Your Perfect Tomato Sandwich

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You know how recipes are just made up?  I mean, some people have a lot of good ideas about food, and some people have extensive experience with food, and those people are probably going to make up good recipes.  But still, they’re just playing around, asking themselves what tastes good.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to recipes, really, and on some topics there is not even the remote possibility of agreement between any two authorities.  Once such topic, I submit, is The Perfect Tomato Sandwich.I’ve tried many.   Tomatoes alone.  Tomatoes with pesto, fresh mozzarella, and vinegar.  I understand that some people like tomatoes with lettuce and bacon.  I’ve even tried this sandwich, the tomatoes opulently nestled into a double setting of mayonnaise and butter.  Perfection is a slippery thing, ephemeral and ever-changing.  Especially when it comes to tomato sandwiches.

My personal current Perfect Tomato Sandwich–which I achieved tonight, just one of many wildly varying Perfect Tomato Sandwiches I’ve had in my life–is pictured above and detailed below.  It is emphatically open-faced, with thin slices of avocado and thick slices of tomato on grainy toasted bread.  Its crowning glory (or maybe it’s a hidden glory?) is a smear of anchovy-laced mayonnaise.

What is your perfect tomato sandwich this summer? Continue reading →

Basil Pesto with Whole Wheat Pasta and Tomatoes

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I found this picture on the camera the other day:I asked J, “Why did you take this picture?”

J asked me, “Why did you put a glass of basil in the cupboard?”

Well, for about a million reasons, of course!  First, you all convinced me that I should keep my basil on the counter in a vase of water–and hey!  That really works!  Second, the counter was messy and I needed a little more space.  Third…well, ok, two reasons.

When there’s more basil than I have room for, it’s pesto time.  At this time of year, if you have a glut of basil yourself, consider making a big batch of pesto and freezing it in ice cube trays.  (Not because you’d limit yourself to one cube of pesto, of course–just because it defrosts more quickly than if you freeze it in a bigger block.)  And if you’re making pesto to freeze, it might as well double as dinner, right?This is, to me, the perfect pesto.  It’s saucy and flavorful with no one component overwhelming the others.  It tastes like summer, which we’ll appreciate with nostalgia soon.  But for the moment, why not enjoy it with whole wheat pasta and summer’s perfect Sungold tomatoes? Continue reading →

Baked Rice with Tofu, Corn, Tomatillos and Tomatoes

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As a mostly-vegetarian (if you’ll forgive the term), I tend to organize my meals a bit differently from omnivores.  And frankly, I am occasionally envious of the ease with which a meal comes together around a piece of meat (and we do sometimes cook fish), because then all you have to worry about are salads and sides.  And hey, I sure do like salads and sides.

So I get excited when I can have it all in one place: my vegetables and my whole grains, nestled in with tofu and cheese, scented with garlic and spices.  Maybe even with a great salsa on the side.  Yes, it’s true: I made a casserole.

The basic premise here is that flavorful, doctored-up brown rice and tofu are layered with tomatillos and tomatoes.  The rice and tofu sop up the juices as the tomatoes and tomatillos soften and it all bakes up into one big pan of late-summer comfort.  There are a few more steps involved here than in our usual recipes, but it’s quite manageable if you take it a step at a time: Make rice.  Chop vegetables.  Cook onions, garlic, and corn, then add tofu, spices, rice and cheese.  Layer this mixture with thickly-sliced tomatillos and tomatoes, and scatter feta on top for an extra bite of tang and salt.  Bake.  You can do that.

The last thing I’ll recommend is that you try making this dish with tofu that has been frozen and then defrosted.  It gives the tofu a bit of a spongy texture, which is more appealing than it sounds.  Nobody will expect to find tofu in this dish, but it contributes flavor and texture as well as protein.  If you’d prefer to leave it out, you could whisk a few eggs into the rice instead, but then I’d recommend baking the dish covered and maybe for a little longer. Continue reading →

A Watermelon Cocktail

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It’s not easy getting through a watermelon that weighs more than a small child.  But honestly, it’s not that hard, either.

Watermelon juice, for example, is a breeze to make: just pile chunks of watermelon (either seedless or with any black seeds removed) into the blender and give it a quick whirl.  Here we went one step further and strained the resulting puree.  And that took care of a pound and a half of our thirty-pound melon just like that.  Only twenty-eight to go.You can stop right there at the watermelon juice and have a perfectly lovely drink, dressed up if you like with a splash of simple syrup or soda water or lime or all three.  But of course we didn’t stop right there. Continue reading →

Grilled Broccoli

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Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see some of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are June, July, and August).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, add the RSS feed to your own reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

I’m starting to feel rushed now that summer’s days are numbered.  I never told you about my favorite summer cocktails!  We haven’t even talked yet about whether to drench tomatoes in brown butter!  We’ve hardly grilled together at all, except for a lonely piece of fish and those eggplants.  Tune in next summer, friends, because some of those may have to wait.

