family Recipe

Our half bushel of tomatoes sat on top of the washing machine for four whole days before I got around to deciding what to do with them.  It's not that I wasn't motivated to make something--I really was--it's just that summer is slipping away from me faster than I realized.  Really, where does the time go?  Anyone know the answer?

Tim and I decided that making some all-purpose tomato sauce would be the best option.  I say "all-purpose" because before we started tossing ingredients into the pot, I hadn't really considered what we would use this sauce for.  Pizza sauce?  Spaghetti sauce?  Are there other types of tomato sauce?

We started a sort of assembly line in our little kitchen.  Since we only have a small area of counter space, we set up stations.  Tim was over at the stove blanching and then peeling tomatoes and I was next to the sink working on coring and chopping.

We started our sauce operation around 5:00pm on a Thursday night.  I know it's ambitious to make sauce on a weeknight, but I knew we wouldn't have time over the weekend.  With our picky eater in high school now, our leisurely weekends are a thing of the past.

As I dropped the first batches of tomatoes into a boiling pot of water, I quickly realized we didn't have very much ice in the freezer.  Tim went out on an emergency bag-of-ice run while I made do with what little ice we had.

I was pleasantly surprised at how easily the skins of the tomatoes slid off after spending only 60 seconds in a hot bath and 60 seconds in a cold one.  Tim came up with a system to make a little slice on the bottom of the tomatoes and then pull the skins off from the bottom to the top.  He then placed the peeled tomatoes in a bowl on the counter while I tried to keep up my coring and chopping with his peeling pace.

You would think that we  were running a tomato factory with the amount of tomato juice puddling on the counter-top.  I tried to manage it by sopping up as much watery juice as I could after every few tomatoes, but eventually I started just pushing it into the sink and apologizing in advance to Tim for the inevitable clogging that would follow. 

Working in batches, I pulsed the chopped tomatoes in the food processor until the tomatoes were in small pieces, but not completely pureed.  We like a little texture to our sauce, but if you'd prefer yours to be thinner, by all means, process them more.  By the time we had finished processing all of the tomatoes, it was nearly 9:00pm.

Then this is where I have a little more trouble describing what we did.  I tossed in about 1/2 cup of olive oil, maybe more, a few tablespoons of tomato paste, a few cloves of grated garlic, some salt & pepper, and a half a palm-full of red pepper flakes.  It was more of a taste-and-go system where we would let it simmer for a while, taste it, and then add a little bit more of this or that.  At the very end of cooking, Tim tossed in a good handful of fresh lemon basil that he had chopped up.  It added a really great fresh fragrance to the sauce that I know will reemerge when we reheat this another day. 

Since we didn't strain the tomatoes before processing them, the sauce started very watery.  By 10:30pm, after lots of stirring and thumb twiddling, Tim was satisfied with the consistency.  We got out our little plastic containers and filled them up, taking care to date and label the lids.

Before putting the lids on, we let the sauce cool for 30 minutes or so.  Just when Tim could barely keep his eyes open any longer, we put the lids on the sauce and transported them to our deep freeze.  By the next day, our seven pints of sauce were frozen solid and ready for their fall hibernation.

While tomatoes are still available straight from the vine, we will keep buying them.  But in a month or so when there are no more local tomatoes in sight, we will have our homemade sauce--our secret family recipe.  So secret not even we could recreate it.

Eggs on Sunday

Tim and I are big breakfast people.  When we first started dating, we would go to breakfast at a diner called The Echo in Hyde Park.  I loved that place because we would always order the same things:  eggs, potato cakes, bacon, and a Diet Coke for me and either the same for Tim or an omelette with coffee.  Sometimes my old roommates would also join us and one of them always ordered her version of the Hyde Parker omelette:  egg whites, spinach, tomatoes, and feta cheese.  Everything was always perfect.

We are both creatures of habit when it comes to breakfast, but there are times when we try something new.  For example, right after we watched Julie & Julia, Tim went out and bought me Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  I promptly baked my family a cheese soufflé.  It was tasty, but I quickly realized that there wasn't much substance to a plain cheese soufflé and it wasn't a very filling brunch.

 

My friend, Meg, wrote about eggs baked in ramekins and I really haven't been able to get that concept out of my mind.  The nice thing about making eggs in this manner is that you can make individual portions and don't have to spend time tending to a pot of boiling water for poaching or a sauté pan for frying.  And the way we made them was a good use of the endless tomatoes available at the farmer's market. 

Baked Eggs in Tomatoes
adapted from Everday Food magazine
serves 2

This recipe can easily be increased to serve more than two or paired down for one.  You can also adjust the seasoning amounts to your taste or add any diced vegetables like corn or zucchini to the egg mixture for more texture.  

Ingredients
2 large, firm tomatoes
2 large eggs
2 tsp fresh chives
2 tbsp grated Parmesan, Gruyère, or other hard cheese
salt & pepper

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.  With a paring knife, cut around the top of the tomato, taking care not to pierce all the way through to the bottom.  Using a spoon, scoop out the insides of the tomatoes, without poking through the skin.  Arrange tomatoes in a baking dish lined with foil or parchment paper.  Salt & pepper tomatoes.

In a small bowl, mix eggs, chives, salt & pepper.  Pour egg mixture into tomatoes.  Top with cheese.  Bake for 35-40 minutes or until egg mixture is cooked through and cheese is slightly browned.  

Serve immediately.