On Monday I really, really didn’t feel like going anywhere, including the grocery store. I rummaged through the refrigerator, then tossed a tweet out asking for suggestions based on my main available ingredients: macaroni noodles, fresh tomatoes, feta and salami. Cook Local (as well as my cousin Katherine) came through with an improvised pasta idea – thanks! I decided to add arugula at the last moment, partly to add color but mostly because a friend gave us a bag of arugula that still needed to be finished off – I had forgotten to list it among my assets.

The truffled salami here was in my IFBC goody bag. It was extremely fragrant – when I cut into it the smell of truffles infused the entire house and lingered for hours and hours. I used half of it in this pasta and we ate the other half last night, sliced thinly and tucked into hot gougères alongside Negroni cocktails. To quote James Oseland, Oh my god that was so good.

The main thing I learned here is that feta is a great thing to add to pasta. I’ve recently started buying an Israeli sheep feta that is gloriously soft and salty, and it vanishes into hot macaroni like butter. I had thought about making an actual white sauce for more of a mac-and-cheese effect, but it really wasn’t necessary. Yum.

Truffled Salami Macaroni

A highly improvised recipe. Serves two with lots of leftovers.

• half a truffled salami, finely diced
• two handfuls fresh ripe tomatoes, halved or quartered
• one handful arugula, roughly chopped
• half a pound macaroni noodles, cooked and drained (reserve a cup of the cooking water)
• random quantity feta cheese (maybe a cup?), crumbled

Saute the salami in a little olive oil, then add the tomatoes. Once they are heated through, toss in the arugula to wilt, then stir in the macaroni. Sprinkle the feta over the top and gently stir it all together until the cheese is melted. Add leftover pasta water if the sauce needs loosening. Serve immediately.

Not the prettiest dish in the world, but extremely good. And easy!

The sauce, a mixture of tomato, cream, green chile, cilantro and spices, is straight from a Madhur Jaffrey recipe, but she wants you to serve it with prawns. We made it that way for a while, then hit on the idea of stirring in lightly cooked peas instead of shrimp. We’ve done it this way ever since.

First, your tomatoes. I often use one of those small cans of Hunt’s tomato sauce, but any tomato puree will do. Then measure in the garam masala, salt and ground cumin, and just a pinch of cayenne. I like to grate the chile and ginger on a microplane, but you could chop it by hand if you like little bursts of flavor. Add a handful of chopped cilantro and some lemon juice. Stir it all together. Then pour in some cream. Cook the peas lightly in boiling water, drain, and stir into the sauce. Eat over rice.

Or, make the sauce, hold the peas, and serve it as a chilled soup. That would be pretty awesome. Leftovers of this, with or without rice, are rather good with scrambled eggs. Or just eaten straight for breakfast with a spoon.

Peas in Spiced Tomato-Cream Sauce

Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s Spice Kitchen: Fifty Recipes Introducing Indian Spices and Aromatic Seeds

• 8 oz tomato puree or sauce
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 3/4 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• pinch cayenne (or more if you’re a heat fiend)
• 1 green chile (serrano or jalapeño), chopped or grated
• 1 tsp fresh ginger, chopped or grated
• 3 Tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
• 1 Tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1-2 cups frozen or fresh peas (depending on how saucy you want the final dish), lightly boiled and drained

Combine everything except the peas and stir well. When the peas are cooked (as much as you want – I like them still a bit firm), drain them and stir them into the sauce. Serve warm or room temperature.

Here’s a lovely sauce to make you feel like it’s summer again, even though it may be more than a little snowy outside. Oven-roasted tomatoes and peppers, pureed with chipotles and spices, then simmered with onion until thick, make for a spicy rich sauce redolent of the flavors of late summer. Using the sauce to braise country-style pork ribs makes for some fabulous winter tacos.

We’ve just started to get into the half pig we bought recently. The chops we started with were fantastic, pan-seared and coated with a cider reduction. More recently I tried braising some blade steaks in a sauce of vinegar, mustard and beer, which was eye-rollingly good but one of the ugliest plates I’ve ever produced (the braised green cabbage on the side didn’t help matters). These ribs came somewhere in between, and while I didn’t get any pictures of the shredded pork tacos, trust me that they were extremely successful as well. However, don’t feel that you need to use this sauce with pork – it would be great used for enchiladas, or on eggs, or stirred into a pot of beans, or anywhere that could use a shot of spicy tomato goodness.

