Tomatoes Provencale

I got this recipe from the Arizona Daily Star. I usually make a bread crumb version of these, but this is better. I use a little less oil than called for.

Tomatoes Provencale

Serves: 6

• 6 hot-house, heirloom or your favorite tomatoes

• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

• 2 tablespoons fresh chopped garlic

• 1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme; dry thyme can be substituted

• 1/4 cup fresh Parmesan cheese

• Sea salt

• Cracked pepper

Cut the tomatoes in half and cut a sliver off the ends so they will lie flat. Discard the ends.

Place the open or cut sides up, drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, rub the open halves with fresh chopped garlic, sprinkle with sea salt, fresh cracked pepper, thyme.

Bake for 20 minutes at 375. Remove from the oven and sprinkle fresh Parmesan cheese over top the tomatoes and place back into the oven for 5-7 minutes until the cheese has a golden color.

Vegetarian Southern Food Again

Mark returned for a short visit, this time with his awesome new wife, and I made a vegetarian Southern meal the last night they were here. It was semi-successful.

The grits were fine, nothing fancy -- you can see them soaking on the right side of the picture. Just soaked, simmered for a few hours, and finished with half and half.

I made black eyed peas -- I browned onions and garlic and flour carefully but quite a bit, then added some sherry and a lot of vegetable stock and some fresh thyme and cooked it all down for an hour and a half. It was a nutty brown, very rich and good.

I quickly sauteed garden collards with some red pepper flakes, finishing them with vinegar.

Florida okra and tomatoes have started appearing in stores, so I made stewed tomatoes and okra. Very simple: just sweated half a Vidalia onion in some butter, then added the okra (stems cut off) and a few chopped tomatoes (seeds and some skin removed) and cooked it all down for 15 minutes, covered.

And I made strawberry rhubarb cobbler.

On Succotash and Microwaving Sweet Corn

So, as I mentioned in a comment below, we recently heard from Lawson's dad that microwaving fresh corn is way better than boiling it. I looked up several recipes, did some experiments, and found that he is absolutely correct. I'm a convert.

All the prep I did was to cut off the messy tip of the husks with scissors. I didn't pull the silk out -- I just cut off the whole silk-and-husk part that was hanging off the end. I pulled off a few banged-up outer leaves from some ears, but not all. Mostly this was so the corn would fit in our microwave.

Then I microwaved the corn for 4 to 5 minutes, rotating the ears once halfway through. If I put more than two or three ears in at a time, I would increase the cooking time by a few minutes.

Use gloves to rotate and remove the ears -- that corn gets hot, and little pockets of steam in the husks can burn the heck out of your hand.

Let the corn sit for 10-15 minutes so it can steam and cool off, then pull off the husks and silk. The best part: shucking cooked ears is way easier than shucking them raw. And the corn flavor is intense.

I didn't even put butter or salt on this corn, it was so good. It was from somewhere in the Upstate; Lawson's dad brought back 8 ears for us, and I've been wishing for more ever since.

Mostly we ate it plain, but one night I made succotash with all fresh ingredients. It was among the freshest, purest, most summery foods I've ever cooked.


I didn't like any of the recipes I read, many of which called for bacon, which I thought would be wrong here. Fresh lima beans or butter beans might have been good, but I liked the sweetness of the dish without them. So here's my recipe:

Succotash

1-2 tablespoons butter
1 small onion, diced
2 cups fresh tender okra, sliced crosswise into 1" pieces
2 or more cups fresh tomatoes, seeded and roughly chopped
2 ears fresh sweet corn, microwaved and set aside to cool
salt

Saute the onion in butter over medium until soft, not brown. Saute okra lightly. Add tomatoes and let cook for 5 to 10 minutes, until thickened slightly -- you want to keep the tomatoes tasting fresh, not sauce-like. At the last moment, shuck the cooked corn, cut the kernels off, and stir them in. Add salt to taste.

No herbs, no pepper, no nothing -- this is all about the light, sweet flavors of the garden vegetables. It blew me away.

We ate it with buttermilk biscuits (made with Adluh self-rising flour and local buttermilk) and barbecued chicken (marinated in soy sauce with star anise and five-spice powder, then lovingly grilled over a hickory fire by Lawson.

Margherita

I was proud of this pizza. Garden basil and garden tomatoes, pure and authentic, except for the cheese: that's queso fresco. It was convincingly mozzarella-like.

It's gluten-packed, though -- no spelt in sight.

Roasted Cherry Tomato and Garlic Pasta

Susan told me how to make this when we were visiting them in Texas last week. She just gave me the general idea, so I hope this is what she meant. It was great, anyway.

Roasted Cherry Tomato and Garlic Pasta

2 cups cherry tomatoes

1 head of garlic, cloves separated but not peeled

Roast the garlic and cherry tomatoes in a hot oven for 20 or 30 minutes, or until garlic is soft and the tomatoes have collapsed and charred.

2 servings penne or other pasta

1 tablespoon olive oil

Pasta water

Red chile flakes to taste

Salt, pepper

Cook the pasta. Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a skillet. Squeeze the garlic out of the skins into the skillet and mash them into the oil. Add the cherry tomatoes and do the same. Put in a few tablespoons of pasta water to form a sauce. Season with red chile flakes, salt, and pepper to taste.

2 to 4 cups arugula leaves
Parmesan cheese

Drain pasta, but not too thoroughly, and toss with the sauce. Add arugula and toss until wilted. Serve at once, topped with grated Parmesan.

Pico de Gallo on the Road

We drove from Tucson to South Padre Island, Texas, in our trailer and just got back yesterday. Just before leaving Dad picked all the jalapenos and cherry tomatoes in his garden to take with. The tomatoes ripened daily, and we also bought more jalapenos on the way, so I ended up making pico de gallo every day, varying it to fit in with the ethnicity of the evening meal. If Indian, I threw in more cilantro and ground cumin.

The usual recipe consisted of:

a handful of cherry tomatoes, halved

1 jalapeno, seeded and minced

2 cloves garlic

Juice of 1 Mexican lime (the little ones)

Salt

Optional additions included fresh herbs, onions, cumin, red chile powder.

Here's a trailer dinner. I had bought foil packets of Saag Paneer and a garbanzo dish. I made salmon patties, pico de gallo, and toasted some tortillas in a skillet to mimic Indian bread.

On New Year's Eve we had a really great meal of fresh Gulf shrimp, black eyed peas, and champagne.

There were lots of wonderful roadside fruit markets on the Gulf coast near Corpus Christi where we bought grapefruit and Texas sweet onions. Some advertised "We have Valley Lemons"--I bought some and discovered that they're Meyer lemons. Wish I had bought a whole bushel, since our crop failed this year.