Some of you might’ve seen my Instagram snaps of the dinner I made for Joe and I last week on Valentine’s Day. This pic of the tomatoes I was slow roasting to go with our chicken got a lot of questions and comments, so I thought I’d share exactly how to do it, and why I love these tomatoes in particular.
Make no mistake — tomatoes are one of my favorite things to eat, raw, in sauce, or otherwise, but these oven roasted ones are simply divine. First of all, they go with everything. Really, everything. Put them in salads, add them to soup, deck out a sandwich with them, line an antipasto platter, serve them as a side to meat or seafood, mix them up with pasta. The options are truly endless. Second of all, they’re so easy to make. You just need to have a few hours of time to let them do their thing in the oven. And third, you can use basically any variety of tomato you want — vine, the little Campari ones, romas or plums.
Once you slow roast these for a few hours, the flavor is out of control good. Super concentrated tomato-y, and unbelievably sweet. The tomatoes also get so soft you can smear them around; you could even puree these and add to your basic marinara to amp it up a bit, or blend them in with regular hummus to flavor it. Like I said, the options are really endless! Here’s how to make it (good news — there’s really no set recipe!): Read more »
You know that saying, “You can take the girl out of the place, but you can’t take the place out of the girl?” For me, “the place” is Texas. Like it or not, when you grow up in the Lone Star State, certain things just stay with you. This is true even after living in California for ten and a half years (oh my god, I can’t believe it’s been that long). There are a few things I still do that raise eyebrows here on the west coast and make people wonder just where I grew up. One is use of the word “y’all.” Sometimes I’m conscious of it, and won’t let it slip out; other times, it just flows right from my mouth. Another thing I simply can’t let go of is my undying love for Tex-Mex food, which you basically cannot find out here. When I moved from Austin to Los Angeles, it took me a long time to realize that the Mexican food I had grown up with was in fact not Mexican at all, but instead, a cheesy, saucy, completely unhealthy genre of awesome that really only existed in Tejas. Read more »
If you couldn’t tell from the post title, I struggled a little bit for what to call this delightful condiment. I’m sure there must be some name for it in Italian, but I don’t know what it is and what extensive research I conducted (read: 5 minutes while cooking dinner) yielded nothing. So I named it a ‘spauce.’ Sometimes sauce. Sometimes spread. Always really, really delicious.
I love making spauces like this to pair with dinners. They can make anything that seems overly plain — say, a filet of fish and a vegetable — seem much more fancy. Any leftovers can be spread on bread, tossed with pasta, eaten with other veggies, or reheated and served alongside other meats, like chicken.
In last night’s case, I took a bunch of dry farmed tomatoes (we’re at the height of the season, people!), and slow cooked everything together with caramelized onion, fennel, garlic, and white white. The result was a thick, chunky spauce that paired perfectly with black bass filets. We have a little bit leftover, and I already know what I’ll be eating for lunch today. It’ll taste perfect on some crackers, and alongside a bowl of soup!
This one takes a little time and attention, though in principle, it’s extremely easy to make. Here’s what I did: Read more »
