Kitchen Sojourn » tomato

Tomatoes in winter (where I’m calling from pt. 1)

Greg Turner — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:55:02 +0000

When thinking about my own culinary history, my first instinct was to label it boring as laundry and catalog the many absences. No ethnic tradition, no national traditions, few regional traditions. No exotic spices. Kitchens the size of walk-in closets. Potatoes and flour in the pantry. The more I thought about my culinary past, however, the richer it became.

My Granny’s house always smelled of food. Partly it was the old gas oven she used, a massive thing with cast-iron burner covers and pilot lights that filled the kitchen with dry, warm air. I remember bacon grease in a small jar on the back of the stove, and this amazing food smell, not of any dish, but just of food. There, the kitchen seemed a place of sustinence, and whatever your stomach desired could be had, as long as the desire was steak or catfish, some vegetables and a starch (or two starches, if the vegetable was corn). Still, when my family travelled there, mom and dad coaxing our beater Volvo nearly 1,200 miles, and we entered the old farmhouse through the kitchen door, there was always a light on for us, and that kitchen’s warm aroma.

Granny also had a massive vegetable garden for a number of years, probably the first organic gardener my sister and I knew. She grew cucumbers and tomatoes, mostly, and I wish I had an appreciation for tomatoes back then because all who tasted them raved at their deep flavor and amazing mouth feel. I went with her once to a farmer’s market in Lawrence, Kansas. Muscle, mostly. I piled baskets into her trunk and helped her unload them on a table in someone else’s booth. A friend who’d offered to buy the lot then sell them piecemeal. I was fifteen and surly, didn’t care for vegetables and thought the idea of a salted tomato slice on a plate was anathema to all things good and tasty.

How little I knew.

When compared to tomatoes we get in the local supermarkets most of the year, a fresh, ripe tomato is a wonderful thing. Tart and slightly sweet with none of the mealy mouth feel so often off-putting to kids and adults alike. It’s because the off-season tomatoes aren’t bred for flavor or texture. They’re genetically engineered for shipping, with sturdy interiors and thick skin bitter with tannins.

A good canned tomato is better than a bad fresh one.

In her cellar, Granny kept jar after jar of canned and pickled vegetables. Her cucumbers became light, crisp dills, and her tomatoes were preserved for soups and stews. Again, I wish I’d been able to appreciate them.

Farfalle with spinach tomato sauce and goat cheese

Ingredients (serves 4)
8 – 10 ounces dry farfalle

Sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
29 ounces canned tomatoes, diced, no salt added
1/2 cup white wine
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar (optional)
Fresh spinach leaves (approx. 20)
Kosher salt
Oregano (dried, in winter)

Fresh goat cheese

Technique
mince
chiffonade

Method
Caramelize
Boil
Simmer

Heat the olive oil in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook until it just begins to brown, then add the tomatoes and white wine, stir. Increase the heat to medium-high, and when the sauce begins to bubble, reduce the heat to medium-low and continue to simmer.

Fill a stock pot with about four quarts of water. Add two tablespoons of kosher salt and bring to a boil. Add the pasta and set a timer according to the instructions on the package.

Now turn your attention back to the sauce. Add a teaspoon of kosher salt, stir, and taste. It should taste well seasoned, with a certain depth and brightness of flavor, but not salty. Sprinkle a dash of the oregano in the sauce, add the balsamic vinegar if you feel like it, and stir the ingredients together.

Finally, it’s time to chiffonade the spinach leaves and add them to the sauce. Work in batches of five. Stack them on top of one another, roll them up, then slice gently and cleanly through the leaves. Each cut should be about a quarter inch apart.

When the pasta finishes cooking, plate, top with a generous portion of the sauce, and then add a few pieces of the goat cheese. The tart goat cheese provides a wonderful counterpoint to the sweet oregano and spinach and lends the sauce a certain creaminess.

There’s no shame in canned tomatoes. My Granny knew that, and her canned tomatoes made a better choice for her stews than anything that might have come from the store in the dead of winter.

I probably still can’t make a good vegetable stew, fresh tomatoes or no. But an excellent sauce doesn’t have to come from fresh tomatoes. High-quality canned tomatoes produce marvelous flavor and are a much better bet when the fresh tomatoes in the store have been flown in from Chile.

Can people enjoy the simple pleasure of a salted tomato slice on a plate during the off season? No. But during a Kansas winter, would they want to? No, they’d want to stand in a warm, dry kitchen the size of a walk-in closet, faint blue glow from the stove’s pilot lights, the scent of tomato stew in the air. And the kettle on, for hot chocolate. With marshmallows.

How to cook vegetarian

Greg Turner — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:15:58 +0000

On the way back from my in-laws Christmas day, my daughter announced she was officially a vegetarian. My wife and I weren’t surprised. We knew it was coming the day she disavowed bacon, and I’ve been encouraging her since reading Michael Pollan’s “Farmer In Chief,” which includes striking information on environmental impact of the US food industry. Still, it throws a wrench in my overall plan of learning again how to cook.

To mark the occasion of my daughter’s vegetarian transformation, I wanted to do something special. An appetizer. In the past, we’ve enjoyed the frozen spinach artichoke dip produced by T.G.I. McGuilicutty’s (and yes, I’ve hated myself for it). Why not do something similar? Luckily, I’d seen a close recipe in Rocco’s 5 Minute Flavor. Did I mention how I already hated myself a bit? Don’t judge. It was heavily discounted, and there must be some merit, some universal truth in spending $7.95 on a book that lists at $26.95 by a former chef (he’s just a cook now) who enjoyed one of the most well-publicized and precipitous falls from favor in the public cooking world.

