Content about Tomatoes
August 27, 2010
Our solution for what to do with too many tomatoes
There isn't much argument that summertime is the peak season for cooking. It never gets easier than in August: the produce is top-notch, everywhere, and cheap. Locavores are finally settling down and enjoying themselves instead of passing judgement on the rest of us for buying zucchini out of season. You can make dinner by cutting up tomatoes and fresh mozzarella and calling it a masterpiece. My CSA vegetable delivery is overflowing...
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May 20, 2010
The SIP method of urban gardening
I've long been drawn to the idea of urban farming. When I lived in Brooklyn, I had two plots in two community gardens, in addition to three massive tomato plants on the back deck. Planting seeds and growing vegetables was an unlikely pleasure. For me it was connected to good eating: I loved to cook and eat the freshest vegetables I could find. Getting to the source is something we often explore on The Paupered Chef--from seeking out how...
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March 23, 2010
Sometimes you need to start with the basics.
I was recently bumming on a friend's membership to Costco, arms full of inexpensive bulk yeast and Dijon mustard for salad dressing, when I discovered the can of tomatoes you see above. It seemed like the deal of a century. For $3.89, I walked away with a can of San Marzano tomatoes weighing almost 7 pounds. That's the price you sometimes pay for a single 28 oz can of them.
I immediately contemplated the massive pot of tomato...
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September 24, 2009
Make both of those at home.
The tomatoes were turning on me. A few weeks ago they were red and rosy, destined for a starring role in a BLT. Now, I'm not sure if they can withstand the scrutiny of the spotlight. They are still light years beyond what appears during the winter here in the Midwest, but not quite the ones you can slice up, sprinkle with salt, and eat raw. I kind of wish I would have known this before I bought a huge batch of them at the farmers market...
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August 31, 2009
This Mexican classic deserves a little love.
Around hour five, I became terribly exhausted from what felt like continuous marathon of chopping, sautéing, blending, grinding, broiling, stuffing, whisking, dipping, and frying. It was the most complex and curious chile relleno I'd ever laid eyes on and the flavor nearly bawled me over. Every bite revealed layers of flavor, from the salsa, pork stuffing, to the batter. Nothing was an afterthought. Though it doesn't exactly...
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April 3, 2009
Nick learns from his mistakes and makes a good deep-dish pie at home.
I was determined not to fail this time. My last attempt at deep-dish wasn't an absolute failure, but it was close. It was too soggy and messy, and had none of the glorious qualities that my favorite Chicago pizzeria, Pequods, displayed. I theorized about all kinds reasons for the failure, thinking it had something to do with the crust. Then I just gave up and asked you all to help me. Ended up I was way off...
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March 17, 2009
Nick struggles to perfect deep-dish pizza at home.
Or at least, that was my hunch. I searched for a long time and finally settled on this recipe from pizzamaking.com. Deep-dish dough is very different from its thin crust counterpart. The crust has a healthy dose of cornmeal, which gives it an interesting crunch and texture. All the elements seemed to be here. I tracked down some tomatoes, cheese, and even decided to add some spinach (an addition that has worked well...
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January 30, 2009
A recipe for Texas-style chili.
Diced instead of Ground Meat
I had stopped using ground beef a few years back, after watching a Good Eats episode. The reasoning makes sense. When ground beef is used, the fat either needs to be drained off immediately, or needs to be skimmed off the day after when all the fat has accumulated at the top. But if you use chunks a lot of the juices stay inside, leaving both the chili less greasy and the meat more...
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January 13, 2009
How long do you cook ravioli? I wondered this precisely the moment after I plunged my handmade ravioli into a raging cauldron of boiling water. It didn't occur to me that it might be an issue. I had always thought you pulled them as soon as they floated, or was that just gnocchi? When I consulted my recipe in The Silver Spoon it said I needed to cook them for 10 minutes, which sounded absurd. I had only cooked my homemade tagliatelle...
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November 20, 2008
Because fresh pasta deserves a sauce this good.
Once I figured out how to make fresh pasta, I waited all of 12 hours before I set out to create my own Ragù alla Bolognese. It was a goal of mine ever since watching an episode of Heston Blumenthal's TV series In Search of Perfection. The premise of the show is for the acclaimed chef to reexamine some stodgy British classics by going back to the roots of the original dish. His final recipe usually involves...
