This is a family favorite that I've never seemed to post before! So no story, just delicious pork chops! Strangely, I did post a picture of it.

Tomato-basil pork chops

1 chop per diner
per chop: 1 medium to large tomato, one small onion, handful basil leaves
1 or more large cloves of garlic, pressed
3 T butter
Sherry

To prepare the meat, poke both sides of chops with fork, lightly dredge w salt, pepper, crushed garlic. Set aside. Slice onions, tomatoes and basil. Melt 2-4 tablespoons of butter (you heard me) in a large skillet. Brown the chops on both sides (a few minutes per side), then add the sliced onions to the pan, stir until they are thoroughly coated with butter. Cook until just short of carmelization. If you have any other veggies to add do it now. I had a small black bell pepper, so that went in. Before you add the tomatoes, make sure the pan is browning. If it's not, let the chops fry another few minutes . Add the tomatoes and turn down heat. Continue to sautee until a light sauce has formed. I like to lift out the tomato skins as they separate from the meat. To start creating gravy, through a splash of sherry in. You want a little bit of liquid at all times after this point. Add the fresh basil.

Start water for pasta, continue to simmer the meat while the pasta is cooking. We're using a German egg noodle tonight, but spaetzle, gnochi, or fettucini are also nice with this.

Start to finish about 40 minutes, not counting waiting for the pasta to cook. For a complete step by step time line, check out the Twitter thread, in real time: #basilporkchops.

How foodie culture has made people afraid to cook

It's not just cheap, available, easy and frankly tasty boxed food, fast food and prepared foods (even the so-called "organic" companies have gotten into the act) that have made ordinary people reluctant to cook.

It's also the popularity of writers like Martha Stewart and even Michael Pollan or Barbara Kingsolver, as well as cooking shows that emphasize high end ingredients, professional preparers, and exotic dishes.

I love to cook, and I'm pretty good at it, but these shows, books, and articles are just plain intimidating.

They purport to be encouraging people to cook, but frankly, I'm not going to have "pizza night" where I have to make pizza from scratch, however seasonal, local, organic and whole I'm trying to be; it entirely defeats the benefit of pizza night, which is that there is no prep and no clean up. Do these writers not get that? I'm never going to hunt for chanterelles; I didn't even know what they were before I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I don't know anyone with a backyard clay oven. Can I cook a whole goat in my Kenmore, do you think?

We're never going to get people back to preparing their own home-cooked food by only talking about $12-a-pound morels, and turning up our noses at the perfectly fine, pre-sliced plain white mushrooms available at the Safeway. I love making scones, but grating frozen butter, per America's Test Kitchen, is just a pain in the ass. But apparently this is the only way to make "perfect" scones. We don't need another Hell's Kitchen, or Rick Bayless with his flawless urban farm; we need Prince spaghetti night again, where Grandma makes sauce to put on the readily available pasta from the grocery store.

Tomato-apple soup

This is a wonderful "leftovers" meal, which I made with the apple peelings from a simple homemade apple sauce (peel and chop up apples, throw them in a saucepan, simmer until it turns into sauce. A four-year-old could do this.) I served it with this morning's banana-apple scones.

10 small to medium tomatoes, cut in half
Apple peels and cores from 8 apples
3 large cloves of garlic, peeled and slightly crushed
1 cup apple cider, or any vegetable broth

Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray, and put all the veggies/fruits on it. Lightly salt and pepper (I used sea salt, but any salt will do), and drizzle with olive oil. Roast for 1 hour in a warm oven (300F), or until the tomatoes start to brown and shrivel very slightly. Put all in a 2 quart sauce pan, including draining any liquid. Add the cider or stock; all the veggies should be covered, just. If they are not, add more water. Simmer until the tomatoes have lost all shape and the skins have slipped off. Run this through a food mill until all seeds, skins, pits, etc have been seived out, return to the sauce pan and smooth with a handheld immersible blender, or smooth it in the blender or food processor. Makes enough for two large or three to four smaller servings.

This does not need any additional spice, herb, or garnish.

Wordless Wednesday

Pork chops with heirloom tomatoes, basil and garlic

What to do with the cherry tomatoes

You know that scene in The Return of the King where Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn are in the cave with the ghost army, and all the millions of skulls coming tumbling down?