And I tell you this: if there is no other recipe in the whole book, the artichoke dip alone is worth the price of admission.

Ingredients (serves 4)
1 14 oz. can of artichoke hearts, finely chopped (I’m a fan of Virgo. They’re organicish and inexpensive, which is much more than I can say for Progresso)
3/4 cup mayonnaise (the original recipe suggested low-fat or reduced fat, but that doesn’t quite have the same wonderful unctuous mouth feel as the real stuff)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup parmesan cheese, grated fine
2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped fine (yes, fresh counts here. I wouldn’t dare use the dry stuff for this recipe)
1/2 cup panko bread crumbs (this is my addition, for color and some texture)
1 fine French baguette

Technique
Mince
Chop, fine

Method
Bake

To make the dip, simply combine the artichoke hearts, mayonnaise, garlic, parmesan cheese, and basil in a 8” * 8” baking dish. Stir them all together then sprinkle the top with the bread crumbs. Cut the baguette on a bias and arrange the slices on a baking sheet. Put the sliced bread and the artichoke dip in a 425(degree F) oven for about 5 minutes. The bread will crisp up and the dip will get nice and bubbly. Right at the end, zap the dip under the broiler for about 30 seconds to brown the bread crumbs and give them some additional crunch.

For the main course, I went with an old standby, spaghetti and tomato sauce with garlic bread.

Ingredients (serves 4, without being piggish)
For the sauce
1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes, mostly drained
1 8oz can tomato sauce
four garlic cloves, crushed and copped fine
kosher salt
1 teaspoon dried oregano (or more, to taste)
1/4 cup grated parmesan + 1/4 cup grated parmesan held in reserve

For the pasta
1 16 oz package of dried spaghetti (duh)
2 level tablespoons kosher salt

For the garlic bread
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 loaf of crusty Italian or cu ban bread, cut in half lengthwise

Technique
Chop, fine
Mince

Method
Boil
Simmer
Broil

Fill a 6 qt stock pot with four quarts of water. Add two level tablespoons of kosher salt and set the water over high heat

While the water is coming to a boil, set a large sauce pan over medium-high heat. Add a tablespoon of olive oil. The pan is at temperature when it feels warm to a hand that’s several inches above it. Add the garlic and let it soften and turn translucent at the edges. Make sure to keep it moving so it doesn’t burn.

note: burned garlic is very bitter and gives a hard, sometimes unpleasant edge to sauces and soups.

When the garlic has softened some, add the diced tomatoes and the tomato sauce and stir it all together. Let the mix come to a boil, then lower the heat to medium-low (low-medium), and allow the sauce to simmer. Give it a taste and add a little salt, if necessary.

Without any extra ingredients, the sauce will taste very bright and acidic, like a slightly under-ripe tomato. Add the oregano, stir it in, and taste. The sauce should taste more mellow now. Gone is the tannic edge and in its place is a rounder, deeper flavor. If the sauce still tastes tart, try adding a bit more oregano or a couple grinds of black pepper. As a last resort, you could add a trace of sugar, but then you might as well have saved yourself the trouble and just bought the jarred stuff at the store, savored its cloying sweetness.

When the sauce tastes good (tasting along the way is the secret to an excellent tomato sauce), slowly stir in 1/4 cup of the Parmesan cheese and then leave it alone. From here on out, the sauce will take care of itself.

Your water should be boiling now, so go ahead and carefully place your pasta in the pot, give it a stir, and let it go. Set the timer as directed on the box (I usually go for the lowest suggested time so I don’t inadvertently cook my pasta to mush), and give it a good stir about two minutes into the cooking time. That’s when the pasta will release most of its starch into the water and thus will be most likely to stick together into a giant spaghetti rope. Looks cool, but is pretty inedible.
After you’ve given the pasta the second stir, It’s time to toast the garlic bread. Set a small sauce pan on one of your remaining burners (sorry, Bittman) and bring it to medium-high. Add the olive oil and butter. When the butter has melted, add the minced garlic. Don’t let it sit in the pan. Stir, keep the pan moving and heat the garlic until it begins to go translucent, then use a slotted spoon to remove it from the pan. Get a brush (or you could just pour it over the bread) and brush the bread with the butter mixture.

Note: If you want an extra garlicy touch, reserve the minced garlic to spread on the bread once it’s out of the oven.

Stick the bread in the oven under the broiler for about a minute (check it at 45 seconds, just to be safe). When the bread begins to brown on the edges, take it out.
When the beeper beeps, drain the pasta.

Plate the pasta, cover with a couple spoonfuls of the sauce, and serve with the garlic bread, sliced. Put the remaining Parmesan cheese on the table so guests can adjust the sauce’s cheesiness to their liking.

A good spaghetti sauce is easy to make. Cook it slow, taste along the way, and add nothing in huge quantities. Use the best ingredients you can (don’t you dare use off-season tomatoes; go for canned), and keep it simple. It’s a formula that’s served me well for a long time, evidenced by this exchange:

Daughter: What are we having for dinner?
Me: Spaghetti and tomato sauce.
Daughter: The stuff you make, or the stuff from a jar?
Me: The stuff I make.
Daughter: Good.

That vote of confidence from a picky eater? It’s a wonder I don’t make the stuff every night.