Posted by Adam Kuban, April 16, 2008 at 1:45 PM
Adapted from The River Cottage Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
Ingredients
2 pounds ripe, full-flavored tomatoes, cut in half
2 to 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Procedure
Preheat oven to 350°F. Meanwhile, arrange the tomato halves, tightly packed but not on top of each other, in an ovenproof dish. Mix the garlic with the olive oil; drizzle it evenly over tomatoes. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Roast in oven for 35 to 45 minutes, until tomatoes are soft and pulpy and slightly charred. Rub through a sieve; discard the seeds and skins.
Can Be Used In
Beet Soup with Feta
Posted by Robyn Lee, April 8, 2008 at 6:00 PM
One Polaroid photo of a pair of tomatoes may not be that interesting, but arrange 15 Polaroid photos in a 3x5 grid and those tomatoes look much cooler. Check out more photography by Mike Slack. [via swissmiss]
Posted by Adam Kuban, March 5, 2008 at 6:30 PM
Today's recipe from this week's featured cookbook, Panini Express, veers away from the ham of the last two days and heads straight to vegetarian territory with Artichoke, Oven-Roasted Tomato, and Goat Cheese Panini. Although tomatoes aren't in season as I write this, oven-roasting those you do find this time of year can help concentrate their flavor, sweetening them enough to play against the other flavors in this pressed sandwich.
But that's not what we did. We didn't have four or five hours to roast tomatoes today, so we subbed in jarred sun-dried tomatoes. We also didn't want to buy an entire bunch of basil just for one tablespoon's worth, so we subbed in some greens we had growing in the office AeroGarden.
Win 'Panini Express'
If you're just now tuning in, you should note that we're giving away five (5) copies of this book here on Serious Eats this week. More details on that here.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, March 5, 2008 at 5:45 PM
- makes 10 tomato halves -
Oven-roasting tomatoes concentrates their flavors and is a good technique for pepping up the less-than-ideal tomatoes of winter. Oven-roasted tomatoes are juicier and softer than jarred or bottled sun-dried versions.
Use This Recipe In
Artichoke, Oven-Roasted Tomato, and Goat Cheese Panini
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Posted by Ed Levine, December 22, 2007 at 5:35 PM
Edna Lewis' food to me was the essence of soul and comfort, and this simple Sunday supper of Baked Tomatoes with Crusty Bread reflects her elegant, simple aesthetic perfectly. I guarantee when you serve this dish to friends and loved ones there will be nary a crust left. Though Edna envisioned it as a side dish, it can also feed four hungry folks as a main course accompanied by a substantial salad. Or serve it as a side dish with roast pork.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, October 31, 2007 at 1:30 PM
When we paged through Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
earlier in the week, we knew we had to save this recipe for today. If you selected a pumpkin with eating in mind rather than carving, you should be good to go.
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Posted by Mario Batali, October 5, 2007 at 11:00 AM
My take on marinara sauce (actually the sauce of the seafarers) is a basic tomato sauce. In some places it just means garlic oil and parsley, and in others it is as elaborate as tomatoes, peppers, and lots of herbs.
I use it as a building block in lots of dishes as well as just a simple quick pasta sauce that can be transformed in a thousand ways. If you add chile flakes, you have arrabbiata; if you add anchovies, chile flakes, olives, and capers, you have puttanesca—both only for pasta and so on and so forth.
I have seen places in the States serve fish or meat with the preceding two Italian phrases and am embarrassed for the chefs who have not traveled to Italy. Anyway, this is my recipe, and it is as simple as opening a can. The key here is San Marzano tomatoes from Italy—not from Chile and not from California.
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, September 27, 2007 at 4:45 PM
It took me three years to admit it, but the rather large patch in my garden that we created specifically for tomatoes was dug in the wrong place! The plants just don't get enough sun, which explains why I'm harvesting the first truly ripe tomatoes now, at the end of September.
The tomatoes were awfully slow to turn red—so slow that most of them were eaten by the chipmunks, raccoons, deer and moles, who get to spend more time in the garden than I do—but, on a good day, that made them seem so much more precious. To celebrate our first harvest, we ate sliced tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner (I even had a tomato sandwich one day) and I made these pretty tomato tartlets as a starter for an outdoor dinner.
The tartlets are built on a base of puff pastry (homemade or storebought), which is baked between two cookie sheets in order to keep it from doing what it was created to do—puff. I know, I know, it's an act against the pastry's nature, but what you get is perfect: a layer of pastry that is shatter-at-a-touch flaky, but flat enough to serve as a palette for a pile of delicious ingredients.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, September 17, 2007 at 4:00 PM
Most of the okra I put down is pickled, which means A) I don’t have it that often and B) I haven’t the slightest idea what to do with it raw.
I know about its powerful thickening properties and that it is used a lot in Southern cooking. So I when I brought home a nice bag of the stuff from the farmers' market, I pulled out my 1985 edition of the Courier-Journal Kentucky Cookbook (it’s a long story), and looked for some recipes for this interesting vegetable.