Now think cherry tomatoes instead of skulls. That's what I feel like.

One of the things that can catch inexperienced gardeners unaware is the bounty. Everyone's heard the apocryphal stories of the sneak zucchini attack-- some hapless gardener plants 10 zucchinis in a fit of madness and can't get rid of them, so they leave them on some unsuspecting neighbor's porch in the middle of the night.

This year, as part of the Eat Real Food challenge at Not Dabbling in Normal, I decided to see if I could preserve enough food to make it into January before resorting to store bought (since I'm trying to stay local and seasonal). I planted twice as many tomatoes as usual, plus 6 cherry tomatoes, thinking I'd eat the cherries and preserve the full size.

And like the newbie that I'm not, I got caught unaware-- I've got cherries out the wazzoo. About 4-5 quarts so far, with double that ripening as I write. They make great snacks, and a friend is taking 2 quarts (plus some corn, and though she doesn't know it yet, refrigerator pickles, not to mention, ahem, zucchini) in payment for a design job, bless her, but what to do with the rest?

Cherry Tomato Eggplant Bruschetta
1 quart Cherry Tomatoes (about 60-80 tomatoes, depending on the size)
1 eggplant
garlic to taste (let's say 3 large cloves)
2+ T olive oil plus 1 T olive oil
Fresh herbs (basil is nice, also parsley, also oregano)
Salt and pepper

Adjust quantities if you have 80 pounds of cherry tomatoes, like I appear to.

Peel and dice eggplant and dredge it with salt. Let it sit for 30 minutes to an hour, until some liquid has accumulated. Rinse, pat dry, and macerate in 2 tablespoons olive oil until thoroughly absorbed. Quarter or dice the tomatoes, chop the herbs very fine, press the garlic. Mix it all together with the remaining olive oil. At this point you can either roast it in a cool oven (300-325F/150-160C) for 45-55 minutes, or cook it in a skillet at high heat for about 5 minutes. Cool and eat right away, or spoon the hot bruschetta into hot jars and heat preserve. For a sweet garlic taste, roast a head of garlic whole first, then whip that with the olive oil before mixing it all together.

Cherry Tomato Salsa
Use any basic salsa recipe, just with quartered cherry tomatoes instead of diced full-sized tomatoes. Here's one from mykitchenaddiction.com:

1 pint cherry tomatoes, quartered
1 red onion, finely diced
1 jalapeño, minced
Juice from 1/2 of a lemon (I'd rather use lime, but she uses lemon)
1/4 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
Kosher salt

Toss the cherry tomatoes, red onion, and jalapeño together in a small mixing bowl. Squeeze the lemon (um, lime?) juice over the mixture, and stir in the fresh cilantro. Season to taste with salt. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes prior to serving.

Cherry Tomato Paste
You need at least 3 quarts of cherry tomatoes to end up with a pint of paste, or a quart of sauce. Put the tomatoes into a sauce pan with a little water (maybe a quarter cup, just to keep them from burning until they start to release their own liquid). Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until all the tomatoes have lost their shape. Run through progressively finer sieves in a food mill, until the seeds and skin are separated. Compost the seeds and skin, or use them as the base for stock. (Then compost them.) Return the tomato-y liquid to the pan and cook down by half (i.e. keep cooking and stirring until half or more of the water has simmered off.) Spoon hot paste into hot jars (1 cup for paste, larger for a thinner paste, larger still for a sauce consistency) and heat seal. Since cherry tomatoes have a high sugar content, for extra insurance against spoiling add a little lemon juice, citric acid or vinegar. (Do this to taste. You don't want your tomato paste to be sour. For additional insurance, store these cold.) If you like, you can add salt, spices, garlic or onion to this, but I like the flexibility of a pure paste.

Dried Cherry tomatoes
Cut your tomatoes in half and lay between two clean screens. Set out in the sun for 2-3 days; bringing them in overnight. (from the gardener behind Read Between the Limes). Colleen Vanderlinden, the organic gardening guru at About.com, says she does this with her grape tomatoes especially.

More tweeted advice:
Canning

Freezing

Thanks to all my tweeps for the ideas!

