Category Archives: Recipes (Savory)

Titillating Tomatoes

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German pink tomatoes. Photograph by Victor Schrager.

When I leaf through the pages of the glorious looking new book, “The Heirloom Tomato, From Garden to Table” (Bloomsbury), I fairly blush.

I’m just going to come out and say it: This is tomato porn.

Rippling, curvy, plump, and with bodacious glistening seed sacks, tomatoes have never looked so utterly sensual as they do in this book written by gardener, seed savor and heirloom produce advocate, Amy Goldman, and photographed by the incomparable Victor Schrager, whose works have graced the Museum of Modern Art in New York.Â

Talk about tomato on tomato action; wait until you see these photos of half a dozen beefsteak tomatoes piled pyramid-style on top of one another, with each a different glorious color and size. It’s tomato as high art. It’s tomato as sex object. It’s tomato beauty you can’t stop staring at.

Thankfully, though, you don’t have to hide this book under your bed or pull it out only when nobody’s looking. This can proudly grace your coffee-table. And anybody who grows tomatoes _ even I, who can barely keep my plants alive half the time _ will lust after the beauties in this book.

Goldman produces hundreds of tomato varieties on her farm in New York’s Hudson Valley. She offers growing advice, as well as information on dozens of varieties, including what shape and color fruit they produce, what the flavor is like, what the texture is like, and what its origins are. Fifty-five recipes are included in the book, as well as more than 200 of those luscious photographs.

Cherry tomato focaccia. Photo by Victor Schrager. Recipe follows.Â

Yearning for more tomatoes? Head to Sutro’s at the Cliff House in San Francisco on Aug. 13 for a very special tomato dinner. Guest Chef Ron Siegel of the Ritz-Carlton Dining Room in San Francisco, and his pastry chef, Alexander Espiritu, will be on hand to create a four-course dinner that will showcase the organic, heirloom tomatoes grown by Cliff House General Manager Ralph Burgin on his family’s Sonoma farm. Think grilled skirt steak with tomato compote, and tomato tart tatin with yogurt mint sorbet.

The dinner is $55 a person ($80 with wine pairings). A portion of proceeds will benefit the non-profit Community Alliance with Family Farmers, which fosters family-scale agriculture.

Sutro’s Chef de Cuisine Brian O’Connor also will be featuring heirloom tomatoes in dishes on the daily summer menu in an “Ultomato” celebration.

At PlumpJack Cafe in San Francisco, Executive Chef Rick Edge gets into the tomato spirit, too, with a four-course tasting menu featuring lovely heirlooms. The tasting menu, $45 per person ($21 more with wine pairings), will run through the end of September or when the tomatoes run out. Dishes include seared day boat scallops with golden tomato vinaigrette, and tomato-braised Kurobuta pork shoulder.

Additionally, more than 52 San Francisco restaurants will be participating in “Heirloom Tomato Week” (which is actually longer than a week since it goes from Aug. 14-24). The restaurants will feature heirloom tomatoes in a la carte dishes or in tasting menus. Its their way of trying to help farmers who were impacted during the recent salmonella scare that mistakenly identified tomatoes as the culprit.

Every diner who pays with a Visa card also will receive a commemorative book with tomato recipes from the participating restaurants, which include Coi, Piperade, and Poleng Restaurant & Lounge. View a complete list here. Reservations are available on OpenTable.com.
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Showcasing Wild Alaskan Salmon

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Salmon mousse at the cook-off

CORDOVA, Alaska — How spectacular is the salmon here?

Allow me to let Regan Reik, executive chef of Pier W restaurant in Lakewood, OH, answer that. Reik was one of three chefs who created the magnificent 5-course dinner ($50) spotlighting Copper River salmon at the Reluctant Fisherman Inn’s July 12 gala event. Like me, Reik has tasted salmon before in the lower 48, but this was his first time — and mine — to Alaska.

His summation: “The fish from the Copper River is the best damn fish I ever had.”

Indeed, it is. Brilliant pink-orange, buttery flesh with a rich flavor that just fills your mouth.

Reik, who has cooked at Alain Ducasse in New York, had help with the dinner from chef Jeremy Storm, a Vermont native who fell in love with Alaska and now cooks in Juneau and Cordova; and fellow Ohio chef Dominic Cerino, who learned the art of sausage making alongside Mario Batali’s father, Armandino.

Parfait of Copper River Salmon tartare

Cerino created the dinner as if “you’d had a salmon run in Italy.” Indeed, his family recipe for pillowy spinach gnocchi  with goat cheese fondue was capped off by a sprinkling of Copper River salmon caviar that had been smoked to add an unexpected depth. He and Reik also spotlighted salmon in a robustly-flavored sausage made with Cerino’s house-cured guanciali; and in a beautiful tartare parfait with house-made ricotta.

