197. Vodka-Spiked Cherry Tomatoes with Pepper Salt (p. 26)

OK, it's time to stop sulking. Gourmet's gone, and it's not coming back. (But if you believe Ruth Reichl, the death of every other magazine isn't very far behind. It sounds a little like sour grapes, but she just might be onto something.) So, it's time to move on and get back to blogging. And boy do I have a huge backlog of recipes to get through!

But before I do, I have to comment on something I saw on EatMeDaily.com today. Every year, there are a few "big" cookbooks that are released around the holidays. This year, those books are David Chang's Momofuku, and Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home. In what I think is a wonderful development, two intrepid bloggers have already stepped up to take on the challenge of cooking through these two ambitious books. EatMeDaily isn't so sanguine. Here's what they have to say about the cook-through phenomenon: "this schtick is starting to get old." Well, folks, the snarky food blog is a schtick that's not all that original either. That said, I just can't hate you, EatMeDaily. Can't we all get along?

Now that I've got that off my chest. Back to the food. This recipe, which I made as an hors d'oeuvre for my family's Labor Day cookout (I told you I had a backlog!), could easily be renamed "Bloody Mary Bites." These boozy, zesty, spicy and salty nibbles were a nice surprise, even though they weren't my favorite recipe from The Book.

For the last few weeks of August and the first few weeks of September, my CSA box included some delicious red and yellow cherry and grape tomatoes. Sweet and flavorful, they were great on their own by the handful as a snack, but I was happy to sacrifice a pint to this recipe. First I peeled the tomatoes. I made a small "x" on the bottom of each tomato and blanched them in boiling water for just a few seconds before shocking them in ice water. Just like magic, the peels slipped right off. A little bit of a pain, but necessary for the vodka to permeate the tomato flesh.

Next, I combined some vodka, white wine vinegar, lemon zest and some superfine sugar. I marinated the tomatoes in the vodka mixture for about an hour, and I served them with a small bowl of mixed kosher salt and coarsely ground black pepper for dipping.

These hors d'oeuvres were potent little bites. There's a lot of bold tastes here: vodka, lemon zest, salt and pepper. They made quite an impression, although I didn't really love them. I think that had a lot to do with the fact that I'm not a big vodka fan.

Date Cooked: September 5, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: B-

191. Fresh Tomato Sauce (p. 207)

Tomatoes have been having a rough go of it over the past couple of years. Last year it was a salmonella scare, and this year, it's an attack of late blight. I had pretty much resigned myself to another summer without tomatoes. But for whatever reason, Farmer Dave (my CSA farmer) and Mann Orchard have been spared the blight, and I've been able to get plenty of beautiful, fresh ripe tomatoes. And I'm loving it.

So, when I got a load of tomatoes in my CSA box a few weeks ago, I decided to make this recipe* for Fresh Tomato Sauce. This sauce is a lot of things. It's easy to make, it's uncomplicated, and it's fresh and light tasting. But, there's one thing this sauce isn't. It's not your Nonna's Sunday Gravy. Now, I'm not Italian, and I don't have a Nonna. But my wife is part Italian, and her family's recipe for Sicilian tomato sauce is a big part of our culinary lives. When we were first married, we carried on her family tradition that "Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti day."



So, if I'm comparing this recipe for Fresh Tomato Sauce to Grandma Leone's recipe from the Old Country, this recipe loses. But, if I can separate the two and keep in mind that they're two completely different things, this sauce is very good, and a nice change of pace.

To make the sauce, I peeled six pounds of fresh, ripe tomatoes. Peeling tomatoes sounds like a pain, but it's really easy and worth the effort (despite what I've said before). All you need to do is bring a big pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile, cut a little X in the bottom of each tomato. Plunge the tomatoes into the boiling water for about 10 to 20 seconds (the more ripe the tomatoes are, the less time they'll need in the boiling water). Immediately plunge the tomatoes in a big bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. Once the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, you should be able to pull the skins off without any problem. Next, I removed the seeds. This sounds like a pain, too, but it's really easy. Just set a sieve over a large bowl, cut the tomatoes in half and gently squeeze them to release all of the seeds and juice. The seeds get trapped in the sieve, and the juice collects in the bowl so that it can be added back to the sauce. Then I chopped the peeled, seeded tomatoes.