Zombie Corn, flavor, and Sungold sauce

The weird gray mass in my corn turns out to be Corn Smut, aka Ustilago maydis aka Huitlacoche (“wee-tlah-KOH-cheh”), and is apparently edible. Now, I’m a pretty adventurous eater, but frankly, I draw the line at Zombie Corn.

Also made an interesting discovery about the Bloody Butcher from Seed Savers Exchange— every husk has 2-3 ears growing in it, unfortunately at wildly different rates, and you can't harvest the oldest without also pulling the youngest, since they share a husk and a stem. So assuming I can keep ahead of the aphids, I’m going to try leaving these and see if I can get some of these multiple husks all to mature.

One of the interesting things about growing different corn varieties is that different types taste differently. The Bon Appetit is as sweet as candy, no joke. Eye poppingly sweet. The Bloody Butcher has a smoky deep flavor, it tastes roasted even when it’s braised. The Country Gentleman has the "corniest’ flavor so far, which is probably why it’s a popular backyard variety.

This is one of the most interesting things about growing your own food. You rediscover variety in places you've been trained not to expect variety. Different tomatoes have not only different shapes, but also different flavors, sometimes subtle but sometimes dramatic, like the three different corns. Eating three different varieties of cherry tomatoes in a row is as different as eating a bagel and then a cookie and then pasta. All the same basic ingredients, but wildly different flavors.

Sungold Pasta Sauce
1 quart mixed cherry tomatoes, primarily golden
1 bell pepper, red or green, seeded and diced
1 large clove garlic, crushed
large handful white mushrooms, diced

Blanche the tomatoes and pull off the skins. This is tedious, but worth it. I made this without peeling the tomatoes and found the skins to be tough and distracting in the sauce, although my husband didn't mind them. Set the peeled tomatoes aside.

Heat up a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, then add the mushrooms and garlic. Saute until the mushrooms have absorbed all the oil. If you want your sauce to have a mushroomy back taste, add about 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice and saute until the mushrooms release liquid. Add the green peppers and saute until just going soft. Add the tomatoes and continue cooking until their structure breaks down. For additional texture and color, throw in some unpeeled small sweet red or black cherry tomatoes.

This sauce will have a golden/pale green color, very lovely and unusual.

Serve over your pasta of choice with grated parmesan or romano cheese and a nice woodsy white.

Economies of scale

One thing about eating "real" and local is convenience. It is terribly counter intuitive. It turns out to be much more challenging, expensive, and time consuming to buy flour, eggs, milk and meat from Wisconsin, 50 miles away, than it is to buy kiwifruits from Chile.

I did finally find a local-ish place to get chicken and eggs, Harrison Poultry Farms, about 15 miles. They weren't on localharvest.com so maybe their farm in southern Wisconsin doesn't make the "local" cut.

There's another Wisconsin farm called Great River that seems to sell flour to Sam's Club, so I'm off to Sam's Club some time this week to buy $2.20 a pound flour, grown and milled in Southern Wisconsin, as opposed to 70c a pound flour, grown and milled god knows where-- you can't tell from the packaging. India for all I know. I worked out the cost-- if I make all my own bread, the expensive flour makes each loaf about the same price as the store brand. If you count my time as having no monetary value.

I can get local milk at Whole Foods; I just have to forsake a 20-year-old vow never to shop at Whole Foods since they closed down all the old locally owned organic grocers that they bought when they moved in, despite promises not to. (And the ones they couldn't buy they forced out of business.) Local cheese is abundant at the regular chain markets, thank goodness. I actually have a neighborhood butcher (!); he tells me his meat is from Iowa, and I'm going to count that as close enough for jazz.

In all, the thing that this challenge seems to boil down to is the American character. As a red blooded rugged individualist I find myself resisting the time I have to carve out of a tight schedule, greater good bedamned. Not counting cooking time, I figure I have about 8 hours a week for non-work work, if you see what I mean, like blogging and meeting these challenges. Instead of one-stop-shopping for groceries, and being able to walk to the store, I have to go to several different shops all over the north side (I just can't justify trekking to the south side or the 'burbs for this). I realize that doing this might start a butterfly effect. If every singleton decides "not worth the trouble" then we'll never create a critical mass to force change. But do I really want to be the pebble that starts the landslide? Do I really have that power?