Salmon sausage, gravalax, and fennel sauerkraut

The chefs had sent a list ahead of time of the provisions they would need. But with only one delivery of produce a week here by plane, and Cordova’s cool, misty weather not conducive for growing much at all, they ended up scrounging for a few key things at the last minute.

But that’s where the generosity and kindness of the town came into play. No kimchee brine to be found in the two main grocery stores in town? No problem. Walk into the “Oriental gifts and jewelry” store and a kind Vietnamese-American woman there will hand over just the needed amount from her own home refrigerator. No rhubarb delivered? The friendly neighbor in town with the organic yard will let you cut just what you need to make your gelato. Amazed by the smoked salmon caviar? The guy who makes it will give you his last jar at no charge just so you can use it for your special dinner.

“It’s that mentality that made us fall in love with the community,” Reik says.

Before the professionals got to strut their stuff, the locals got in on the act. At the salmon cook-off, 18 contestants brought their best dishes forward for tasting by judges that included yours truly. There was everything from salmon tamales to sweet-spicy Thai salmon cakes to salmon mulligatawny soup. Winners included perfectly grilled salmon with fruit salsa, and a show-stopping salmon mousse piped fancily in rosettes over a whole salmon.

If all this talk of salmon is getting you hungry, there’s no better time than now to try this easy salmon recipe from “The New Alaska Cookbook” (Sasquatch Books), which was written a few years ago by noted New York Times food writer, Kim Severson.

Barbecued Salmon

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An Odiferous Time in Gilroy

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Smell that pungent, mouth-watering aroma?

You will as the day draws nearer for the 30th anniversary of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, July 25-27 at Christmas Hill Park in Gilroy.

Over the years, the popular event has raised nearly $8 million for local charities. And it’s fed quite a crowd _ more than 3 million, who have consumed 376 tons of beef, 119 tons of pasta, 68 tons of scampi, 50 tons of calamari, and 72 tons of California garlic.

This year will be more of the same as booths will dish out all things garlic, including garlic frog legs, garlic Kettlekorn, Cajun fried catfish, garlic chicken pizza, lumpia, garlic fried-green tomatoes, and of course, the ever popular, garlic ice cream.

July 26 at 10 a.m., eight amateur cooks from across the country will duke it out in the annual cook-off. This year’s local contestant is Linda Wang of Sunnyvale, who will be trying to sway the judges with her garlic corn creme brulee with pan-seared scallops and garlic pancetta saute. For the first time, the cook-off will be telecast over the Internet on the festival’s Web site.

July 27 at noon, the professionals get in on the act when four area chefs will vie for a top prize of $5,000 and 1,000 pounds of fresh garlic. This “Garlic Showdown” will feature chefs Mark Ayers of the Highlands Inn and Hyatt Regency Monterey; Christopher Preyale of the Fountaingrove Golf & Athletic Club in Santa Rosa; James Waller of the Monterey Plaza Hotel & Spa; and Ryan Scott of San Francisco’s Mission Beach Cafe and a contestant in this past season’s “Top Chef” show. This “Iron Chef”-style challenge will feature a not-so-secret ingredient — garlic, of course.

Tickets to the festival are $12 for adults, $6 for children ages 6-12 and for seniors, and free for kids under age 6.

For those who want to bring a part of the festival home — well, besides the resulting garlic breath — pick up a copy of “Any Bozo Can Cook,”  a collection of 102 recipes inspired by everyone’s fave smelly bulb. It was written by Sam Bozzo and Gene Sakahara, both festival cooks and former festival presidents. The $16 book will be sold at the festival, and online.

For a sneak taste, try this recipe from the book:

Garlic shrimp with spicy garlic peanut sauce

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Meatball Madness

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Bucci\'s Italian-American meatballs

We’re mad for meatballs. We certainly are.

Consider that loyal diners nearly revolted when San Francisco’s A16 once halted its popular ”Monday Night Meatball” special. No worries, as that curtailment was short-lived, and the meatballs are safely back on the Monday menu.

What is it about meatballs that we can’t get enough of? There’s something so comforting in their rustic presentation. They’re a little more special looking than a hamburger; a little more playful than a big hunk of meatloaf.

When I dined at Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, the pizza was the star, of course, and the butterscotch budino for dessert was out of this world, too. But the appetizer of “meatballs al forno” nearly stole the show with their incredibly light texture, and subtly spiced tomato sauce. I could have eaten the entire plateful, well, if there weren’t two other people with me.

When I’m jonesing for meatballs, I turn to this favorite recipe from “The Complete Meat Cookbook”by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly. Heap these bold tasting meatballs over pasta or soft polenta, and you can’t go wrong.