With the heavy prep work done, I moved on to the cooking. I heated some olive oil in a stock pot and added five cloves of thinly sliced garlic. Once the garlic was golden, I added the chopped tomatoes, reserved juice, and a little bit of sugar and salt, and simmered it for about an hour. I stirred in a big handful of chopped fresh basil and I served it with some sauteed sliced Italian chicken sausage over rice pasta (my wife is back on dairy and some soy, but gluten is still off limits).

Like I said, this sauce doesn't hold a candle to my wife's family recipe. It doesn't have the substance, spice, and subtle flavors that you can only get from slow cooking and a few family secrets. But, when viewed for what it is -- a simple celebration of fresh, summer tomatoes -- this sauce is really very good.


Date Cooked: August 30, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: B+

* I couldn't find this recipe on epicurious.com.

104. Fresh Tomato Salsa (p. 896)

The Superbowl was last Sunday. And you know what that means ... chips and dips! We watched "The Big Game" at my sister-in-law's house on their huge-mongous hi-def TV. I made this recipe for salsa, and some guacamole that I'll write about in my next post.

The salsa recipes in The Book are intended to be used as condiments for grilled meats, so in order to use them as party dips, you need to double the recipe.

To make this salsa, I chopped some plum tomatoes. The Book says that you can seed the tomatoes if you want, or you can leave them in. I chose to leave them in. Then I minced a serrano chile. The Book calls for two, but since serranos rate 10,000 to 23,000 on the Scoville Scale, I decided to keep it pretty mild. I chopped some white onion, which The Book says is better than yellow onions for recipes calling for raw onions because of its "sharper, cleaner, brighter flavor." Finally, I chopped some fresh cilantro. I mixed up all of these ingredients, and that's it. The Book calls for adding three tablespoons of water, but I omitted this because I though that it would make the salsa too watery.

This was a pretty good salsa. I served it with some multi-grain tortilla chips. It was fresh, simple and clean tasting, and it had just the right amount of heat. This could easily be a party stand-by.

Date Cooked: February 1, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: A-

55. Tomato Tatins (p. 66)

According to The Book, this recipe* is a savory take on the classic upside-down apple pie known as Tarte Tatin. Legend has it that the dessert, also known as tarte renversee, was invented in the 1850s at l'Hotel Tatin. Apparently, in a moment of harried distraction, Caroline Tatin, who ran the hotel with her sister Stephanie, absent-mindedly tossed a bunch of carmelized apple slices into a pie dish without first rolling out a pie crust. Not wanting to start over, Caroline just put a crust over the top of the dish and baked it anyway. When it was done, she flipped the whole thing over onto a serving dish, served it to her eager and appreciative patrons, and the rest is culinary history ... more or less. In reality, French farmwives had been making tarte renversee long before Caroline was born, and some suggest that Caroline never even set foot in the kitchen at l'Hotel. But, hey, everyone loves a good story, right?

Just about the only thing that this Tatin has in common with its namesake is the upside-down presentation. The "crusts" on these individual tarts are rounds of country-style white bread that have been cut out with a cookie cutter, brushed with oil, toasted in the oven, and then rubbed with a clove of garlic. The "filling" is slices of ripe red tomatos that have been lightly salted and roasted to soften them and bring out their natural sweetness.

The tatins are assembled by placing a tomato slice in each of four ramekins, topping it with a dallop of pesto, and repeating until all of the tomato slices are gone. Each tatin is topped with a toast round, and they are put in the oven for a short time to heat through and to let the flavors combine. Once they are done, they get the Tatin treatment by being flipped over onto a serving plate.

I really liked this dish, and I'd make it again as a first course for a dinner party when I want to impress my friends. This is one of those recipes that's really pretty easy, but it gives you a lot of bang for the buck with a stunning, restaurant-quality presentation, and a really nice flavor. The tomatoes, which were ripe and in season from the farmer's market, were delicious, and the pesto was a really nice flavor accompaniment. The golden toasted crust gave textural interest and structure to the dish. Overall, I'd say this one is a winner.

