Tomato Sandwiches [The Cookbook]

When I got out to the garden this morning, I was greeted with a very pleasant surprise:

They're ripening!

I swear to you, I handled this is a very classy fashion. I totally didn't jump and squeal or anything.

It's been a very wet and cool summer in these parts, which while great for the snap-peas, which are still producing into August now, not so much for the more warm loving plants: tomatoes, peppers, my sad, sad cucumbers, etc. I've got a lot of lovely green fruit on almost all of my plants, but it's all mostly green. I'm so glad to see some ripening going on. This particular variety is called "Saucy," an heirloom paste tomato, which according to the description is a pretty early variety, so hopeful a few of the other varieties will get themselves to ripening before October.

Now, these tomatoes (along with a few other paste varieties) were planted with the express purpose of going into my spaghetti sauce. Pastes are meatier and using them will definitely cut down on "cooking down" time with my sauce. Unfortunately, when planning my tomato varieties, I didn't think about the fact that this was an "early paste" and what that meant. It's not canning time yet. Or, rather, none of the other tomatoes are even close to ready for it to be canning time, so I can't even whip up a small test batch. Still, I didn't want little critters munching on my tomatoes, so there was only one thing I could do.

My photos of the actual finished product are awful, so you're going to have to deal with a picture of toasting bread. Hopeful in the next month or so, my photo quality will improve thanks to some changes, which I discuss later. Anyone who knows me, though, knows what the toasted bread is about to become.

It's a dish that really brings back memories of summer lunches on the back porch with my mother. They were probably accompanied by a huge mug of coffee. :) I don't remember eating them with Bisnonna though. Likely because of that terrible anti-tomato phase I experienced in youth, but don't talk about the dark days.

Madre remembers though:

Tomato Sandwich

Madre writes: This is one of my favorite lunches with Grandma. Toast two thinly sliced pieces of Italian bread [Amy's note: Or medium-ish wheat, I don't think it makes a difference *hides*] Butter them, slice your tomato, and put it on the bread. Sprinkle a little bit of salt and pepper and a tiny bit of oregano. Enjoy!

So there you have it. A favorite (delicious and easy!) summer lunch for generations.

Preserving the Bounty: Sweet Sauce [The Cookbook]

A week ago, Madre came to visit and we canned several quarts of sweet sauce (we also did salsa and pickled peppers as well, because we had an absolutely absurd amount of tomatoes from our garden). Sauce has been on my cooking bucket list since, well, pretty much forever. It's...got a legacy in my family. Nonno was well known for his spaghetti sauce (even though I refused to eat it until I was well into my teens - it's a long and terribly odd story that I'll save as fodder for the memoir), and Bisnonna's sweet sauce is a starting point for the majority of her main dishes.

As I am not feeling well; however, I will let the pictures and madre do the talking on this one:

Sweet Sauce: [madre writes] Brown a couple onions in a little oil. Blend your tomatoes in the food processor. This will blend everything. Grandma used to put her tomatoes in really hot water, then peel the skins off and squeeze the juice and seeds out of the tomato. You do whatever method is best for you. Add a pinch of salt, sweet basil, oregano and pepper. Let it cook for a little while. Then add a can or two of paste. Add some sugar to taste. Let this cook a good while so that it thickens up. All the amounts of the ingredients depends on how many tomatoes you are using. Use your own judgment. I like to can mine. Grandma would put hers in the freezer. Here again, do what is best for you. This sauce can be used as a base for vegetable soup, spaghetti sauce, and chili. Have some fun with it.

Tabbouleh: Sicilian Style

There is a fair bit of Middle Eastern influence in Sicilian cuisine. It's most obvious in classics such as cassata, the use of couscous, and a fondness for apricots. This dish, which started as a way to use up an absurd amount of parsley from our garden, plays off those influences.

