Tomato Bread Salad

24 09 2010

After two years of eating seasonally, my kids have learned to associate seasons with food. So when we returned home from the Harvest Festival at my farm share last weekend with a gallon of vine-ripened, organic tomatoes, my 3rd-grader begged for one of her favorites: tomato bread salad.

This is a salad that can only be made with the ripest, freshest, sweetest tomatoes, so we only make it this time of year. Making it in winter, even with those tantalizingly red tomatoes-on-the-vine, is akin to trick-or-treating on Easter. It just isn’t done. Bread is important, too, but there really is no wiggle room when it comes to tomatoes.

If you’ve never had bread salad before, you might be surprised that an eight-year-old would request it. But the dish is really just croutons and tomatoes, which isn’t that different from other carbohydrate-heavy combos that kids love, like noodles with red sauce or pizza. The trick is to assemble the two moments before serving, so the croutons stay crisp. Once the bread sits in the tomatoes it gets soggy, like cereal that’s sat too long. No way a kid is going to eat that. To round out the meal, heat up the grill and throw on sausage, chicken, whatever. Add a green salad and dinner is ready in no time.

Tomato Bread Salad
Preheat the oven to 400. Dice 4-6 tomatoes and put them in a non-reactive bowl, being careful not to lose any of the juices. Add kosher salt and several tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil and let it sit while you make the croutons. Tear a baguette into bite-sized pieces (larger is okay, just not smaller), drizzle them with extra-virgin olive oil and toast them on a lightly oiled cookie sheet until crisp and pale gold. Chop a few teaspoons of fresh basil. When you’re ready to eat, add half the croutons to the tomatoes and toss. Add more croutons until you get the right balance of tomatoes and bread. Taste and add more salt or extra-virgin olive oil as necessary, or even a splash of balsamic vinegar. Sprinkle with basil and enjoy.


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Categories : In Summer, Recipes

Pasta with Pesto — Easier than Take-Out

21 06 2010

My oldest child is a swimmer, so once a week we stumble out of bed at 5:45 to get her to the pool before the meet. We don’t get home until early afternoon, by which time my other kids are hot and tired and crabby. Did I say the other kids? I mean me, too.

After a swim meet, cooking is always the last thing on my mind. But by the time we got home from last week’s meet and played for a while, it seemed like more work to buckle everyone in car seats and drive somewhere. You know you’re tired when take-out seems too hard.

But what about dinner? Luckily I remembered I still had some pesto, which I’d frozen last summer when basil was coming in by the bunch from our farm share. I quickly thawed some out, cooked some whole wheat rotini, and sliced up mozzarella and organic grape tomatoes. While I cleaned spinach for salad, I sent my five-year-old out to the patio for fresh basil (he’s the proud gardener of the family). Before we knew it, we had dinner. Easier than take-out. And healthier, too.

Pesto Recipe
I’ve followed many pesto recipes over the years and now I don’t use a recipe at all. Simply wash and dry the basil (a cup at least, if not two) and throw it in the food processor. Process until coarse, then add salt and a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. Process until smooth, adding more oil if necessary. Fresh parsley makes a nice addition (up to 1/2 cup), as does lemon juice. I skip pine nuts entirely, but sometimes throw in a handful of walnuts.

If I know I’m making it for the freezer, I don’t even add the garlic or cheese. I just spoon it into an ice cube tray and put it in the freezer. Later, I pop the individual blocks into a Ziploc for use all year long. Upon serving, I add a few cloves of garlic and lots of parmesan, plus more oil if needed.


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More Thoughts on Pesto

24 09 2009

pesto3
In the previous post, I did what journalists are taught not to do. I “buried the lead,” which is reporter-speak for saying that I put the important stuff too far down.

And what was the important stuff? Namely that pesto can be used on more than pasta. I’m not sure why we Americans tend to limit it to linguini, capellini and the like, but really, pesto is a concentrated burst of summertime flavor that can be added to grilled fish, grilled chicken and even steak. As I wrote before, the thought of green pesto on steak might seem disconcerting, but it’s not too far from Argentinian chimichurri (click here for a good chimichurri recipe from Gourmet).