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July 9, 2008
It was the most fantastic feeling in the world--especially for someone who has no idea how to grow food, like me. A bunch of seeds Elin and I planted months ago in a nearby community garden--tomatoes, kale, peppers, cucumbers, snap peas, beets, radishes, onions, lettuce, and corn--had been growing into large green bushy things that we hoped weren't weeds. Were they healthy and sated with water and getting just the right sunshine? Did they...
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May 21, 2008
Moving beyond pico de gallo into real authentic territory
I thought I knew everything there was to know about salsa. Tomatoes, garlic, onions, jalapenos, lime juice, salt. Chop, mix, serve. It’s an enormous pain, but the alternative (jarred salsa) just doesn’t compare. Taking the time to chop is a noble pursuit.
That was until Blake visited last weekend. What he threw together in a matter of minutes turned blood red and clung to every chip like it...
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April 16, 2008
A few months ago I was wandering the poultry aisle at my food coop looking at the bewildering number of options for a roasting chicken. As the words free-range and humane--proclaimed on every package--began to lose their meaning, I came across a pile of frozen, gangly-looking birds with their long necks still intact. The label, announcing this new product, read “Amish stewing hens.” “Great for stock!”...
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January 18, 2008
What's more fun than a make-your-own-pizza party? Not much. My friend Austin was in town from Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches Spanish, Latin, and mythology. Often when we get together it's an excuse to do a lot of cooking. Throughout college he would make Nick and me ridiculously good brunches with fresh chorizo, eggs, and breakfast potatoes, and occasionally expose us to his Texas chili, which has an entire...
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November 11, 2007
Earlier this year, Blake and I stumbled upon an astonishing pizza making technique - one that allowed us to create restaurant-worthy pies at home using nothing but a cast iron skillet and an oven. The cast iron skillet was warmed over high heat on top of a stove, while the broiler was preheating. Then the skillet was turn upside down, the pizza put on top, and then stuck underneath a preheated broiler. In a minute a thirty...
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September 9, 2007
I’ve been gathering cook books by whatever method I can...and beggers usually can’t be choosers. I borrow nearly anything I can lay my hands on. I owe lots of money to the library. And whenever I get to head home I usually make it out with an armful books my mom hoarded over the years ( I promise I’ll return them!). One of those was The Louisville Courier-Journal Cookbook. By all stereotypes, it...
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September 5, 2007
I don’t think I can ever tire of the holy trinity comprised of tomatoes, basil, and carbohydrates. Whether it’s a straightforward pasta of raw tomatoes in olive oil with basil tossed with spaghetti, a bruschetta on grilled bread, or with fresh mozzarella and some balsamic or red wine vinegar—it always tastes fresh, simple, and surprisingly hearty.
Sometimes around the end of summer, or the end of a late summer day, you...
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March 19, 2007
The most well-documented failure on this website was the first time we cooked beef short ribs. Tough, sinewy, and ugly--a big fibrous brick of protein fastened onto a sled of white bone by tendons and mysterious pieces of grizzle. Short ribs are the beef equivalent to a Salman Rushdie novel: willfully difficult, at times indecent and gross, but after an extended period of histrionic outbursts and piquiant flavors, in which patience...
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March 15, 2007
I'm not sure why, but it wasn't until last week when my mom handed me a fresh copy of Heat, that I realized I had forgotten to read it. I'd read another Bill Buford book, his manic and terribly disturbing Among the Thugs, along with his New Yorker profile on Batali and a narrative on his experience slaughtering animals in Tuscany, the latter two of which are included in some form in Heat. The rest was just details, I thought, I'd...
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January 11, 2007
I've been attempting to eat more fish this year. In fact, it's something of a resolution for me. Whether I did it to be healthier, get fitter, or simply have a more varied diet, I instantly dreamt of grilled salmon, roasted whole red snappers, halibut tacos, and other feasts of fresh, flaky fish that would pump me full of omega 3 and immune me from any possible disease. What I wasn't thinking about when that ball was dropping...
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January 10, 2007
I've been reading Thomas Keller's two cookbooks lately, one for each of his Napa Valley restaurants--Bouchon and The French Laundry--and I've doing a lot of drooling. First off, they are probably the most gorgeous cookbooks I've ever seen, physically. From the text design to the layout, paper quality, printing colors, it's all overwhelming.
Then, of course, there is the matter of Keller's recipes, which are so intimidating and complicated...