I guess that's why they call it a challenge.

All in all, it seemed appropriate to go rogue here in my frustration, and propose a risotto which I made with imported rice (already in the larder), hothouse tomatoes (yay! local, and extremely expensive) and summer squash. Ah, irony.

Tomato risotto with summer squash

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil (or use the oil from the sundrieds)
1/2 cup minced yellow onion (about 1/4 pound)
1 tablespoon minced garlic (about 4 cloves)
1 tablespoon sun dried tomatoes, diced
1 cup Arborio rice
3 medium tomatoes, seeded and diced
1 medium summer squash, diced
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups vegetable stock
Freshly ground black pepper
1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (from Wisconsin, hooray!)
coarse salt (optional)

Melt butter with oil in a 2 quart stock pot; stir in onions, sundried tomatoes, and garlic, saute until onions are translucent. Add rice and stir to coat, cook for about 4 more minutes. Add tomatoes. Start adding broth 1/2 cup at a time, simmering each time until all the liquid is absorbed. There may be some stock left over. Halfway through this process, add the squash.

Stir in pepper and cheese, add salt to taste, if desired, and serve hot.

A new dish and an old complaint

Coffee with Mealah and Isaac this morning-- lovely. They were amazed at my endless blogging. I often attribute it to either my insomnia or my manic episodes-- you can get a lot done on the happy edge of crazy, but actually I think it's more because the web is such a controllable environment.

On line, I have no boss, or deadline. I can delete the unpleasant comments, and only interact with people who agree with me. I don't care if people don't like me, or object to my pink hair, or think they are better than me. On line, no one is better than me. On line I'm an expert cook, and a master gardener, and a wonderful mom, and who's to say me nay?

Today, an experiment, drawn from the web and then tweaked to be my own. This is essentially pizza casserole

Baked mozzarella

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2-4 slices coarse country-style bread
salt and freshly ground pepper
2-3 tomatoes, cut into thick slices
13 oz mozzarella cheese, sliced
several slices hard salami, cut into small pieces
3 tablespoons fresh basil





DIRECTIONS:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Pour the oil into a baking dish. Arrange the bread slices in the baking dish so they are slightly overlapping in a single layer. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Cover the bread with the tomatoes . Arrange the mozzarella over the toms, then put the salami over all. Sprinkle with the oregano or basil.

For vegetarian, substitute walnuts for the salami.

Bake in a preheated 400 degrees F oven for about 20 minutes.

Back from the dark side

The dark side being tv dinners.

I've never been one to avoid fast food, although prepared food has always somewhat stumped me. Canned soup, okay, although soup is so easy to make, but mashed potatoes or stuffing out of a box? This seems bizarre to me. Although my daughter is a big fan of Kraft Mac and Cheese, but there is a kind of American primal response to it.

But up, at last, from my week-long bout with maybe-the-flu I wanted to cook. Last night I combined the best of both worlds making one of those Asia-in-a-box meals, with my own fresh vegetables and pine nuts. This morning I took my giant stash of fresh parsley (grown from seed, yay me) and dried half, then made a pesto with the other half. Parsley is one of those things that for some reason I hate to buy. It seems like cheating somehow.

Moving on to lunch, I recall my brother's amusing comment that there was a spy in my tomatoes, and thought, hmmm. So here's another Xan original.

Tomato-Apple Soup with leeks and chard

2 cups chicken or vegetable stock
2 pounds ripe tomatoes
3 small apples, peeled and chopped fine
1/2 c. leeks, chopped very fine
3 cups loose of chopped chard (about 9 large leaves)

Place the apples and leeks with the stock in a medium saucepan,simmer. Blanche* and seed the tomatoes and conserve the water. Add the tomato meat to the stock. Run the seeds and skins through a food mill to extract every bit of delicious juice, add to pot. Simmer 30 minutes or more, until all vegetables are completely broken down. Puree (easiest way is with a hand held submersible blender, although you can also use a food processor or blender). Blanche the chard in the conserved water, drain and add to the soup just before serving.

Serve plain or garnish with a dollop of plain yogurt or sour cream.

* This is how you peel tomatoes. Drop each one in boiling water for 15-20 seconds. When it comes out the skin will slip right off, leaving all the meat for eating.

