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

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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Categories : In Summer, Recipes

Two (I mean,Too) Early Tomatoes

2 06 2009

IMG_0782This early in the growing season, we still head to the Boulder farmers’ market for our week’s supply of fresh, local veggies. Our CSA won’t start for another few weeks and the closest markets tend to be heavy on prepared goods (pies, cupcakes, pasta, and the like) and light on produce. That will change as the season progresses and farmers have more to go around, but for now we think it’s worth the time and gas to hike up 36.

Last weekend, however, we tried out the Sunday market at East High School, near City Park. As expected, of the 28 or so stands, less than a handful were staffed by farmers. And one of those was depressingly empty: the truck had broken down en route to Denver, leaving me with a list of desired items and an empty bag.

As a last resort, I wandered over to McCurry Farms, a conventional (i.e. non-organic) farm based in Pueblo. Seeing sweet corn, zucchini and yukon golds on the table, I was skeptical that anything was homegrown. But when I asked, I was told that while one side of the table was indeed full of purchased produce, the other side — the one featuring radishes, greenhouse tomatoes, asparagus, lettuce and green onions — was theirs.

Yes, pickings were slim. The lettuce was wilted, we’d already eaten a season’s worth of asparagus, and green onions don’t exactly a side-dish make. I somewhat dejectedly walked away with radishes (more on those another day) and two greenhouse tomatoes — not exactly the arugula or shelling peas I’d been hoping for. My husband, however, was not at all dejected. Indeed, he was so delighted with the prospect of a Caprese salad that we picked up the fixings on the way home.

While the kids checked the garden (“look at how big the peas are!”), I sliced the tomatoes and fresh mozzarella, julienned the basil and brushed olive oil on the baguette before running it under the broiler. Just before serving I drizzled the salad with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkled it with the basil, kosher salt and freshly-ground pepper and added a handful of mixed olives to the plate.

Were the tomatoes as good as the vine-ripened ones we’d picked last summer? No. The flavor was spot on, but the texture was lacking. But even a foodie like me knows that sometimes a meal is about more than the ingredients. It’s about being with family, eating al fresco, feeling the arrival of summer and, yes, the promise of better tomatoes to come.

Click here for the recipe for Caprese Salad.


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Categories : In Spring, Uncategorized

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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Categories : Recipes

The Cost of Cheap Tomatoes

21 02 2009

Aside from a few tomatoes I used in guacamole for a Super Bowl party, I haven’t bought a tomato in a while. They’re so hard and pink and flavorless this time of year, and they’re definitely not local.

Then the March issue of Gourmet arrived, giving me an even better reason to pass them over (assuming, of course, the accuracy of the reporting).

In Barry Estabrook’s “The Price of Tomatoes,” he exposes what he calls “involuntary servitude” in the fields of Immokalee, a tiny Florida town known as the tomato capital of the country. As he reports, more than 1,000 Florida men and women have been freed over the past 12 years in more than a handful of cases. The chief assistant US attorney, Douglas Molloy, is even quoted as calling Immokalee “ground zero for modern slavery.”

After reacting with sadness and disbelief, I thought back to Michael Pollan’s “Unhappy Meals” (New York Times Magazine, 1-28-07), especially to a point in his conclusion where he admonishes us for expecting to pay so little for our food. As Pollan writes, “The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care.”

Later, he argues that “those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.”

In Estabrook’s article, he talks of hard-fought success in lobbying companies like Yum! Brands (owner Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and others) to pay a penny more per pound to tomato pickers. Success, yes, but it seems the reality of distributing that raise is in jeopardy due to a disagreement with Florida farmers.

Supply and demand are fierce taskmasters, but somewhere along the way, we’ve clearly crossed a line. Hats off to both journalists for bringing this to our attention.


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Categories : Food News, In Winter, Uncategorized


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