End of Summer Dinner

Well, this is it. Its the final week of August and while it still feels like summer, it won't for long. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting cooler and I'm starting to see pumpkin spice flavored everything on the grocery store shelves. In just a few short weeks I'll be putting my sandals and shorts away to make room for boots and jeans.

The end of summer also means the end of summer produce. No more garden tomatoes, no more fresh corn and no more inexpensive peaches and berries. I've been harvesting what I can and getting it processed for the winter. My basil and parsley plants have been tremendously productive this summer and they needed to get trimmed back. I also had a hell of a time last weekend trying to fit everything in my freezer and I decided to cook some of my stored stuff to make room for more.

Our garden was a bit of a disaster this year. Most of our tomato plants came down with late blight and one of them was a variety that was developed specifically for the Heinz company. It is a super Roma that is quite fleshy and has very few seeds, so it is perfect for thick sauces. Before the plant succumbed to blight, it has started to bear fruit and there were about 30 green tomatoes on it. I left the plant alone and let most of the tomatoes ripen. Once they were ripe, I blanched them in hot water, shocked them in ice water, peeled them and put them in containers in the freezer. I had two quarts of those special Roma tomatoes taking up space in the freezer and I also had a huge amount of fresh basil and parsley still growing in my garden. Based on those ingredients, my game plan was to make tomato sauce and fresh pesto for some kind of Italian dinner. After a brief discussion with my husband, we settled on chicken Parmesan and angel hair pasta.

I started with the tomatoes. I'd never grown this variety before, so I wasn't sure how they would taste. I left them to defrost on the kitchen counter for a few hours and as they defrosted I noticed that water was collecting in the bottom of each container. Normally tomatoes put off some juice, but it is typically red just like the tomatoes. This liquid was completely clear, but it had the flavor of sweet tomato juice. I chopped half a yellow onion and sauteed it in olive oil with a little salt, pepper and oregano until it was just starting to brown, then added two cloves of thinly sliced garlic. As soon as the garlic started to brown ever so slightly, I dumped in that clear tomato water and let it reduce for a few minutes to concentrate the flavor. Then I added the still partially frozen tomatoes and let that all simmer together until the tomatoes were completely defrosted. I mashed them a bit with a potato masher and left it to simmer over low heat for about an hour to let some of that liquid reduce. Finally, I used my immersion blender to make a chunky sauce. I was surprised at how sweet these tomatoes were and how much body the sauce had given the amount of juice there was. I set this yummy sauce aside and moved on to the pesto.

I made the pesto following the directions from Tami Dixon who'd made pesto in my kitchen just a few weeks earlier. I wanted to recreate that rough and chunky pesto that Tami made, so I filled my food processor with basil and parsley leaves, added some pine nuts, walnuts, three big cloves of garlic and just pulsed the processor a few times to break everything up. Then I added the olive oil, cheese, salt and pepper and pulsed it just until it was blended. It was chunky and bright green and fragrant just like Tami's. There was quite a bit of pesto and some went directly in the freezer for a future preparation. Once the sauces were made, I moved on to the chicken. I sliced a couple of chicken breasts into cutlets and pounded them out to about half an inch thick.  Each chicken breast yielded four cutlets and I floured them lightly, dipped them in beaten egg and then pressed them into a dish of seasoned Panko breadcrumbs. I pan fried them until they were golden brown and set them on a sheet tray. Once they were all cooked, I covered each one with a healthy dollop of tomato sauce and some shredded provolone cheese and popped them into a 350 oven. After about 10 minutes, I turned the oven off while I boiled the angel hair pasta. When the pasta was cooked, I tossed it with a couple of big spoonfuls of pesto and the rest of the tomato sauce.  I served this delicious dinner with a salad on the side.

The tomato sauce had a very bright, sweet flavor and the tomatoes maintained a nice texture during cooking. If I'd had more of them, I may have cooked a giant pot of tomato sauce and let it boil down to a deep red, rich consistency. Perhaps I will grow them again and next time I will have a bigger yield. The pesto had just the right texture and still had little bits of crunchy walnuts and pine nuts floating around in it.  The earthy and herbaceous flavor of the pesto blended beautifully with the bright tomato sauce and the contrast in texture between the crispy chicken and the soft pasta was a marriage made in heaven. It was simple fare, but made with love from things I grew in my own backyard. You just can't get that kind of fulfillment from a jar or can. When you grow it yourself or buy from a local farmer, you can always trust the quality of your ingredients and your meal will taste that much better when you know where your food came from.