At my cooking school last week, Sara Foster also used pesto on slices of crusty bread, which were toasted and topped with heirloom tomato slices and mozzarella cheese, a great appetizer.

I’ve gotten a few questions about why my pesto recipe doesn’t include parmesan or nuts. I do use parmesan — “parm-a-lot” was a nickname in my old cooking club because I used so much of it — but I wait to add it when I’m tossing the noodles and pesto before serving. If I’m using pesto more as a sauce for chicken or steak, I prefer the texture without cheese. Lastly, I’ve been told that pesto freezes better and lasts longer without the cheese, though I admit I haven’t done a taste test.

As for the omission of nuts — pine nuts are traditional, but you can use other kinds, too — I’ve found that I prefer the more intense flavor that comes from just the basil, garlic, salt, pepper and extra virgin olive oil. Experiment and see what you like best. After all, that’s the beauty of cooking at home. You can make things just the way you like them.

P.S. Here’s the recipe again, in case you missed it the first time

Pesto
2 cups basil, washed and dried
2-4 cloves garlic
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Put all ingredients into a food processor and puree, adding more oil if necessary.


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Pesto on More Than Pasta

22 09 2009

I love basil, but for years I couldn’t bring myself to eat pesto. I guess I overdid it back in the 90s. And who could blame me? I was living in New York, and everywhere I turned restaurants were serving what we laughingly referred to as “yuppie pasta.” Think noodles of all shapes, colors and sizes loaded with chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and pesto. Sometimes there were capers. Often there were olives. I don’t even want to think about all the other ingredients that enthusiastically but unwisely found their way into the bowl.

But back to pesto.

For most of the summer, I used up cups upon cups of basil in Creamy Basil and Zucchini Soup. Now my freezer is stocked with more of that soup than my family will probably want to eat. Faced with a box of basil my kids and I picked at my CSA’s Harvest Festival this weekend, I knew it was time to rethink my relationship with pesto.

basil 1

Since then I’ve tried several recipes, some with more oil and some with less; some with all basil and some with parsley; some with walnuts and some with pine nuts; some with 4 cloves of garlic instead of 2. This is my favorite version. If you’re freezing it, don’t add the parmesan cheese until you’re ready to use it. And put it in an ice-cube tray until frozen, then remove the frozen blocks and put them in a double Ziploc.

basil 2 use this

When you’re making pesto, don’t worry about exact proportions. If you have more basil, add a little more extra virgin olive oil. If you like yours thinner, add a lot more oil. If your kids hate garlic, use two cloves instead of four.

pesto3

In this batch, I added more oil. In the next batch, I opted for less oil. The former will be great over pasta. The latter — since it’s thicker — will be wonderful with grilled chicken. We ate it with steak for dinner last night as a stand-in for chimichurri, the tangy herb-based sauce used with beef in Argentina, and my son ran his finger over the bowl to scoop up every last bit.

Pesto
2 cups basil, washed and dried
2-4 cloves garlic
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Put all ingredients into a food processor and puree. Many recipes call for parmesan cheese, but I prefer to add it to the dish rather than the sauce.


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Local Musings, plus a Great Green Bean Salad

8 08 2009

photoI’m on the road now, visiting my family in rural Virginia. Just how rural this is is up for debate. Yes, my parents’ small town is still small (thankfully), but the sprawl of D.C. has littered the roads from here to the beltway with more grocery stores than I can count, not to mention McDonald’s and Borders and Target. Fact is, the land is pretty out here and folks don’t mind spending hours in the car so they can live here but work there.

So we were in the car driving back from D.C. the other day when my dad surveyed the eight (or was it ten?) lanes of stop-and-go traffic and said, “I can’t imagine that when your kids are grown, this will be their dream.” With long-range predictions of gas prices topping out at $20 a gallon, something will have to give, and this life — the one followed by so many folks in the cars around us, with jobs in one place and houses in another — won’t be tenable. The price will simply be too high. I hope my kids have the sense to either live in the city or in the country, rather than trying to straddle two worlds.

