Falling in Love Again -- with Tomatoes

I didn’t grow up liking fresh tomatoes. In fact, for most of my life, I avoided tomatoes as tasteless and of a texture I didn’t like. And even when farmers’ markets began sprouting up all over New Jersey, I took a pass on tomatoes.

Then on the trip south to deliver our first born to college, we left a few days early to check out the mountains of the Carolinas, where my husband envisioned retiring. (That would be before I convinced him that we needed to go to Austin.) We found a bed and breakfast that was straight out of a Tennessee Williams story, and I called for reservations. When I told the owner where we were coming from, he said, “New Jersey? I’ll give you a discount if you’ll bring me a cooler of Jersey tomatoes.”

That’s when I began to suspect there was something special about them.

I’ve since become a complete convert to the joys of fresh, garden-grown tomatoes. (I still refuse to buy those rubber ball tomatoes you get in the grocery store for most of the year. There’s just no comparison in the flavor, the texture, and even the look.) And in what is becoming a rite of summer, I've once again fallen back in love with them. So here in New Jersey, I’m luxuriating in recipes that feature all flavors of tomato: this week, I’ve made a BLT using a hearty red beefsteak tomato, a tangy corn relish made with mellow yellow tomatoes, a sweet-tart marmalade from lemons and green tomatoes, and, of course, my favorite gazpacho recipe from The French Laundry Cookbook. And all the while I’m cooking, I nibble on those lusciously sweet orange Sungold tomatoes from the farmers’ markets. I’m even growing a couple of massive Sungold tomato plants in my Austin garden – plants that amazingly re-seeded themselves from last year, and are starting to look suspiciously like Audrey Jr. from The Little Shop of Horrors.

So while they’re cheap and plentiful, have a tomato – summertime is tomato-time!

Green Tomato and Lemon Marmalade (© The New York Times)

[Kitchen Goddess note: This recipe was posted by Melissa Clark in The New York Times back in 2007. It is a bit runnier than most marmalades, but that just makes it fabulous as sauce over vanilla ice cream, or a glaze for chicken or pork tenderloin. OMG, just thinking about these things makes make want to hurry so I can get back to the kitchen. I have listed it here just as she wrote it, but will tell you that I simmer it a good 35-40 minutes. And the yield she gives is highly suspect: when I made it last night, I filled SEVEN of those half-pint Ball jars.]

1 lemon, thinly sliced and seeded
2 ¼ pounds green tomatoes (about 5 large tomatoes), cored and thinly sliced
3 ¼ cups sugar
2 Tbl fresh lemon juice
Pinch of salt

1. Bring lemon slices to a boil in a pot of water. Drain.

2. Combine all ingredients in a saucepan along with 1/4 cup water, and bring to a simmer, stirring, to dissolve sugar. Cook at a bare simmer until tomatoes and lemon slices are translucent and syrup thickens, 20 to 30 minutes. Cool completely; store in refrigerator.

Yield: 1 3/4 cups.

Gladys’s 99th – Happy Birthday!

Not everyone gets good in-laws. And very few get really great in-laws. I am one of the lucky few. Adding to that good fortune, yesterday, my mother-in-law celebrated her 99th birthday.

It’s amazing what can happen in 99 years. In addition to outliving fellow 1911 babies Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, and Mahalia Jackson, Gladys has watched a sea change in our daily lives. Just to give you an idea of what was happening in the world when she was born, here are a couple of milestones from the year of her birth.

■ An expedition led by Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole.

■ Chevrolet officially entered the automobile market in competition with the Ford Model T.

■ President Taft presided over the dedication of the New York Public Library.

■ The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of the largest industrial disasters in the history of New York City, caused the death of 146 garment workers, almost all of them women, who either burned or jumped to their deaths because ladders couldn’t reach them on the 9th or 10th floors. It was the worst workplace disaster in NYC until September 11, 2001.

■ Calbraith Perry Rodgers, a pioneer American aviator trained by Orville Wright, made the first transcontinental airplane flight across the U.S. The trip took from September 17 to November 5, and included some 69 stops, both intentional and accidental.

■ The number of motor vehicles in the U.S. was 470,000.

My sons can’t imagine life without cell phones or computers; when Gladys was born, there also were no electric traffic lights (invented in 1912), household refrigerators (the earliest, in 1922, cost almost twice as much as a car), zippers (1913), or ballpoint pens (1938).

So we celebrated on Sunday, with a family gathering at which Gladys’s daughter (my fabulous sister-in-law) baked one of her mom’s most delicious cakes.


Gladys’s Apple Pound Cake

2 c sugar
1½  c vegetable oil
3 eggs
3 c flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 Tbsp vanilla
3 c finely diced apples
1 c walnuts, chopped
1 c coconut

Preheat oven to 350º. Combine sugar, oil and eggs in bowl and beat until thick and creamy. Sift together the flour, soda, and salt (or combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, and stir well). Beat the dry mixture into the wet, and stir in the vanilla. Fold in apples, nuts, and coconut. (Kitchen Goddess note: It's a stiff batter, but take heart – it’s a great cake, and needs no icing.) Pour into a greased and floured tube pan. Bake at 350º for 1 hr 20 min.