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December 5, 2006
There's a passage in Anthony Bourdain's book of bistro recipes, Les Halles, that goes something like this: "If you can't roast a chicken, you are a sorry, incompetent idiot who should dig his own grave." Apparently, roasting a chicken should be marvelously easy: throw salt and pepper on that bad boy, put into the oven, and out comes a crisp-skinned, succulent, juicy, hot dinner, twice as good as your average grocery rotisserie.
Except, I've...
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November 3, 2006
Rice, beans, pasta. These are the ways we make sure we haven't incidentally fallen into the Calorie Restriction Diet. They keep us looking flush and healthy and let us concentrate our attention on careful preparation of everything else on the plate. Just about every recipe we've cooked has one of these ingredients incorporated so that we don't leave the table hungry.
Yet I've never even thought about cooking lentils before....
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October 27, 2006
First off, a language lesson: refried beans are not fried twice. It's understandable that most people, myself included until I started writing this, assume a literal translation of the word "refried" and, employing razor-sharp detective skills, deduce that the beans are fried, let rest, and then fried again.
But the word refried is actually an approximation of the Spanish word refrito, meaning "over-fried." The prefix re- in Spanish is a...
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October 18, 2006
"Just use whatever leftovers are in the fridge."
That little statement is repeated endlessly throughout the course of one day on the Food Network and I'm not sure who they are trying to fool. It's as if those celebrity chefs aren't paid enough to send an assistant to the store to pick up some tomatoes--not that they need to. Their fantastically clean fridges come stocked with leftover tuna and perfectly grilled chicken...
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Traditionally, I've wondered why farmers' markets are so expensive. It's almost a given that the price per pound for things can reach double what you'd pay in a grocery store. It doesn't make any sense to me: we're cutting out lots of middlemen, the farmer and I, by communicating directly with one another. There's no shipping the tomatoes halfway around the world, no large distributor that's taking a cut from the deal, no grocery store that...
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August 31, 2006
Back in the days of heroicism and yore, legends and lore, shish kebab was invented. In between bouts of maiden-rescuing, treasure-finding, and windmill-attacking, the roaming horseman of the world's countryside decided that they hadn't done enough for mankind. One evening, as the stars shone brightly and the last few vagabonds were settling lazily against rocks for a pipe and a night's sleep, one awoke with a start. In a (literal) stroke of...
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August 29, 2006
To make a grill week interesting, you have to move beyond the basic hamburger, steak, boneless skinless chicken breast, and the occasional fish. We've done steak twice before, and as we espoused during the Shake Shack Alternative week, we're not big fans of the charred-on-the-grill burger (naysayers and defenders, feel free to comment away). Leave that business to dad.
So, we looked for new territory, some item that might be removed from...
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It began when my friend Glen T. Tremaldi, who runs a community garden in Boerum Hill, informed me of his zucchini overstock. "You should see the zucchinis I picked. The size of your calves," he said. And he wasn't joking. They were the size of melons. Then he related something about a frozen rabbit that was bought some time ago from a butcher on Court St., who had divided it up into serving pieces while it was still frozen, with a saw. He...
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June 29, 2006
Before the poor whore jokes start to spouting out, before we talk about how quick and easy this dish was, how lustful and robust the flavors were, I'll dispel the obvious and hopefully show how these ladies of the night were actually thrifty chefs without the benefit of access to fresh ingredients. How the whores of Italy were, actually, quite creative.
Fun fact of the day courtesy of Diane Seed, author of The Top 100 Pasta Sauces:
"...
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June 13, 2006
I'm tapping numbers into a junky-looking ATM in the back corner of some random bodega that hugs the BQE. It's dropping those dollar bills down, one hundred, two hundred, as I get prepared to hand over some dear cash to the broker for a beautiful new apartment in Brooklyn, when I notice that I probably shouldn't probe the machine for any more.
I have thirty dollars.
Which is all well and fine, usually. I was getting paid nicely in a...
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June 1, 2006
Tackling the art of braising
When I got to the grocery store I had no idea what short ribs look like, so I simply asked for 2 pounds of them, and that amounted to 4 short ribs. Thankfully the butcher didn't look at me funny or say "They're right in front of you, bub" (which they were). They were only about 6 dollars a pound, amounting to 12 dollars of meat feeding four people. This was looking good. It was time to learn how to braise....
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All content copyright Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer.