I bring this up because “local” might be a buzzword in food circles these days, but its implications extend beyond eating what’s grown within a hundred miles. A recent article in The Atlantic pondered how energy might one day be locally generated, with wind or solar panels distributing power not across state lines but across a neighborhood, much as my neighbor in Denver does now.

Speaking of Denver, I heard that tomatoes aren’t in our farm-share bag this week. But in Virginia the growing season is a few weeks ahead, so they’re in. To celebrate our arrival, my parents picked up local tomatoes and green beans from a farm down the way. This is the dish we made, along with marinated pork tenderloin, roasted corn on the cob and crusty bread.

Tomato and Green Bean Salad
Adapted from EatingWell in Season: The Farmers’ Market Cookbook

1/4 cup cider vinegar
4 teaspoons honey
1 teaspoon olive oil (not extra-virgin)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 15-ounce cans of white beans, or an equivalent amount of already-cooked dried beans
8 ounces green beans, trimmed
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes, halved, plus a few beefsteaks or other full-size tomatoes
1/2 cup fresh basil leaves, sliced
2 ounces of goat cheese, if desired

Whisk the vinegar, honey, oil and salt together. Drain the beans, then add them to the vinaigrette and let sit for at least an hour in a non-reactive bowl. Boil a pot of salted water and cook green beans about 5 minutes. Drain and dry and add to the marinated beans. Gently add sliced tomatoes and basil and season with salt and pepper. Top each portion with a few slices of goat cheese and serve on a platter lined with sliced tomatoes, if desired.


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Zucchini Soup Recipe

5 07 2009

IMG_1380Summer is definitely here. Not that you’d know it by the weather, which dampened many plans this holiday weekend. But when 4 pounds of zucchini showed up in my CSA delivery, there was no mistaking the season.

Nestled among the turnips and lettuce and broccoli were three varieties of squash: yellow summer squash, dark green zucchini, and a lesser-known round summer squash with a light-green skin. Last year, in my first year of a CSA, I admit I didn’t know what to do with the round one. Now I’ve learned to use it in any zucchini recipe where you don’t need to showcase aesthetics. While the round one lacks the bright green pop from the skin and has more fleshy “insides”, it has the same mild flavor and can be eaten cooked or raw.

Faced with so many pounds of the stuff, I pulled out a recipe for Creamy Basil Zucchini Soup that had caught my eye last year in Sunset. Never having tasted zucchini soup before — it doesn’t headline many menus — I was a little hesitant, but I assumed that the generous cup of basil would save the day, if indeed the day needed saving. Another similar recipe from the June 2008 issue of Gourmet contains just 1/3 cup of basil for the same amount of zucchini.

Turns out, I had no need to worry about the soup. The zucchini is mild enough that it allows the basil to shine through with loads of summery goodness. After sautéing an onion and simmering 2 pounds of zucchini in chicken broth until tender, you puree it in a blender, resulting in a surprisingly thick and creamy texture. Indeed, if I had ordered it in a restaurant, I would’ve guessed the soup included potatoes or rice as a thickener. The recipe calls for pouring the soup through a strainer but I prefer a bit of texture and chose to leave some bits of zucchini and basil. In Gourmet‘s version, the soup is topped with blanched julienned zucchini — a nice touch, but an extra step that a busy home cook like me doesn’t have time for!

Click here for the recipe for Creamy Basil and Zucchini Soup.


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Caprese Salad

2 06 2009

This salad is deceptively easy, but don’t take the easy way out by buying cheap ingredients. And while the creaminess of the fresh mozzarella and the pop of the basil can mask somewhat sub-par tomatoes, they can’t work a miracle. In other words, don’t try it with tomatoes that are hard and pink.

1 or 2 tomatoes, sliced
A ball of fresh mozzarella, sliced
At least 5-10 basil leaves, julienned
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
One baguette, sliced, brushed with olive oil and toasted under the broiler

Nestle the tomatoes and mozzarella in a slightly overlapping fashion on a plate (I like to do it in a circle). Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkle with the basil, kosher salt and freshly-ground pepper and serve with the baguette. If you like, add a handful of mixed olives to the center of the plate.IMG_0788


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