REALLY scratch spaghetti sauce

Despite gloomy forecasts, it was sunny and 60 on Sunday, so I was able to get out into the garden and some of that end-of-year work that’s been nagging. I managed to get a good harvest of leeks (watch this space for cream of leek soup, coming up in a couple of days), broccoli, parsley, and carrots, and mowed the lawn maybe the second to last time for the year. And then I just sat on my stoop and looked at the garden and thought, "this is the feeling that everything I do should give me. This is how good I want to feel about what I do in my life."

Because working in the garden gives me a feeling of utter well being. Better than a pill.

Today's recipe is actually inspired by my bag-ripened tomatoes, and it's time to talk about how to make tomato sauce from the whole fruit.

Tomato sauce or puree from fresh tomatoes
To remove the skin, you need to blanche the tomatoes. Boil water in a 2-quart saucepan. When it's at a rolling boil, dip each tomato in, whole, for a count of 20-30 (or until the skin splits, whichever comes first). Remove it, and take the skin right off (it should just slip right off). Cut the tomato in quarters, and scoop out the seeds, set them aside with the skin (you'll make juice with these). Also core them, then roughly cut the remaining meat and put them in a second sauce pan.

Run the cores, skin and seeds through food mill, or just press them through a sieve if you don't have a food mill (although you should have one). You should end up with a nice red tomato juice, just poor this right back into the sauepan with the tomato chunks. Simmer this down to the desired consistency for either sauce or paste.

You can make about a quart of sauce from 6 large or 10 smallish tomatoes.

Tomato sauce with roasted bell pepper

2 large bell peppers, different colors
1-2 pints of tomato sauce
4 medium garlic cloves, crushed and chopped
1/2 large onion, diced
4 bay leaves
1 Tablespoon dried oregano
1-2 teaspoons sugar if needed
salt and pepper to taste

To roast the peppers, cut them in half, remove the seeds and stem and roast at 400F/200C for 20 minutes or until the skin starts to brown. Remove from oven, remove the skin (should be easy) and dice.

Saute onion and garlic in a little olive oil, add the tomato sauce and simmer. After about 5 minutes, add peppers, oregano, and bay. Give it a taste and add remaining flavorings. The roasted peppers give this sauce quite a sweet taste; I liked it better with a little sugar added, so that the tomato also leaned to the sweet rather than the acid side. For a really sweet sauce, add a pinch of baking soda.

Serve over your pasta of choice.

Jenn brings lunch

My friend Jenn came over today to talk about art and skating, and brought bounty with her, a homemade minestrone made from farmstand vegetables, sourdough bread, and chocolate eclairs. I provided the ambience and the homemade cherry soda. A perfect finish to a week of rain and flu.

Minestrone is another "stone soup" type of dish. There are some things you must put in there to call it minestrone-- cabbage, red beans, tomato, carrots, oregano-- but otherwise pretty much anything will do. Jenn threw in some brussels sprouts she had hanging around.

Minestrone

The Broth:
Beef or vegetable broth, homemade or canned
1 can of whole tomatoes, or 3-5 cut up fresh tomatoes
oregano, salt, pepper

The Bulk:
Thinly sliced onion
crushed or pressed garlic* (please fresh cloves only. Dried garlic is an abomination)
Kidney beans
1/2 large or 1 small head cabbage, rough cut
coupla carrots, cut in good sized chunks
something green (broccoli, spinach, green beans, or even brussels sprouts)

If you use dried beans, give yourself enough time to plan ahead. Most packages say soak overnight, but I've found this never gets them soft enough. I've found it works better to boil them for about 20 minutes, then drain and resoak in hot water at least 2 hours. Home-picked beans from a backyard garden also need to be processed this way; they'll behave like dried. But canned beans are fine, just remember to drain them well. I like to use different colored beans, from black to pinto, for the interesting visual sometimes.

Sautee the onions and garlic in some olive oil. When the onion turns translucent, add the broth ingredients, and then pretty much right away the remaining ingredients. Simmer for an hour. More. Less if you're impatient. Make enough to save, because this stuff is better from sitting overnight.

Garnish with grated parmesan or romano cheese; serve with a nice heavy peasant bread.