Roasted tomato-pepper sauce with chipotles

from (guess where?) All About Braising by Molly Stevens

• 3/4 lb tomatoes
• 1 red bell pepper
• 3 cloves garlic (we left this out of this batch, due to a friend’s allergy)
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• 1 1/2 Tbsp cider vinegar
• 2 or 3 chipotles in adobo
• salt
• 1 tsp sugar (optional)
• 1 onion, diced

Turn on the broiler and set a rack about four inches below the heat. Place the tomatoes, pepper and garlic on a baking sheet and position under the flame. Broil, turning occasionally (and removing any vegetables that seem done) until everything is bubbly and slightly charred on all sides. Remove from the oven and let cool.

Core the tomatoes and peel off the skin, peel the garlic, and peel and seed the bell pepper. Drop them in a food processor.  Add the dried spices, vinegar, chipotles (with some of their sauce), and some salt, and process to a coarse puree. Taste, add salt and/or sugar as needed.

Fry the onion in olive oil until soft, then pour in the puree and simmer for about ten minutes. Use it for anything you like.

If braising pork in the sauce: take 2 or 3 pounds of  country-style ribs, season them with salt and pepper and sear them in batches in a skillet. When browned all over, lay them in a gratin dish and pour the sauce all over. Cover tightly with foil and put in the oven for an hour or so at 300°. Take off the foil and roast another 30 minutes at 350°. Serve as is, or take the meat out of the sauce to cool and shred it by hand, then combine it with the sauce again.

Stuffing cheese into a chicken thigh doesn’t necessarily sound like a wise idea, but when the cheese in question is panir, a dry non-melting Indian cheese, all is well. We found this dish in a recently acquired cookbook, Modern Spice (on clearance at Village Books!), which is full of wonderful recipes that fuse Indian flavors with the American pantry. In this case bone-in chicken parts are stuffed with Indian herbs and spices mixed with Indian cheese, but baked in the oven instead of being simmered in liquid on the stovetop, as with so much Indian cookery. The chicken gets crispy on top, and the stuffing takes on the flavor of the bird as well as that lovely cheesy toastiness and a kick of chile heat.

Panir is crucial to this recipe, since no other cheese behaves quite like it (maybe halloumi?), but if you can’t find panir you could still make all the other ingredients into a rub for roasted chicken parts. What’s not to like about butter, chiles, ginger, garlic and cilantro?

A fusiony sort of dish like this didn’t seem to need a traditional Indian accompaniment, so we recreated a salad we invented on our Paris vacation, caramelizing finely diced fennel in a skillet and stirring in chopped ripe tomatoes. Pure essence of summer, it played beautifully off the spicy cheese and chicken. With a bright Sangiovese rosé, this was a very successful summer-to-autumn transitional dinner.

Panir-stuffed Chicken Thighs

adapted from Modern Spice by Monica Bhide

• 4 bone-in skin-on chicken thighs
• 1 garlic clove, pressed
• piece of ginger, grated
• 1 Tbsp melted butter
• 1 1/4 tsp kosher salt
• 1 cup finely grated panir
• 2 serrano chiles, red or green, minced
• 2 Tbsp cilantro, minced
• 1/4 tsp ground turmeric
• 1 tsp red chile flakes (our serranos were so hot we left these out)

Preheat the oven to 375°.

Combine the butter, 1 tsp salt, ginger and garlic. Loosen the skin on the thighs, then rub the paste all over the chicken.

Combine the panir, chiles, cilantro, turmeric, chile flakes and the remaining 1/4 tsp salt. Stuff this mixture under the skin of each thigh. Place the chicken in a roasting pan, skin side up.

Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until cooked through and the skin is crispy on top. You can either baste the thighs halfway through, or use my technique of just turning them in their juices with tongs.

