so.freaking.good.

thanks for posting the recipe!!!

The dish is the vegetable. YOu could have had a protein in its own sauce beside the tomatoes. The pasta fits in well with the tomatoes. Both become one in this dish. Pasta takes own the flavor of the tomatoes and garlic and oil etc…

I gave up growing herbs for cooking in my patio. Can’t get the rapid rate of growth that would make it worth the effort. So the bon-sai’s rule the patio now.

There is a product at Publix herb freezer that is fresh herbs in oil. It comes in a tube and sits right under the fresh herbs.
Long story short I am trying some of these tubes to avoid the spoilage I get with fresh herbs. Can’t hurt… let you know more later after I have had a chance to try them. Same thing for tomato paste in a tube vs a can.
But for a special dish I think I will buy the fresh herb.

The pulp gets cooked with (garlic and olive oil or shallots/onions and butter) then pureed. The last step combines the puree with the fillets and chiffonade of basil/thyme/tarragon.

Make a curry mayo.

Pour or spoon frozen slushy tomatoes in to separate cups.
Add dollop of curry mayo to each and serve.

Refreshing and yummy.

*for extra piquancy, add chopped onion to tomato mixture.

500g Bread flour
300g fresh tomatoes, pureed until smooth in a blender (whole – skins, seeds, everything except the stem and core)
15 grams salt
2 tsp. dry active yeast
just enough water to dissolve yeast in(about 30 grams)

I add about 50 grams of mixed, ground grains (spelt, wheat berries, flax seed, rice) for texture.

This yields a rich tasting,light textured, yeasty loaf with a reddish/orange color/ It’s really good.

Step one: Buy some good looking (and good smelling) heirloom tomatoes at the Farmer’s Market. And pick up anything else that looks good, foodwise. The local Farmer’s Market is one of the few places to shop that I’ll recommend to customers at the supermarket where I work, because they aren’t really competition for us, and it’s a social event. Given the tourists that come through the supermarket during the summer, if I spot a vacationer at my register that clearly is shopping for a week and is interested in food (you can tell from what they’re buying, trust me), I’ll tell them about the Farmer’s Market and almost every time be thanked for the information. Yes, we food people can spot one another.

Step two: Drop by the local gourmet shoppe, if I happen to be out of angel hair pasta nests. Oh, heck, drop by just for the fun of it, because they’re really nice people. And there’s almost nothing they sell that we sell at the supermarket, so there’s none of that “competition” problem. This is one of the other places I’ll tell customers about.

Step three: Drop by the store. Buy shrimp, uncooked, shells on. And if there’s anything else that looks good over in the produce section, grab it.

Step four: Shell and devein the shrimp.

Step five: Simmer up a nice broth from the shells, with any aromatics going in at this point. Ginger is nice. Garlic is nice. Peppercorns are nice. A few herbs are nice. Strain out the shells – crunch is not desirable in this dish.

Step six: Cook up a couple of angel hair nests. I love how a nest is a perfect portion for a meal.

Step seven (performed at the same time as step six): Steam the shrimp. It’s the best way I know of to keep from overcooking them.

Step eight (again, at about the same time): Chop up those tomatoes into nice bites. Do the same with any other veg that’s going into the bowl.

Step nine: Plate. Or, more accurately, bowl. In a large soup bowl, first add the cooked angel hair, then the tomatoes (and other veg), then the steamed shrimp, then pour the broth over everything. Any fresh basil, or other fresh herbs? Add them now.

Step ten: Serve. Smile back when partner smiles.

Yeah, the tomatoes are basically uncooked, other than from the broth. But that’s the point of getting good, fresh tomatoes.

And I always get more shrimp than we need for dinner. Having the extra shells is nice, and my partner likes having the extra shrimp for lunch the next day. It’s one of the bonuses of cooking for two.

At 51, my knees ache after a day of hiking or skiing and my left wrist get’s sore when it rains….other than that I’m in pretty good shape for an old reprobate.

the top pic is awesome!

Thanks, Michael, for your recipes and conjuring up a great childhood memory for me.

We lived in the country when I was growing up in Ohio (Lorain County .. west of Cleveland). Surrounding us were fields — what they called a truck farm — where the local farmer (we called him Louie) grew veggies and trucked them to the West Side market in downtown Cleveland. He would back the truck up to this long covered area where, early in the mornings before sunrise, he would sell big baskets of whatever was ripe at the time to grocery stores and other vendors.

He would pay us neighborhood kids a couple bucks to ride in with him to unload his truck — cheap labor for him and always a blast for us! Can’t believe our moms let us go.

My favorite summers were the ones when Louie used the land behind our house to grow tomatoes. I know I must have consumed my weight in them those summers! Oh, my dad had plenty in our garden, but they always tasted better when we “snitched” them from Louie… never thinking we were really stealing because, geez, he had SO MANY!

Us kids had a couple of those cardboard salt shakers stashed away in our “fort” in the rocks. We’d sneak into the field, pick a nice big ripe tomato and retreat to our fort and chow down — the juice dripping down our arms.

Wow, I can almost taste it — juicy, tender and salty … and always warm from the sun. To this day I still like ‘em warm.

I’m sure Louie is gone by now … to the big truck farm in the sky. I probably should feel guilty about all his tomatoes I ate for free through the years.

But … nah.

Somehow I don’t think Louie minded all that much. Afterall, he had SO MANY!

I grow basil in my garden and have some Italian parsley, too. I don’t buy the herbs already started, they are very easy to grow from seed. In fact, this year’s basil plants are last year’s basil’s babies. In the fall I let them go to seed and collect the seeds. It’s incredibly easy. Oh, and free.

FYI, I doubt many of your readers are participating in the Food Stamp program, but I feel the need to let anyone to whom this applies know that you can buy seeds for edible plants with Food Stamps. Even in an apartment one can grow herbs in the windowsills.

Some of those I didn’t even use in cooking this spring/summer, but I liked knowing I had them if I wanted them. I feel a little geeky about how much I’m looking forward to seeing what overwinters and what I can replace/add next spring.

My brother is eight years older than me and actually did Woodstock the first time around and so it is with this i begin a story about herbs in my house..(this was a lost memory until a year ago i read a story in Food and Wine about how the writer gave his father a lime tree, i believe, instead of a meyer lemon tree and lied about it.

Perhaps because Mr.Antin’s educated father reminded me of my own who could re-count all my brother’s faults but could never tell the difference in the marijuana plant that my father watered and cared for a whole summer, and wondered out loud one night why my brother was cutting the leaves.

Why, for herbs in the tomato sauce at work, was the standard response my brother ALWAYS gave; and so each time my mother made her tomato sauce, my father chopped a few of the leaves and placed them in the pot.

Dad died never knowing he watered and cared for a plant my brother smoked probably every weekend, and the tomato sauce lives on in all our memories.