Top 10 Herbs and Spices

On an airplane a couple of days ago, I was reading the latest issue of Writers’ Digest, in which the editors took on a theme of “Top Ten” and pretty much wore it out. But you know how something like that will get inside your brain, so before I knew it, I had pulled out my notebook and begun writing down a few of my own Top Tens, mostly to do with cooking. I’m going to try not to wear it out here, today, so I’ll take just one, and write about the others over the next few weeks. It’s a cheater’s way to write – after all, you don’t have to develop any flow to the text; but for a now-and-then sort of thing, it’s fun.

I’ll start with my 10 Favorite Herbs and Spices, because I want to tell you about a simple and delicious salad I made as I was trying to pack. And one of the ingredients is in this list.

Garlic salt. OK, right off the bat, this probably doesn’t qualify as either an herb or a spice. But I keep it in my spice cabinet, and both garlic and salt are flavor enhancers. (I buy the Lawry's brand, which has freeze-dried flakes of parsley in it; maybe the parsley flakes help it qualify for this list. But if you’re going to clench your teeth and mutter curses at me for this, you’d better move on.) In any case, I put it in almost everything that’s not dessert. I add it to a lot of soups, and sometimes I sprinkle it on salads that don’t want a strong garlic taste. Garlic salt and lemon pepper are my standard seasonings for meat or seafood of almost any kind, especially if I’m grilling or broiling, and not adding any sort of sauce. So naturally, my number 2 is...
 
Lemon pepper. Lemon definitely doesn’t qualify as an herb or a spice, but it does make the flavor of so many things sparkle. And in combination with garlic salt, lemon pepper helps bring the flavor out on most kinds of protein.

Mint. I’m starting to believe that southerners have a specific taste bud that periodically sends out a call for mint. Sort of like oregano for Mexicans and basil for Italians.(This may be why English food has a tendency toward bland – I can’t think of a single herb that’s particularly English.) Whatever the reason, I will happily add mint to a range of dishes. Fresh fruit, salad dressings, ice cream,... And the drinks: lemonade, iced tea, mojitos, even plain old water with ice and lemon.

Thyme. A staple of my chicken soup, which is, ahem, fabulous. (Soon, soon, I will post it. Just gotta get out of this summer heat.) Actually, many broth soups call for fresh thyme in the bouquet garni. It’s easy to grow, and pretty hardy. And if I’m baking chicken breasts for a salad, I always throw a sprig of fresh thyme and a thin slice of lemon on each breast – it gives a great flavor to both the chicken and the broth that accumulates.

Dill. Dill is the lemon juice of the herb garden. There’s a sparkle to it that really perks up the flavor of broth soups, of baked chicken, and many kinds of fish. It’s another staple of my chicken soup. Fresh dill is also good in a salad.

Ginger. I’m going to distinguish here between fresh ginger and powdered ginger. I love fresh ginger, but it’s already on a list of my 10 favorite ingredients for cooking, which I’ll write about in a future posting. So here, I’m just talking about the powdered form. One of my favorite baked chicken recipes, called Bobbie’s Chicken, is from the first Silver Palate Cookbook. It uses an obscenely large quantity of powdered ginger and powdered mustard to create a rub that produces – oh, my goodness – just the best baked chicken ever. And my friend Pam has a ginger snap recipe that I’m hoping she’ll let me post one day. Ginger is another of those sparkly spices that do more than add flavor – they make your mouth do an oh-wow thing. Which must be good, yes?

Cumin and Chili Powder. I can’t seem to talk about one of these without the other, so I’ll stop trying. Maybe that’s because chili powder actually contains cumin. But sometimes you want more of that earthy, roasted flavor that cumin alone imparts. Of course, any good chili recipe requires both of these spices, but have you ever considered mixing them with a tiny bit of sugar and tossing sweet potato spears in it? Oven-roasted sweet potato fries will make you weep.

Nutmeg. This stuff is one of the best fall flavors I know. It’s essential in my Aunt Marcy’s pumpkin chiffon pie, wonderful if grated on top of whipped cream for many desserts, often found in sweet rolls, and completely amazing when grated over cooked fresh spinach. The grating part is so easy, I stopped buying grated nutmeg years ago. Buy the nuts in a jar and get a fine grater (or rasp) – you’ll never regret it.

Basil. I left this for last because it’s a key ingredient in today’s salad recipe – not because I like it any less than the others. In fact, pesto is a strong contender for My Favorite Pasta Sauce. [See my July 31, 2009, post for the recipe.] After Sun Gold tomatoes, it’s the best thing I grow in my Austin garden. And among farmer’s market lunches, nothing could be simpler than sliced tomatoes with mozzarella and basil, topped with a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. But the following comes very close (and, in fact, is not too different).

Kitchen Goddess Note: I recognize the heresy of using bottled salad dressing, but Julie’s Caesar Salad Dressing (from The Silver Palate brand) is really good, and you will note that this is a salad made as I was literally on the run. So there.

Leaving for the Airport Summer Salad

1 medium tomato, cut into half-inch cubes
2 oz fresh mozzarella, cut into half-inch cubes
1½ c watermelon, cut into half-inch cubes
1 peach, peeled and cut into half-inch cubes
2 Tbl fresh basil leaves, sliced into thin ribbons
2 Tbl Julie’s Caesar Salad Dressing (Silver Palate brand)

Toss it all together and enjoy. Serves one hungry person – or two, if it’s not the only thing on the menu.