The more revolutionary idea was a big shortcut in the process.  I wish I could remember where I read this one. Usually, when you make tomato sauce, it’s a lot of work. Before you even start you have to prep the tomatoes in the way Deb at Smitten Kitchen describes, by blanching them, peeling them, squeezing out the seeds, and chopping them.  It means working over a big pot of boiling water before you even start cooking the tomatoes. It requires a big assembly line set up in your kitchen, and if you’re making a big batch, it takes some time.

Here’s how you make it easier: don’t do any of that.  Instead, just puree them.  Rinse the tomatoes off, cut out the cores and any bad spots, and stick them in the food processor. A few pulses, and you’ll never know the skin and seeds were there (but you’ll still get all the added nutrition). That’s it. Then you make sauce.

The problem with this approach is that you retain a lot of extra liquid, much more than if you squeezed out the seeds and juice. That’s why the traditional process is, well, traditional.  But there are solutions.  You can aim for a thinner sauce.  You can cook it a couple extra hours.

Or, you can add mushrooms, like I did.  Because the second idea I found was making a vegetarian version of bolognese sauce (usually made with lots of meat).  I saw suggestions for making it with lentils, or with mushrooms.  I picked mushrooms for this because, frankly, I like them better, and because mushrooms are amazing at absorbing liquid. And what did we need in this sauce? Less liquid.  So I ground up a box of mushrooms, and tossed in some finely-chopped dried porcinis, and it worked just right. Even better, all the extra mushrooms made the sauce taste rich and “meaty” – as meaty as you can get without beef.

You can scale this recipe up, or even down, as you see fit.  As with most of my “recipes”, you can adjust most ingredients to taste. The amounts below made enough sauce for about 3 meals for the two of us, and it keeps well.

Easy Vegetarian Bolognese Sauce

3-4 large, fresh ripe tomatoes – they don’t have to be in perfect condition, but should be good quality
1 onion
1-2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp butter
One 10-oz box of mushrooms (I used baby bellas)
Oregano & basil
Salt & pepper

Melt the butter in a large saucepan or pot (large enough to hold everything). Chop the onion, and saute until lightly browned.  If you feel ambitious, cook until it’s carmelized. When the onion is almost done, add the garlic and cook a few more minutes.

While the onion cooks, finely chop the mushrooms, to about the consistency of ground beef.  When the onions are done, add the mushrooms and saute for a few minutes.

Rinse the tomatoes. Cut out the cores and any bad spots.  Process them in batches in a food processor (if yours is like mine, it may help to cut the tomatoes in quarters first). When they are pureed, add them to the pot.  Add herbs, and bring to a simmer.

Simmer the sauce over low heat until it’s reached the desired consistency. This could take 1-3 hours, or possibly more.  It needs little attention, but stir it every 15 minutes to keep a skin from forming on the top.

We’re planning menus and making a shopping list now, so we don’t forget anything critical when we arrive. And it’s been a while since I’ve been on a traditional camping trip.  So, help me out: what are your favorite easy camping meals?

When we get back, I promise to post some recipes!

If you’ve been reading this blog for long, or if you’ve ever cooked with me, you know I believe fiercely in messing with recipes.  I’m more likely to modify a recipe than to follow it.

When I do follow a recipe to the letter, there are two main reasons, which I think apply to most people: either it’s a very special recipe (from my Grandma, for example), or else I don’t understand it well enough to mess with it.  Every cook has a different threshold for “understanding something well enough to mess with it”.

Some cooks are bolder than others.  I’m pretty bold, and sometimes I pay for it.  But I believe that everyone can benefit from learning to modify recipes. Not only does it save your butt when you’ve run out of something, and need to make a substitution, but it lets you adjust recipes to your liking – you will like the results better.

And so, I present: the Recipe Builder: a little toy to help you learn how to mess with recipes.  This one is a recipe for pasta with vegetables.  Nothing complicated, more a proof of concept than anything else, but I hope to do a whole series of these, each one focusing on a recipe that’s friendly to modify in a variety of ways.  I’m thinking hummus… lasagna… soup… quesadillas.  Those sorts of recipes, with the goal of showing how recipes in general can be adjusted to taste, with little risk of things going wrong.

Please go play around with it.  I’d love to know what you think.  Do you find it useful?  Do you know someone who would?  (Or do you think it’s silly?) Do you wish it would do [fill in the blank]? Got ideas for a recipe that would work well in this form? Leave a comment and let me know!