The tomato harvest this year has really blown me away. Normally, having just one or two vines in pots on the deck, I’m lucky if I have enough tomatoes to make the occasional salad, or to top a taco now and then. This year the stars aligned to produce showers of juicy little red Stupice tomatoes and bowlfuls of Sungold cherry tomatoes, including the single prettiest tomato I have ever grown. Look, isn’t it beautiful?

So, finding myself in the unusual position of needing to eat a lot of tomatoes all at once, I opened a few cookbooks at random and found a recipe: Oven Roasted Tomatoes with Thyme and Garlic, from James Peterson’s impressive tome Vegetables. I had a pile of freshly dug garlic drying on the front porch, a pot of thyme on the deck, and plenty of olive oil, so it was but the work of a moment to get a pan of this roasting in the oven. And then the work of an hour or two to wait for it to finish up…

All I needed to do was wash the tomatoes, cut them in half, and lay them cut-side-down in a pan filmed with olive oil.

I broke up a head of garlic, peeled the cloves and nestled them amid the tomatoes, then sprinkled fresh thyme branches over the top. The pan went into a 400° oven and immediately the house filled with the scent of roasted garlic. About 45 minutes later I poured out most of the liquid expressed by the tomatoes into a small saucepan, then continued to roast until the garlic was soft and turning golden, and the tomatoes were blistering on top – maybe another twenty minutes or so. I could have roasted them further, but at this stage they were still soft and juicy, but with a nicely deepened flavor.

The first time I tried this, I had the brilliant notion of adding canned tuna to the reserved liquid, then mashing the garlic in. Then I tossed the garlicky tuna with the roasted tomatoes and some rotini pasta. That was really, really good, and we will be doing it again. Oh yes.

The second time I made this, just a couple of days later, I used it as a topping for a pork tenderloin that Jon seared and roasted. That was pretty good, too, especially when we smeared the garlic cloves over pieces of pork, as if we were buttering toast. The juices from the tomatoes went beautifully with the soft lettuce salad I served alongside – you could easily make a salad dressing out of them. When I separated the juices from the pan, I followed Peterson’s directions and reduced them, then poured them back in at the end – they end up fantastically infused with garlic.

What I’d really like to do is make a pizza with this stuff as the topping – now that would be excellent. I just need to wait for a few more tomatoes to ripen.

By the way, this post unintentionally coincided with Tomato Week of the blog event Summer Fest 2009, hosted by Margaret Roach at A Way to Garden. To check out what other people are doing with fresh tomatoes this week, take a look at the participating blogs: Mattbites, Steamy Kitchen,  White on Rice Couple,  Simmer Till Done,  The Sister Project, and Gluten-Free Girl. And feel free to chime in with your own favorite tomato recipes!

We eat so much grilled eggplant  during the summer (thanks to the nice folks at Hedlin Family Farms) it’s a little embarrassing. Sometimes we dust it with spices first, but usually we just dress it with olive oil, salt and pepper, grill it till it poofs up and turns golden, then eat it in huge heaps with lamb kebabs or whatever else is on the grill that day. In an attempt to do something different with our weekly poundage of eggplant (plus some of the tomatoes which are beginning to take over the deck), I came up with this caponata. And we’ve made it twice in one week, so I guess it worked pretty well.

My approach here is to get all the ingredients except the eggplant mixed together in a big bowl, so all I have to do is take a cutting board down by the grill and dice up the eggplants as they come off the heat. Then I dump them into the dressing and mix everything up together. The flavors sit and blend while we grill the next part of the meal.

This is all eminently adjustable, but here’s what I added to my latest batch:

1. over two pounds of eggplant, grilled and chopped
2. about a cup of garlic-stuffed green olives, roughly chopped
3. all the kalamata olives that were left in the jar, maybe a third of a cup? Also roughly chopped
4. several handfuls of ripe Sungold and Stupice tomatoes from the vines on the deck, halved or quartered depending on size
5. a spoonful or two of capers
6. a good glug of olive oil
7. several good glugs of red wine vinegar
8. a pinch of kosher salt

You could easily add other stuff here according to your own taste and what’s in the fridge at the moment. Onions would be nice, especially grilled, and so would zucchini. I don’t think fresh herbs would go amiss, either – I tried topping some of the caponata with sprigs of fresh basil and that was very nice.