 Bucci’s Italian-American MeatballsÂ

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A Marriage of Pasta and More Pasta

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My husband, Meat Boy, morphing into Pasta Boy

Husbands.

When my about-to-be husband and I were registering for wedding gifts five years ago, I remember combing through the online catalogues of Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table for all manner of cooking gadgets I might finally be able to possess in my kitchen.

Good pots and pans. Professional knives. Flatware that actually matched. Gleamingly new baking pans to replace my ancient, beat-up ones. Ahh, it was like the joy of Christmas, only better.

Since we were living in a modest apartment at the time, I tried not to go too crazy because we simply didn’t have the storage space then. But I also tried to heed my friends’ advice to pack my registry with a lot of items to give folks an array of choices when it came to gift-giving.

And then I saw it. It caught my eye and called out to me because I’d never had one or even used one before. It was a pasta machine. Not just any pasta machine, but an attachment to my KitchenAid mixer that would allow me, the carb lover that I am, to make my very own strands of fettuccine.

As I stared at it on my computer screen, I yelled out to my husband, who was in the next room, “Honey, should I put this pasta attachment for the mixer on our registry?”

Him: “A pasta attachment? Are you kidding? We’ll never use it. You know we won’t. It’s just a waste of space.”

Husbands.

Sigh. OK, maybe he wasn’t a killjoy. Maybe he was right. Maybe we’d never really use it. Maybe.

So I clicked on to another page of culinary doodads, leaving the pasta attachment behind.

Fast forward to Christmas last year.

We were at my brother’s and sister-in-law’s house for the holiday. My brother Dale is a marvelous, passionate cook, and on the menu that night, among other things was — you guessed it — homemade spaghetti.

My brother was going to sauce it with good olive oil, crispy bits of bacon, and lovely pungent garlic.

As my brother, Dale, stood poised at the counter beside his KitchenAid mixer, I noticed my husband watching him. Dale combined the ingredients for the dough in the mixer bowl, then gave the dough a brief kneading by hand. Then, he started to feed the dough through the roller attached to the mixer that looked for all the world like an adult Play-Doh pumper machine. The roller flattened the dough effortlessly. Again it went through, and again, each time emerging a little thinner. Then, Dale changed the rollers to a cutting one, and fed the dough pieces through again, as beautiful, long strands pushed out the other end.

My hubby continued to watch my brother doing this. And when my hubby noticed I was watching him as he watched my brother, he said, “Hey, we should get one of those.”

“WHAT?!?” I replied, incredulously, not believing what I had just heard.

“We should get an attachment,” he repeated. “This is so cool!”

I rolled my eyes.

Husbands.

I reminded my hubby of a conversation five years ago. He, of course, did not remember it at all.

Husbands.

And with that, we ordered the attachment online when we got home. And a few weeks later, it arrived on our doorstep.

We took the three attachments out of the box (a roller, a fettuccine cutter, and a spaghetti cutter), read the instructions, and set to work, using the basic pasta recipe included. In went the flour, eggs, water, and olive oil into the bowl to be mixed by the paddle, then the dough hook. I dumped the dough onto a lightly floured counter, and began kneading it until it was smooth and soft.

Dinner time is only two minutes away

Then I handed the dough to my husband to have the first honor. Those are his hands in the photos. It took a little practice — some of the first dough pieces through the roller came out looking like abstract birds of a sort. But hubby soon got the hang of it. And soon, he was having the time of his life.

Husbands.

So why go to all the fuss of making your own fresh pasta when you can pick up a container at most any supermarket or use the ever-handy dried form instead?

Because the taste and texture are sublime. Fresh pasta tastes, well, fresh. You can actually taste the rich egg in the noodles, so much so that you can get by with the simplest of sauces because the noodles themselves have so much flavor and character. Moreoever, the texture is not one dimensional like dried, but rather both more chewy and more tender.

Yes, it does take more time to make your own pasta from scratch. But fresh pasta cooks up in a flash, far faster than dried. Throw it into a pot of boiling water, and it’s done in 2 minutes or less.

I like it with this bold tasting 5-hour pork sugo from San Francisco’s wonderful Perbacco restaurant. Yes, it does take a long time to make the sauce (actually longer than the five hours in the name of the recipe). But most of it is idle cooking. Once you have the ground pork, porcini, tomatoes, sage, juniper berries and whole bottle of red wine in the pot, you leave it alone to simmer until it reduces to a rich, thick ragu. The recipe makes enough so that you can freeze half of it to enjoy another time, too.

Making your own fresh pasta is something you should attempt at least once. (We’ve made it three times this year already.) It’s not only a blast, but incredibly satisfying, too.

Don’t believe me?

Just ask — who else — my husband.

Perbacco’s 5-Hour Pork Sugo

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