Locally Grown Tomatoes Say Summer!

Whether you buy them from your farmers’ market or grow them yourself, richly flavored tomatoes are summer’s gift. One way to take advantage of this bounty is to make the incredibly simple but oh, so delicious dish variously known as pasta caprese, fresh tomato pasta, or summer pasta. Whatever you call it, the ingredients are the same: tomatoes, basil, fresh mozzarella, olive oil and garlic. The success of the recipe rests in their quality. Each must be bursting with flavor, so please, no cardboard-tasting supermarket tomatoes or dried basil from a dusty corner of the spice shelf.

Outside of the quality of the ingredients, you’ve got a lot of lee way here. Tweak the recipe to your taste, but don’t complicate it. Some say seed or peel the tomatoes; I say why bother. And it’s best at room temperature. Heated, the mozzarella can turn to rubbery strings. Chilled, it becomes a slick salad of muted flavor.

Here are rough proportions for 6 servings.

Place ½ C olive oil in a large bowl.

Finely chop or mince cloves of garlic. I only use a couple but my Italian friend Donna would throw in half a dozen. Stir the garlic into the olive oil.

Stack several fresh, good-sized basil leaves, a dozen or more, and cut them crosswise into little ribbons. Drop into the olive oil.

At this point, you can proceed or set the bowl aside, even for several hours. In fact, it will benefit from letting the basil and garlic flavors develop in the olive oil for a while. Do not refrigerate!

Sometime within an hour or two of meal time, chop six or seven of those lovely big tomatoes into bite-sized pieces and put them along with their juices into the bowl.

When you’re ready to eat, or fairly close to it, cook a pound of pasta. Use any kind with a short stubby shape like penne or rigatoni or fusilli. When it is al dente, drain it, sprinkle with salt and grinds of pepper, then dump it into the tomatoes and oil and stir everything together.

Cut a pound of fresh mozzarella into small cubes and gently mix them in.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve this in bowls so the juices puddle in the bottom and you can mop them up with a good chewy sour dough bread. I like to grate some Parmigiano-Reggiano over the top and sprinkle with extra basil. You also could get cute and throw on a few pine nuts but you don’t need to.

This dish can stand up to a light to medium bodied red wine, but a chilled crisp white seems more summery. Serve it as a company meal or an indulgent solitary repast, but enjoy it often while summer and the tomatoes last.

Charlene Scores With Breakfast Innovation

“Great looking muffins!” I exclaimed when I walked into Charlene’s kitchen one morning last winter.

“I made them yesterday,” she said. “Kind of an experiment.”

Charlene and I both enjoy tasty whole grain breakfast breads. For years whenever I visited her, we breakfasted on sumptuous hearty bagels. Then our favorite bagel shop closed and the search for a suitable substitute was on.

I tucked into the experimental muffins. They were wonderful! Hearty, full of grainy flavor, and with a subtle crunch that was hard to identify.

“These are great! How did you make them?”

Charlene pushed over a tattered copy of her old cook book.

Yes, some of you may remember that Charlene put out a cook book—lo, these many years ago. It includes healthy recipes drawn from friends and fans. The muffins I was enjoying were inspired by High Fibre Bran Muffins contributed by Debbie Sergeant.

But Charlene was out of many of the ingredients, so she got creative and we learned just how flexible Debbie’s easy recipe is. Charlene didn’t have all-bran cereal so she used Grape-Nuts. That was the crunch! For wheat bran she substituted oat bran. And honey in place of molasses. She added dried cranberries instead of fresh blueberries. Substitutions for four ingredients had been made with no ill effects!

Here is the original recipe with Charlene’s substitutions in parentheses.

High Fibre Bran Muffins (or Charlene’s Grape-Nut Specials)

1 C whole wheat flour
1 t baking soda
1 C all-bran cereal (or Grape-Nuts cereal)
1 C wheat bran (or oat bran)
1 C skim milk
½ C molasses (or honey)
1 egg, beaten lightly with a fork or whisk
¼ C blueberries (or dried cranberries)

Mix together the dry ingredients. Add the milk and honey or molasses to the beaten egg and stir well. Pour this into the dry ingredients and stir just until mixed. Fold in the fruit. Spoon into muffin cups.

Bake at 375 degrees F for 15 to 17 minutes or until they feel firm to the touch.

This makes a baker’s dozen of big muffins. Tip: As muffin tins only have a dozen cups, use a ramekin or oven proof custard dish to bake extra batter for the thirteenth muffin.

Since that morning, I’ve played fast and loose with other substitutions and the muffins still shine. I’ve used a combination of wheat bran and rolled oats and used Uncle Sam’s as the cereal. I’ve even substituted sorghum as the sweetener. And any kind of fruit works, dried or fresh.

Homemade muffins are a great breakfast food. When you bake them yourself, you control the ingredients—no chemical dough conditioners or strange fats or hidden sugars. You make them whenever you have time and after they’re cool, pop them in the freezer. The night before you want muffins for breakfast, take out two per person and by the next morning they’re thawed and ready to eat. Split and toast them in the toaster if you want.

Even if you aren’t familiar with baking, these muffins couldn’t be easier. They are stirred up with no special equipment. They are healthful and freeze well. And most important—they are delicious!

Real Food

“But what do you eat?” a new acquaintance asks, perplexed to learn I never order fast food or buy processed convenience fare.

I try to explain that the list of what I eat is very long since it includes virtually all consumables in the natural world, but she remains unconvinced.

What have we North Americans come to when those among us who refuse to eat manufactured or non-food foods are considered strange or unusual? What does it tell us that “non-food food” is an actual food industry term applied to artificial concoctions like whipped topping or processed cheese food and that millions eat these fabrications?

Europeans who visit this continent are appalled by the dismal quality of what most of us accept as food. "Have Americans no taste buds?" they wonder. And, indeed, excessive sweetness, unrelenting saltiness and heavy oiliness can actually dull the sense of taste so that only sweet, salty grease satisfies the palate.

The sad thing about this, aside from the well documented health consequences, is that food is such an ubiquitous joy. And it doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Sure I can spent days creating a complex and delicious cassoulet, and there are times I want to do this. But I’ve also had a simple bowl of pinto beans from a tiny Mexican restaurant called Mia’s that I still dream about years later. And the summer I was fourteen I stood on a street in Manhattan and bit into what was surely the most perfect peach in the world. Sweet and tangy, it was so exquisite that the memory of the gaudy fruit stand, the hot pavement under my sandals, the raucous clamor of the traffic are forever affixed in my mind by the radiant taste of that peach.

Good food is a primal joy of life. I shudder to think of being deprived of it.

But how do we avoid being seduced by the illusion of convenience? Food preparation (or non-preparation) habits form and harden and make real food seem beyond reach. Let’s encourage one another—share not only recipes but tricks and ideas for welcoming real food, glorious food, into our lives.