To serve, I can recommend fish: we’ve eaten this with planked salmon and butter-roasted halibut, both excellent. It’s also lovely topping fresh sheep or goat cheese on a bit of baguette, or simply spread on crackers. And I’ll bet it would make a spectacular pizza topping.

I think this calls for more experimentation. What do you put in your caponata?

On Sunday we made sure to make it up to the Bastille open-air market on Boulevard Richard Lenoir. It begins at Place de la Bastille and stretches for several blocks, four aisles wide and teeming with people, dogs and little wheeled shopping carts.

You can buy everything from tomatoes to underwear. Not to mention foie gras. And wine.

It was so exciting to see wine being sold out in the open! At a farmer’s market! We have somewhat arcane liquor laws here in Washington, it makes me easily impressed by this sort of thing.

The “as-is” bottle selection was particularly scary. Some of them were only one euro, but looked thoroughly toxic. Maybe we should have sprung for a bottle, what the heck?

There were sausages of all sorts, and complex looking loaves of pate stuffed with indescribable body parts. I saw little cups of brains and lots of tripe.

You could buy handmade pasta and gnocchi…

…and cheese of all shapes and sizes…

…and fish!

We bought a few vegetables, some fresh herbs and flowers, and some Moroccan bowls (only one of which survived the trip home, alas) then headed for the fish counter. Some had been cleaned and filleted, but most were intact and bright-eyed on their hill of ice. We bought a bag of fresh sardines – always a treat for me, since they’re so rarely available back home.

Back in our tiny apartment kitchen, we realized that we had a certain lack of sharp knives. Jon used a bread knife to cut a fennel bulb and some tomatoes into small dice.

I used a dull steak knife to gut the sardines. They were so tender, though, I probably didn’t even need that. I rinsed them out and patted them dry, then used a pair of scissors to cut up chives and parsley.

We had one decent skillet, so first Jon used it to saute the diced fennel until soft and caramelized. This we mixed with the chopped tomato and herbs, with a drizzle of fruity olive oil from the Ducs de Gascogne store around the block.

Once the pan was free, I fried the sardines quickly in olive oil until the skin crisped.

To accompany our fish and salad, we had a loaf of bread from the bakery down the street, plus a bottle of rose and a round of St. Marcellin cheese which we had also brought home from the market.

It was very simple, yet completely different from any meal we’ve made at home before. I loved the salad, with the deep sweet flavor of the cooked fennel and the summeriness of the raw tomato and herb. We’ll have to make it again.

Ever since I discovered the word “spatchcock” in a Nigella Lawson book, I’ve wanted to try it. And not just because it’s such a great word.

It’s a method of preparing a chicken for high heat cooking such as roasting or grilling, where you remove the backbone and flatten the bird so that it’s more or less an even thickness throughout. It has the effect of getting all the skin on one side, so you should be able to get lots of crispy chicken skin, plus the flesh side is all available for seasoning. This weekend we finally got around to trying it, and the result was sort of a Win-Fail-Win situation.

We had quite good luck with the actual preparation. I bought the smallest organic chicken I could find, which was unfortunately still more than 4 pounds (what is with the enormous chickens in the store these days?) We cut out the backbone with our kitchen scissors, and Jon managed to pull out the breastbone with his thumbs just like Steven Raichlen said to (his book How to Grill gives fantastic photographic instructions for this kind of thing). I cut off the wingtips and tucked the ends of the drumsticks through slits in the thighs. The backbone and other leftover bits went into a tub in the freezer for stock.

Once that was all done, I made a sort of cutting-board pesto of fresh mint, cilantro, garlic, paprika, olive oil, salt and pepper, and rubbed it thoroughly into the chicken. It went in to the refrigerator for the rest of the day.

It was a beautiful day. We gardened until we could hardly move. We had some cocktails. All seemed right with the world. Little did we know…

Grilling the chicken was where the problems arose. Raichlen claims that the grill should be at medium heat, which is defined by being able to hold your hand over the coals for a count of 6-Mississippi. Our grill was burning a bit hot, but we got it pretty close. The chicken went on, skin side down, for about 12 minutes, then on the flip side for another 15. According to the book, it should have been just about perfect. It was not.