Date Cooked: September 21, 2008
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: A

* The recipe on epicurious.com calls for red and yellow tomatoes. The Book's recipe doesn't specify colors. If I had thought of it, I would have used some colorful heirloom tomatoes in this dish. It would have made it just that much more impressive.

49. Crunchy Fried Green Tomatoes (p. 585)

When my sister-in-law gave us some green tomatoes from her garden, both my wife and I immediately had the same thought: Fried Green Tomoatoes. She, of course, had in mind a recipe like this one inspired by Fannie Flagg's book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and the movie that followed. I was, of course thinking of this recipe* from The Book.


The Whistle Stop recipe and the Gourmet recipe are similar in that both start out with sliced green tomoatoes. That's where the similarities end. The Whistle Stop tomatoes are coated in a thick milk, flour and cornmeal batter and are deep fried in two inches of hot oil. The Gourmet tomatoes, on the other hand, are lightly dredged in a mixture of flour, salt, sugar and cayenne pepper, then dipped in a mixture of egg and milk, and finally coated with a crust of crushed Corn Flakes before being pan fried in just the slightest amount of oil.


I was a little suspicuous of the Corn Flake step, since it gave the recipe the look and feel of the kind of recipe that you find on the side of a package of processed food or in the Sunday paper cupon circular. Don't get me wrong, sometimes these recipes can be great. For example, you can't do much better than the Toll House Cookie recipe on a package of Nestle chocolate chips, and I've been making the pie recipe on the canned pumpkin label for Thanksgiving ever year for as long as I can remeber. But, generally speaking, recipes printed on processed food packaging are usually not haute cuisine. Case in point: any recipe ever printed on a Cool Whip container. All I'm saying is that "corn flakes" is not an ingredient I expected to find in a Gourmet recipe.

That said, I thought that these fried green tomatoes were excellent. True to their name, these tomatoes were crunchy. And the healthy amount of cayenne mixed into the dredging flour gave them a nice bit of heat that I wasn't expecting. I was really impressed that the crust stayed on through cooking, despite the flipping, and the transferring from pan to tray to plate. They stayed wonderfully intact. I really liked the fact that they weren't drowned in a thick batter and deep fried beyond recognition. My wife, I think, was a little dissapointed, but only because she had it in her mind that I was making a more traditional battered version. The tomatoes themselves were cooked through, but still firm, and they had that nice sour tang that is unique to green tomatoes.

I was also pretty impressed that the leftovers reheated well in the microwave and still retained most of their crunch.

Date Cooked: September 1, 2008
Degree of Difficulty: Medium
Rating: A

* As Teena noted, the recipe on epicurious.com uses more oil than the one in The Book. Also the tomato salsa accompaniment on the epicurious recipe is omitted from The Book. (A wise choice in my opinion. Tomatoes with a side of tomatoes?)

46. BL-Tomatoes (p. 26)

The concept for this recipe* is simple: BLTs without the bread. These tasty hors d'oeuvres are simply a hollowed-out cherry tomato stuffed with a mixture of shredded iceberg lettuce, crumbled bacon, mayonnaise and salt and pepper. The result is something that is fancy, yet familiar.

I could just tell from reading the recipe that these were going to be a hit at my family's Labor Day cookout, so I doubled the recipe so that we wouldn't run out. That was a good call, since they disappeared pretty qucikly.

I was lucky to find 24 large-ish, ripe cherry tomatoes at the local mega-mart (sometimes they surprise me with good produce). The first thing you do is to cut a very thin slice off the bottom of each tomato so that they won't roll around on the platter. Then you slice off the tops of the tomatoes and scoop out the centers with a melon baller. The one-inch diameter tomatoes called for by The Book is an absolute minimum, otherwise, scooping out the centers with a melon baller will be a frustrating, if not impossible task. But, don't go much bigger than one inch, since as Teena noted, these things should be single-bite-sized, or else you'll be wearing the "BL" filling.

