Very Fresh Tomato Sauce

This is only for fresh summer tomatoes. Do not attempt this with canned tomatoes or you will be missing the point. This is Marcella Hazan's recipe.

While the pasta is cooking dice two nice big juicy tomatoes and put them in a heat proof bowl. Add one crushed garlic clove and S&P. If you want to throw in a chiffonade of fresh basil please do.

Heat a generous amount of good olive oil, at least 1/2 a cup but more if you like, to smoking. Pour hot olive oil over tomatoes. Everything will sizzle and the tomatoes will release their juices and the whole thing will marry into a fresh ambrosia. Drain pasta and toss with tomatoes. The garlic is a vibrant kick that does not go well with parmesan. This takes 12 minutes and is something you might want to eat every other day for as long as tomatoes are around.

Tomato Pie

Still lots of tomatoes around. This pie is scarfed down by all who taste it, even children.

Layers of sliced tomatoes go into a pie crust, the deeper the better, homemade or not. Season each layer with S&P. Spread on top a mixture of mayonaise (Hellman's) grated cheddar and parmesan, more S&P. Bread crumbs on top. Bake in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes to an hour till brown and bubbly. Let it cool a bit or a lot before serving. Yum.

Tomatoes Kept Us Alive

and corn, grean beans, summer squash, new potatoes, fiddlehead ferns...

I thought I could commute to LI every week for my Sous Chef gig, look for a city job, shepherd my kids through the dissolution of my marriage and post on this blog everyday, but it proved to be too much and the blog had to take a back seat for the summer. Summer has passed and I'm done with the commute and ready to hit the ground running. I'm looking back on the summer's travails and happy to know that at the very least we did eat dinner every night, even if I couldn't write about it. I brought a car load of produce back to Brooklyn every Sunday night and we lived on that all week until I had to go back on Thursdays.

We ate tomato salad with avocado, tomatoes with mozzarella, lots of succotash with diced tomato added in to eat with grilled chicken, fried eggs, grilled striped bass, grilled sausages etc. We ate tomatoes with the tops cut off, seeds and flesh scooped out and replaced with a mix of bread crumbs, garlic and herbs, drizzled with olive oil and baked. Those are really good with fried eggs too or cold for lunch the next day. So many things are good cold for lunch the next day. A quick saute of fresh August tomatoes and olive oil is such a good pasta sauce. Anyway, tomatoes cheered me up everyday and kept us fed.