As some of you know, my day job involves building websites. I had a lot of fun creating this, and not just because I didn’t have to test it in IE6, that most reviled of web browsers.  For the geeks in the audience, I got to use some cool jQuery that I normally don’t get to dirty my hands with, not to mention all the CSS3 features that don’t work in older browsers. So, it was worth it for that alone.  I learned some things about WordPress that I never knew (for example, that it will chew up my HTML if I’m not careful, and that it hates Javascript). But I also got to combine web development with cooking, and in my mind, that’s a big win!

The bread isn’t important, though. It’s just a delivery vehicle, not the star.  Polenta served just as well.  The star is the mix of tomato and peach – yes, peach – that went on top. This is one of those combinations that will either make you say “yuck” or thoughtfully say “hmm…”  Though I predict that, if you try it, you’ll love it.

I’ve had this combination kicking around in my head for a while.  Peaches and tomatoes are actually very compatible.  Both are fruits – one acidic, the other sweeter, and both are conveniently in season right now.  I liked using yellow tomatoes here because the flavor is a bit milder and sweeter than red tomatoes, and I love the shades of yellow that come from mixing them with peaches.

You could go all sorts of directions with this.  I chose something close to the bruschetta we’re most familiar with: seasoned with basil, olive oil, a little balsalmic vinegar, and garlic, topped with the local mozzarella that made its first appearance at our farmer’s market last week. But you could as easily use chives and chevre. Or try an Indian flavor, sautéed with cumin and ginger. Or go sweet, with nuts and honey, and have it on your breakfast toast.  Really, there’s no end to the possibilities, and I’m already plotting what to try next.

I’m forever thinking about how to use fruit in savory cooking. I can imagine all sorts of peach-based sauces to smear on grilled tofu.  I actually have a peach barbecue sauce in my cupboard, waiting for me to remember it.  Or peach salsa (this dish is almost a peach salsa already, just add some cilantro and lime – another variation right there). I saw this recipe for peach grilled cheese on Macheesmo the other day, and it’s been tantalizing me.

Do you use peaches in any savory recipes? Or is this whole line of thinking is crazy?

The general advice I’ve heard about potatoes is to wait until the plants die back (or until fall, if they don’t die), and then harvest them.  A week ago, our potato plants were tall, green, and happy.  Then, over the past week, they died on us.  Leaves wilted, stems turned brown, and they clearly weren’t going to grow anymore.

It was time to find out what was happening under the dirt.

My hopes and fears were great.  On one hand, I had visions of armloads of spuds in that bag, just waiting for us to find them – we’d be eating potatoes from our garden all winter long.  On the other hand, there was no evidence I could see that there were any potatoes at all.  We would dig, and dig, and get only dirty hands for our efforts.  (That, I told Nathan, would make me cry.)

My expectations were somewhere in between, but much closer to the side of no potatoes than too many.  If there were any at all, I’d count it as a success.

And what did we find?

Potatoes!  Not armloads, not a year’s supply. but handfuls of them, enough for a good meal.  (Incidentally, the biggest single crop of anything from the garden so far this year.)  Pretty little purple-skinned potatoes.  Success.

They were tasty, too, and I understand now why people grow them rather than just buying them at the store. They had a flavor all their own, more potato-ey than other potatoes, and they were light and fresh.  We had them for breakfast, sliced and pan-fried with olive oil and chives.

We just might have to do this again next year – and perhaps even devote a second container to them.

The New York Times points out that, not surprisingly, these pods aren’t so friendly to the environment. They generate a lot of waste.  The article calls out Green Mountain Coffee, a company that tries to be green in many ways, but is selling an increasing majority of their coffee in pod form.  I can’t visualize how many pods we must throw out at my office in a week, but we’re a highly caffeinated bunch, so I bet it’s a lot.

I completely understand the benefit of the single servings, and not just as a manifestation of our single-serving-everything culture.  In an office, single serving means less waste, and no warmed-over coffee sitting in the pot for hours.  But I don’t understand the need for individually-packaged grounds.  The article talks about reusable filters that can be used with normal coffee, which makes a lot of sense, as do compostable pods.  (In my office, people would lay claim to the pods for their own compost piles.)

But in the meantime, there aren’t any widespread solutions.  I also wonder how the waste from the pods compares to, say, a Starbucks cup.  Are those biodegradable?  I’m not a coffee drinker, so I never really thought about it. But it seems like coffee, of all things, shouldn’t generate a lot of garbage…

This isn’t the greatest picture (my camera wasn’t cooperating), but you can see part of the problem right here. The tomato plants are growing out of control – due to insufficient sunlight, I think, they’re growing taller and taller but producing no fruit. I also lost 2 plants to spider mites, but hopefully they’re gone now.