The filling couldn't be easier. First, you crisp up some bacon (I used turkey bacon without any ill effects to the finished product) and crumble it. Then you finely shred some iceberg lettuce. Mix it all up with some mayonnaise, salt and pepper, and stuff the filling into the tomato shells. This last step proved to be a little time consuming, and I don't think that I'd try to make these for a great big party. Unless you had lots of help, stuffing a hundred of these babies would take all day, and I'm guessing that they need to be eaten pretty soon after being made, so making them in advance probably isn't an option. But for a small party, they're fun and delicious.

Date Cooked: August 31, 2008
Degree of Difficulty: Medium
Rating: A-

*The recipe is not available on-line

38. Watermelon, Tomato, and Feta Salad (p. 145)

What's with Gourmet's obsession for putting watermelon in places it doesn't belong? Before starting The Project, the most exotic thing I'd ever done with a watermelon was to make watermelon sorbet from Alice Waters's cookbook. That, and playing the greased watermelon game at Boy Scout camp when I was a kid ... but that's another story. So far this summer, however, I've already made Watermelon Gazpacho and Watermelon Rind Chutney. Now, I've made this strange recipe for a savory salad featuring watermelon. And I'll be darned if it wasn't half bad.

The recipe is simple enough: just combine diced watermelon, diced tomatoes, crumbled feta and chopped cilantro, along with some oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. I cut the recipe in half since it's just me and my wife, and after the Watermelon Gazpacho incident, I didn't have high hopes for leftovers. Turns out, I was wrong, and the salad held up pretty well in the refrigerator for a day or two, and I enjoyed some with my lunch today.

The recipe calls for white Balsamic vinegar. I've never heard of such a thing before. According to this site, white balsamic vinegar is:

A version of Balsamic vinegar that is made with white wine vinegar and grape must (fresh pressed juice with seeds and skins). Traditional balsamic vinegar is made with red wine vinegar, thus providing a deep reddish color which may add a undesirable tint to the food being dressed. The white variety is often used when the color of white sauces or foods will be adversely affected by the dark brown color of traditional balsamic vinegar. White balsamic vinegar is milder and less sweet than regular Balsamic vinegar and is often considered more suitable for use with salad dressings, since it does not have a strong flavor that can be overpowering when used on salad greens.

I was impressed that my local mega-mart not only carried it, but even had it as a product in its in-house line of "fancy food." Way to go mega-mart! I tasted some of the vinegar on its own before I put it into the salad, and it certainly is milder and thinner than regular balsamic. I thought that it was actually a little sweeter than regular balsamic, and reminded me of cider vinegar. (Hey, wait a minute. Did the mega-mart pull a fast one on me? If so, shame on you mega-mart!)

As was the case with the Watermelon Gazpacho and the Watermelon Rind Chutney, it was hard to find a perceptible watermelon flavor in the finished salad. I sensed a glimmer of watermelon every couple of bites, but for the most part, I couldn't tell whether I was eating watermelon or tomato, or both. What I did sense was refreshment and a nice melding of cool flavors and different textures. The feta gave the salad a nice saltiness and tang, but if I had it to do over again, I'd add more feta. Not surprising, since I always want to add more feta to any recipe that calls for feta. What can I say, I like the stuff.

My wife put it well when she said that this salad was very good, but it wasn't a "revelation." She also accused me of "grade inflation" with my ratings, and suggested that I should reserve "A" ratings for dishes that are revelations. So, it's for that reason that this recipe gets a B.

Date Cooked: August 10, 2008
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: B

5. Roasted Cherry Tomatoes with Mint (p. 585)

I was looking for a quick vegetable side to go with the Pork Chops with Mustard Crumbs, and this recipe couldn't have been easier.

All you need to do is roll the cherry tomatoes around in some olive oil, salt and pepper, and then pop them in a hot oven just until the skins split. Sprinkle with chopped mint, and that's that.

They had the tang of sun-dried tomatoes with a nice sweetness (perhaps brought out by the roasting). The fresh mint gave the tomatoes a nice lightness that was a pleasant change from tomatoes' usual companions, basil and oregano.

This recipe would also be really good tossed with some angel hair pasta and drizzled with some good olive oil.

Date Cooked: June 19, 2008
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: A-