The one I found is apparently from 1946 and written by a woman (hopefully) named Cissy Gregg. She says: "The combination of okra, tomatoes and corn either charms people to the point where they'll roll their eyes around in their heads at the very thought of it, or it brings forth a grimace." Count me in the former group.
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Posted by Mario Batali, September 11, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Editor's note: We're thrilled to introduce our bureau chief of all things Italian on Serious Eats, Mario Batali. Mario will be weighing in regularly on, well, anything he cares to weigh in on. We're excited to have Mario on the site, mostly because he loves to eat and cook as much as we do, and because he adheres to the Serious Eats bywords—Passionate, Inclusive, Discerning—in all of his far-flung endeavors. —Ed Levine
Nothing, nothing, sounds better than a plate of spaghetti al pomodoro in the month of September.
Did I say nothing? I meant nothing!
The myth of summer tomatoes will continue, but real cooks know that the maximum flavor raver for the golden love apples' peak of perfection is in fact September and even October. A walk through nearly any farmers' market in the northern hemisphere will prove me correct, as one jaunt this last weekend through the Union Square Greenmarket did. There are literally three dozen different types of magnificent tomatoes available in assorted hues, with fantasy names from Green Zebras and Brandywines to Black Russians, Wrinkly Ligurians, Ox Hearts and Cherokee Purples.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, August 24, 2007 at 6:00 PM
And so the time has come to say goodbye to Vegetable Harvest, this week's featured book. Our final recipe from Patricia Well's potager-inspired cookbook is one that shouldn't tax you too much on the penultimate weekend of summer; it calls for only three ingredients and a blender.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, August 22, 2007 at 8:30 PM
Speaking of corn, today's Cook the Book recipe makes good use of the vegetable—along with two of the season's other usual suspects, tomatoes and cucumbers. The contrast of colors is as pleasing to the eye as it is to the palate.
The recipe, of course, is from Patricia Wells's Vegetable Harvest.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, August 22, 2007 at 4:00 PM
The hardest part about the stuffed vegetable recipes that I’ve tried is that whatever I happen to mix together—no matter how thoughtful the combination—has to come to together perfectly at the same time. Which, as I’ve found out the hard way, is nearly impossible when you combine meats, vegetables, and cheeses. I’ve had to precook multiple different items, combine them at various stages of doneness, and hope for the best.
Fortunately, this one is different. It’s the first time I’ve been able to really pour over the vegetable section of Larousse Gastronomique. The vast number of recipes contained within scared me away for a while. But this simple little appetizer is the perfect introduction. It helped that we started with some superb farmer’s market tomatoes, but it’s that egg that is ingenious.
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Posted by Ed Levine, May 3, 2007 at 6:45 PM
Like a lot of people my age, the Silver Palate Cookbook became my go-to cookbook when I first started cooking for friends and girlfriends. In fact, the first brunch I ever cooked for my wife featured two recipes from the Silver Palate. Julee Rosso's and Sheila Lukins's recipes are simultaneously sophisticated and down to earth, and—here's the best part—they always work.
This was one of the most popular summer salad recipes from the original Silver Palate.
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Posted by SaraBir, September 12, 2006 at 1:19 PM
My friend Bryan asked me for suggestions for utilizing the abundant crop of tomatoes in his backyard (he lives in California, where tomatoes lazily ripen into the early fall). I told him to can them, but not everyone has the energy or equipment to do that. In the meantime, you can always eat lots of fresh tomatoes. It’s your last summer fling.
This pasta dish came about from my last visit to my parents’ house. They had corn on the cob, beautiful beefsteak tomatoes, and fresh basil in dire need of use, so I threw them all together for a simple but flavorful pasta dish. Juicy tomatoes help make the sauce for the pasta, so don’t use plum tomatoes for this. If you don’t have fresh corn, use frozen, which is often superior to out-of-season fresh corn.
Ingredients
(Serves 4)
1/2 pound uncooked pasta (spaghetti, linguine, or fettuccini)
3 to 4 large, ripe tomatoes, cored (the more tomatoes the better)
2 to 3 cups fresh or frozen corn kernels (thawed if frozen)
2 cloves garlic, very thinly sliced crosswise
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 bunch (three cups loosely packed) basil, thinly sliced
4 to 6 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
Procedure
1. Put a large pot of salted water on to boil and cook the pasta according to package directions.
2. Meanwhile, chop the tomatoes. Place in a large bowl and set aside.
Toast the corn in a heavy, dry medium skillet over medium-high, stirring occasionally, heat until you see charred spots on the corn, 2 to 3 minutes. Add toasted corn to tomatoes.
3. In a small skillet, heat the garlic and olive oil over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the garlic is a light golden-brown (do not allow to burn). Pour over corn-tomato mixture. Stir in the basil and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper.
4. When the pasta is al dente, drain it quickly, allowing some of the cooking water to cling. Add pasta to tomato-corn mixture, toss with the feta cheese, and season to taste with more salt and pepper.
Note: You can substitute Parmesan cheese for the feta, if you wish.