Another twenty minutes, and many chicken-flippings, later, the legs had fallen off the chicken and it was still barely cooked through (too big a chicken? Not warm enough before grilling? Not sure). We eventually gave up and ate the most-done parts of it, feeling more than a little put out. Not even fresh tomato salad and Breadfarm allium bread from the farmer’s market could rescue the evening from the pall cast by eating undercooked chicken – not something I recommend, definitely.

But! I’m happy to report that the whole thing was rescued the next day at lunchtime. I pulled the carcass out of the fridge and cut off the breast meat, heated it in a pan to finish cooking it, then sliced it and tossed it with the remainder of the cherry tomato salad, some sprigs of mizuna, and the rest of the allium bread which I had cut into cubes and fried in olive oil. It made an amazing lunch salad.

The rest of the grilled chicken went into the stockpot. I figure a deep, smoky, herbed chicken stock could be just the thing for a pot of green chili later in the season. So I think you could call the chicken a success, in the end. Next time, though, we’re getting a smaller bird and starting it sooner. Less pain and suffering all around.

Our freezer has gotten very low on emergency lunches, so it was clearly time to make a lasagna. Few things are as comforting on a cold day as being able to pull a container of lasagna out of the freezer, nuke it, pour a glass of wine, and have a hot, cheesy satisfying lunch. And to make that happen, of course, we have to have lasagna for dinner first. Oh, the sacrifices we make.

I make lasagna pretty much exactly the way my parents did when I was a kid (it was my favorite), except for the addition of no-boil lasagna noodles, which are God’s gift to casserole makers. Sometimes I’ll do a variation with pesto and white sauce, and I often add fresh spinach, but this particular one was just the basics: red sauce with meat and mushrooms, ricotta, mozzarella and noodles. End of recipe. I do not add egg, or cottage cheese - I feel very strongly about these things. That grainy ricotta texture is important here.

Oh – to go with our lasagna, we threw together a spontaneous salad of mixed spinach and lettuce greens and shaved fennel, with a lemon-mayonnaise dressing. It was FANTASTIC. If I ever figure out how I did it I’ll write the recipe down. Wow.

Now, back to the lasagna:

Just to be clear, I do not use jarred marinara sauce. I don’t care if that sounds snobby, but I just don’t – your mileage may vary. But really, making it fresh ain’t that hard. I usually start with ground meat; in this case, two pounds of beef from our freezer cow. I added a bunch of sliced button mushrooms, a few cloves of garlic, a good pinch of dried thyme and some salt, and let it all simmer together.

We had some red wine left over that was tasting a little weird, so I added that to the meat and let it simmer nearly dry, then opened the tomatoes. The Co-op was having a canned tomato sale, so I had just stocked up. I added one big can of diced tomatoes and another of puree, then some water to rinse out the cans.

The whole big potful (that’s my superlarge pea-green Mario Batali pot, a wonderful thing for big batches of sauce like this) simmered for a while, then we put the lasagna together:

Take a 9×13 inch pan, and add:

1. Ladleful of sauce
2. 3 noodles (we use Ronzoni, which forbids overlapping, unlike Barilla, which requires it)
3. enough sauce to cover the noodles
4. half the container of ricotta, dolloped over the top
5. a few slices of mozzarella
6. repeat from #2 once or twice, depending on the depth of your pan
7. top with noodles, sauce and the rest of the mozzarella. Make sure plenty of sauce has been added to keep the noodles wet – crunky noodles are not delicious. I’ve produced enough crunky lasagnas to know.

Cover with foil and bake 30 minutes at 375°. Remove the foil and bake another 10 minutes. Take out of the oven and let it set for a bit so you stand a chance of actually cutting a piece. Put individual pieces in freezersafe containers and pack them away for another day, but save plenty to eat immediately.

We had a little impromptu celebration the other night, in honor of my first published piece of food writing. Nothing fancy, just some rotini pasta tossed with garlic scape pesto from the freezer and some hot Italian sausages, a salad with balsamic vinaigrette, a bottle of Bonny Doon Dolcetto, and a bowl of all the ripe tomatoes left on the vine. Easy to throw together, and fun to eat while curled up on the couch watching a very stupid movie. Sometimes you don’t want to have to try too hard.