Sicilian Tabbouleh

inspired by Ina Garten with a lot of random additions by yours truly

[What You Need]

1 cup toasted wheat berries

3 cups water

2 tomatoes

1 cup roughly chopped parsley

1/2 cup roughly chopped mint

1/2 red onion, chopped

1/4 cup crushed pistachio

3 T. olive oil

3 T lemon juice

[What To Do]

1. Boil wheat berries in 3 cups boiling water for ~1 hour. They should soak up all the water much like rice.
2. Throw the pistachios in the blender if they're not yet crushed.
3. Toss all ingredients together in a large bowl.

It's that simple and it's a great dish for summer potlucks!

Stuffed Pepper Soup

It’s getting cold. Can you feel it? Soon it will be Autumn and my favorite time of year: Soup season!

I could wax rhapsodic about my love for soup for many an age. I love soup of all kinds (so long as the amount of celery that ends up floating in the stock is limited -- but that’s an argument for another day). The one I'm about to present to you is one of my all time favorites.

I have a special relationship with stuffed pepper soup (and definitely more memories surrounding this little number than actual stuffed peppers). Many a chilly fall / winter day has been warmed by this soup, but there is one fall day in particular:

It was my junior year of college and having lived in a dorm on a meal plan for the past two years, my cooking skills left something to be desired. Not to mention the fact that college was a rough one emotionally. So, one fall day when things had been particularly rough (though this was still before the time of the bats), my mother showed up with several bags full of ingredients and we got down to making stuffed pepper soup.

Since then, stuffed pepper soup has been on of "our things". Whenever I come home during the fall or winter holidays, we tend to make it at least once. Just last week, she came up to attend a Michigan football game and we made yet another batch.

[ignore the beans; we also made chili]

And so, since this is one of my most requested recipes (especially by my dear friend Jill), I've decided to share its wonderment with you.

Stuffed Pepper Soup

[via mi madre]

[Ingredients]

2 lb ground beef

1 green bell pepper

1 can tomato sauce

1 diced tomato

2 cubes beef bouillon

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 tsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

1 T soy sauce

2 cups cooked rice

[What to do]

1. Brown beef over medium heat
2. Add peppers and saute for 3 minutes
3. Stir in rest of ingredients (sans rice). Reduce heat to love, cover and simmer for 30-45 minutes
4. Stir in rice and heat through
5. Be sure to add some Parmesan  and romano cheese to the top when you serve.

Baked Whitefish with Tomatoes

I was struck by the lack of fish in The Cookbook. I've been taught that fish is pretty much a staple of Southern Italian cooking, but there wasn't a single recipe that involved fish within the collection my mother had gathered.

I think it has something to do with Madre not being a big fish fan as well as the expense of fish in general. An interesting aspect of Bisnonna's cooking is how influenced it was by the Great Depression. Lots of the recipes she used sub out the traditional meats or other items for those that could be obtained more cheaply.

So, there were no fish recipes, but I wasn't about to let that stop me. Beside, I ended up with a lot more fish from the farmer's market than I actually meant to buy...[Farmer's Markets make me nervous, what can I say?] So I concocted something of my own based on what I had around and some guidance from Giada DeLaurentis and the BBC.

I do love fish. And in the Great Lakes, whitefish is -the- fish. Whitefish, of course, refers to a variety of fish so far as fisheries are concerned, but the fishery we go to uses the term to refer to Lake Whitefish. As always, when choosing fish, remember to shop sustainably.

Baked Whitefish With Tomatoes
Adapted from Giada De Laurentiis and BBC's Good Foods Magazine

[ingredients - serves 4]
2 Whitefish fillets (or other sustainable fish for your region)
1/3 cup Olive Oil
1/3 cup lemon juice
3 large tomatoes
Basil, Parsley, Black Pepper to taste

[What to do]

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F
2. Drizzle some of the olive oil in the bottom of a glass baking pan.
3. Season the fillets and add them to the pan. Cover in rest of oil, lemon juice and tomatoes cut into smaller pieces.
4. Cover baking pan (I used tin foil) and bake for 25-30 minutes

I served this fish with some brown rice sprinkled with Parmesan cheese.