One of the plants does have a whole bunch of flowers, and one actual tomato, so I’m crossing my fingers to see if it ripens. It may be that, like last year, we’ll suddenly get fruit when the leaves fall from the trees, and let in more light, leaving us with a late crop that would be much better than nothing.

But ultimately, I’ve come to terms with the fact that our patio just isn’t light enough for tomatoes in the summer. It’s sad, even tragic. I’ll probably keep trying… but on a much less ambitious scale, with much lower expectations.

You’d expect that, if it’s too dark for tomatoes, we should have good luck with greens and root veggies. I’ve been trying to plant more of those, it’s true. But for the most part, anything I plant from seed ends up… well, smooshed. This happened to most of my kale, and all my chard and cilantro. It’ll come up, grow for a few days, then get flattened. I suspect foul play by the local wildlife.

It’s not all bad news though.

Our potatoes have stopped growing taller, and presumably are putting lots of energy into making big tubers. (I’m eager to find out, but want to give them as much growing time as possible before we dig them up.) Our herbs are doing nicely, too: we’ve got plenty of basil, chives, and oregano.

A couple of my experiments, the ones where I said “this will never work”, have actually turned out better than I hoped. I planted some Malabar spinach, a hot-weather spinach substitute, that’s growing slowly but steadily. I started it too late, after a false start with my first batch, but I’m hoping in a few weeks to have enough to eat.

And my scrappy little raspberry plants have actually produced some berries! I wasn’t sure it was even possible to grow raspberries in containers, but I got early fruit from one plant, and I’m hoping for a fall crop from several of them. I don’t expect ever to get more than a handful at a time, certainly not enough for jam or pie, but enough to snack on… good raspberries are hard to come by!

So, knowing what I know now, I’m starting to plan for the fall. I’ll add a bunch of kale (started indoors, probably in the next week), carrots, and maybe even a fall crop of peas. I’m even thinking of building a little cold frame to see if the winter light is any friendlier than the summer.

There has got to be a way to make container gardening work on my patio… I just need to keep trying until I find it.

My perspective on food and cooking changes when it’s this hot out. My idea of an elaborate meal these days is a bowl of blueberries, or some cheese and crackers. Anything to avoid turning on the stove.  Part of my heat-addled brain would like to post recipes for these brilliant creations I’ve made. But somehow I doubt you’ll be impressed.

Some other thoughts for no-cook, no-effort meals:

• Smoothies
• Tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, and bread
• Blueberry salad with goat cheese
• Cottage cheese with chopped fruit
• Hummus and pita bread
• Sandwiches

Has it been this hot where you are? What have you been eating?

I’ve heard for some time that beet greens (literally, the green, leafy part of the beet plant) are quite tasty, and I like greens, so I was curious to try them.  But I never did, because beet greens are always sold with beets attached, and if I bought them, I might have to use the beets.  I guess I could have cooked the greens and tossed the beets, but that just seemed wrong.

So I was amazed when I discovered nearly beet-less greens at the farmer’s market. There exist varieties of beets that are grown primarily for their greens.  The greens grow big and tasty, and the beet (root) part is small, stunted, and not meant to be eaten. Perfection! At last I could try some beet greens in good conscience.

The verdict: tasty.  They’re very mild, and ever-so-slightly sweet, not cloyingly sweet like beets.  In fact, they taste more like spinach than beets, and had almost none of the bitter flavor that so many people dislike about greens. If you like eating healthy but aren’t a fan of kale, you might give these a try.

I prepared my beet greens the way I prepare most unfamiliar foods: sauted with olive oil and garlic. I served them over polenta, with some mozzarella cheese on top.  The bunch in the picture made a greens-heavy meal for one, but could comfortably have fed two.

What a great show that could be! It would take the concept of showing that “anyone can cook” to a new level. In her video, Celia says she talks to a lot of people (sighted and non-sighted) who think they can’t cook. Celia’s a great example of overcoming whatever barriers (real or imagined) stand between a person and learning to cook.

It’s made me think about what the challenges would be in cooking without sight.  Dropping things would be hard – I would make a big mess. You’d need to be extremely organized, not to mention disciplined about using what you buy and cleaning out the fridge (lest you discover something really nasty hiding in the back). I’m sure there are many challenges I haven’t thought of. But the most important sense in cooking, I think, is the sense of smell.  Smell and taste – not appearance – is what really tells you if fruit is ripe, or if the cookies are done, or if you’ve got the balance of spices right. I bet Celia uses her sense of smell much better than I do.

If you’d like to see this show become a reality, please go vote for Celia!