Thanks Jenn!

* to peel garlic with no mess or fuss, lay each clove on its side, snip off the ends, and gently tap with the flat of a large knife. The paper will fall off easily and you can crush, chop, or put it in the garlic press.

Spaghetti sauce from a jar? Bite your tongue.

I've noticed that lately, the prepared food ads don't say "good as homemade" anymore. They say "good as restaurant food" or "better than restaurant food." When did that happen? One of the most common "good as homemade" accolades used to go to spaghetti sauce in a jar, but I can tell you, nothing is as good as homemade.

Now, full disclosure, I'm a big fan of jar spaghetti sauce. We always called it "fake spaghetti" and it was a quick, almost-like-homemade meal for those nights when you just can't bring yourself to cook and you don't want to spend money on pizza. I remember my daughter, I think it was, showing me some p.r. puff piece or column (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference) about moms "heating up the Ragu in a pot" and putting it on spaghetti. Amateurs. The real moms cook the spaghetti and just dump the Ragu onto it straight out of the jar. The hot spaghetti heats it up just fine. Oy.

But nothing beats homemade.

Spaghetti with meat sauce

1 6 oz can pure tomato paste
1 8 oz can whole peeled tomatoes

1/2 pound chopped beef
1 half medium onion, diced
1 large green pepper, diced
10-15 medium mushrooms diced
2-3 medium garlic cloves, smashed or pressed
dried oregano, salt, pepper to taste

In a medium frying pan or 2-quart saucepan, brown the chopped beef, don't worry if the pan gets a little browned too. Do not drain the fat off (the fat gives it flavor, and also releases the essential oils in the herbs). Add a couple tablespoons of olive oil, let that heat up, then add the diced vegetables. Add the oregano (couple three tablespoons?) and some salt and pepper. I like dried herbs for spaghetti sauce. Saute until the onion is starting to go translucent, then add the tomato paste. Scrape back the meat/veggies and let the tomato paste brown just a little, then add the whole tomatoes, about 1/2 cup of red wine and a cup of water. Browning the tomato paste gives the sauce a nice flavor.

Simmer down to a thick sauce and spoon hot over your pasta of choice.

You can make a sauce your own by experimenting with other flavorings like cinnamon or orange zest.

Sprinkle with commercial parmesan from a jar, or grate your own parmesan or romano. Serve with a nice chianti. By candlelight.

Food for a rainy day

Forty degrees and torrential winter rain, plus a long discussion on line about fennel of all things, inspired this meal today.

Nearly identical recipes for tomato fennel soup are all over the web, but I originally found it in the Chicago Tribune Cookbook 20 years ago when I grew fennel and tomatoes in my own garden for the first time. Back then, I grew the wrong kind of fennel (some fennel you grow for seeds, and some for the fleshy bulb). I got the seed kind, which has a woody, inedible root and no bulb. I used it anyway, but it added just flavor, no edibles. This one is made with proper bulb or Florence fennel. The anise flavor of the fennel adds both sweet and savory elements, and compliments the acidic tomato beautifully.

This recipe made two large bowls of soup, which we served with grilled cheese made the America’s Test Kitchen way (with melted butter, butter the bread, not the skillet).

Roasted Tomato and Fennel Soup
Coat a baking sheet with cooking spray; preheat oven to 325F/160C


Halve 6 medium tomatoes (or 8 plum tomatoes) and place skin up on the baking sheet. Add two small fennel bulbs cut into wedges or chunks, a halved onion, and 2-3 garlic cloves wrapped in foil. Brush the vegetables with olive oil, season with salt and pepper (I use sea salt and mixed white and green pepper for this recipe) and roast for 50 minutes. While this is baking, make stock with the fennel greens and onion skins. (You can also used canned stock—vegetable or chicken, but making your own stock both improves the flavor of the soup, and reduces your carbon footprint.)

Once roasted, place the vegetables in a large saucepan with 2-3 cups of stock and simmer until the fennel is very soft. Remove the tomato skins and puree. I use a hand held immersible blender, or you can put it in a blender or food processor. Once it’s pureed, run it through a food mill to smooth it and reduce bulk.

Add half and half or cream and serve with grilled cheese on a cold rainy day.