But this broccoli can’t wait.  Besides, broccoli is a vegetable that will come along right into fall with us.  And once you taste this grilled broccoli, you’ll be firing up the grill every chance you get, even after summer’s gone. Continue reading →

Spicy Pickled Peppers

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While we’re enjoying September’s fine harvest of assorted spicy peppers, why not preserve a few to enjoy when the season is over?

Honestly, my standard method for preserving peppers (of any kind) is to slice or chop them, pile them into a freezer bag, and put them in the freezer.  But you don’t need a recipe for that, do you?

You don’t need much of a recipe for this, either, but I always like to pickle a jar or two of mildly spicy peppers to enjoy in the fall.  This a a quick refrigerator pickle, which takes little time beyond slicing the peppers and simmering a simple brine for five minutes.  The investment will pay off many times over, since it only takes a few of these pickled pepper rings to spice up any meal. Continue reading →

Baked Fish with Thai Basil and Peppers

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Today I put my money where my mouth is and bought a thirty-pound watermelon.  Yes, you read that right.  Thirty.  Pounds.  Thirty pounds!

Does this ever happen to you?  One minute I was innocently stopping by the store to pick up a piece of fish, and the next minute I was staggering to my car carrying a small child and a melon that weighed more than her.  Truth be told, I hadn’t even thought of buying a watermelon today.  The only reason I bought it was that it was sitting beside a much smaller but more expensive “petite” watermelon, making this organic behemoth an irresistible deal at $8.50.  Those marketing geniuses at my co-op know me so well.

And now I have thirty pounds of watermelon to dispatch.  Ideas?

Of course I started off by stuffing everyone with sweet slices and encouraging the children to organize a backyard seed-spitting contest.  And then I made a double batch of that outstanding Chilled Watermelon Soup with Thai Flavors–have you tried it yet?  And that, of course, meant Thai flavors for the fish I’d gone to the co-op to get in the first place.  (You thought I’d forgotten the point of this post, didn’t you?)
Every time I make this, J says it’s his favorite dish.  (I think he says that about other things too, though–isn’t that sweet?)  My favorite dish would probably be something involving chocolate, or maybe these baked eggs, but I agree that this dish is quite good.  And if fish isn’t your thing, you could certainly toss the pepper mixture with cubes of fried tofu and serve it over rice instead. Continue reading →

Watermelon Sorbet

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Avert your eyes from the pumpkin spice recipes.  Don’t speak of apple cider or fall sweaters.  It’s still the height of the summer fruit season, peaches tapering into plums.  And melons.  The melons have hardly begun, here in the Northwest.

Let’s not hurry things along.  Let’s enjoy this final week of summer.

And by “enjoy summer,” I mean “make more ice cream.”  Sorbet.  Clean, summery, refreshing.  Just the thing to cap off the feast that this season has been. Continue reading →

Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpea Salad

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Although our Dinner in White has come and gone, this salad endures.  And no, by that I don’t mean that I have week-old leftovers in my fridge.  (I mean, I might, but let’s not speak of that.)  I mean that I already had to make this salad again, and I am looking forward to having it on our table often throughout the winter.  Along with that smoky cauliflower frittata, of course, and the cheddar and dijon cauliflower soup and that whole roasted cauliflower and…I might almost be looking forward to fall.

Unlike most of the recipes I post here, let me warn you, this one takes an hour.  An hour!  But it’s mostly hands-off time in the oven, and it’s worth it.  The cauliflower emerges limp and tender, the chickpeas crisp-edged and meaty.  The pine nuts add crunch and the raisins sweetness and the whole thing will leave you actually happy that it’s cool enough to turn your oven on for an hour.  We most recently ate this dish with a grated carrot salad, baked orzo with tomatoes, and a piece of grilled fish.  It was certainly a feast befitting the harvest season. Continue reading →

How to Cook Chickpeas

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Last night it rained, an honest, garden-soaking, puddle-making rain.  It hadn’t rained in 48 days.  (Seattle’s record dry spell, set in 1951, was 51 days.)  On the way out the door this morning, wrapped in coats against the newly-brisk air, my four-year-old cheerfully sang out our family’s frequent admonishment to her toddling little sister: “No boots, no puddles!”  It suddenly felt like fall.

It’s as good a day as any to put on a pot of beans. Continue reading →