First Harvest Dinner

It was a Friday night in June and we had no dinner plans. To be fair, it had been an unusually busy week with both of us working extra hours. The following day my radio station was holding our largest annual event, a big concert with six bands in a beautiful park in the middle of Pittsburgh's university district. I hadn't really been thinking about our dinner plans for the evening before Summer Music Festival. Yet there we were, sitting in the living room debating our options of mediocre Chinese take-out, a trip to the grocery store for some frozen or prepared foods or making due with what I had on hand. My husband was ambivalent.

I stood in the kitchen at about 6:30 that evening, my stomach softly rumbling, and stared into the empty abyss of the refrigerator. We had eggs, a head of cabbage and and a couple of apples. The pantry held a little more promise with a can of Italian San Marzano tomatoes and a couple boxes of pasta. Combined with good olive oil, some of the grated Parmesan cheese I unearthed from the fridge and a whole bunch of herbs from my garden, I could make a nice, light and fresh tasting tomato sauce and serve it with angel hair pasta. Voila, dinner would be served.

For a decent tomato sauce, onion and garlic are necessary ingredients, but alas, my fridge was uncharacteristically devoid of onions and I had two pathetic dried out cloves of garlic on hand. That's when my brilliant, handsome and resourceful husband chimed in with "hey, we have a whole bunch of onions and garlic growing in the garden". I seriously need to marry that guy. This is the first year we've attempted to grow onions and its early in the season. The garlic had just put out their shoots a few weeks prior, so we figured they'd be underdeveloped. Gloves and trowel in hand, I ventured out to see if I could harvest enough goodies to make this sauce happen. I pulled up two small onions and a puny garlic bulb, but also decided to harvest the one fairly large Japanese eggplant we had in the garden. With veggies procured, combined with handfuls of fresh basil, oregano and parsley, I was ready to go to work.

TOMATO SAUCE WITH EGGPLANT

1 12 oz. can good quality whole peeled Italian tomatoes
1 cup chopped fresh eggplant
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1 tbsp minced garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup each chopped fresh basil, parsley and oregano
Salt, black pepper and red pepper flakes to taste

Honestly, this sauce is so easy I'm embarrassed to write a blog about it. But there are some fine points that will help you make the very best dinner you can out of these sparse but flavorful ingredients. Normally, when garlic has reached maturity and the bulbs are big and fat, they are harvested and left to dry for a few weeks until the skin become papery and garlic has mellowed. I didn't have that luxury and fresh garlic is extremely assertive. The bulb I dug up was only about the size of a hazelnut, but it stunk up the whole kitchen, so I used half of it. Before starting the sauce, I put a large pot filled with water over medium high heat and added several tablespoons of salt for my pasta. In a medium saucepan, I sauteed the chopped onion with some olive oil, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes just until it was translucent before adding the garlic. While that sauteed, I opened the can of tomatoes and lifted each tomato out of the can into a bowl, leaving the liquid in the can, and I crushed up the tomatoes by hand until all the big pieces were mostly broken down.

Once the garlic and onions began to brown, I added the sliced eggplant and another splash of olive oil and let that cook until the eggplant began to soften, then I added the tomatoes and just a splash of the tomato liquid, turned the heat down to medium low and let it gently simmer for about 15 minutes. I came back and tasted, added a pinch more salt and pepper, a little more tomato liquid and half of the fresh herbs. After 15 minutes, I dropped the pasta into the boiling water and cooked it until it was still a little chewy, about 8 minutes. Before I drained the pasta, I scooped out a cup of the pasta water to loosen the sauce. When you drain your pasta, for goodness sake, don't rinse it!!  Pasta has a thin layer of starch on the outside that allows the sauce to penetrate and stick to it. I drained the pasta into a colander, dumped it back into the pot and scooped the sauce on top. The pasta will taste better if you let it finish cooking in the sauce, so I added about half of the pasta water and put it over medium heat to finish cooking. It only took about 6 minutes for the pasta to absorb the liquid in the sauce and take on its beautiful flavors. Before serving it, I added the rest of the fresh herbs, stirred it all together and admired my work.

We enjoyed our dinner with a little of that grated Parmesan cheese on the top and a glass of chilled sauvignon blanc. It was delicious! The red pepper flakes brought just a little heat and the sauce was sweet, mellow and surprisingly complex. With just a few ingredients and a little imagination, I'd managed to pull a really lovely, light and flavorful dinner out of thin air, thanks to my garden. Even though its early in the season and the garden has just begun to produce, its such a satisfying feeling to cook with the stuff you grow yourself.

Homemade Tomato Sauce

I love making amazing dishes from stuff I grow myself.  Nothing tastes as good as fresh veggies straight from the hot summer sunshine, veggies that you nurtured from small plants. That's the way to eat - the less time and distance between you and your ingredients, the better the food. The sense of satisfaction I get from cooking from my own garden is immeasurable.

I am having an amazing year for tomatoes. I planted golden teardrops, which were the first to harvest and they were sweet and delicious. There was a local variety developed by a nearby farm called Janoski's. That was a firm and fleshy tomato with a bright tartness that was great on sandwiches. I also planted beefsteak tomatoes, which are gigantic and are just starting to ripen. Finally, I grew San Marzano's, the wonderful Italian plum variety so prized for its sweet flesh, low moisture and low seed count - which is the perfect variety for sauce. From a single plant I harvested no less than 50 tomatoes! I also had a head of garlic I'd harvested earlier in the season and lots of fresh herbs.  Hot damn, this is the moment I wait for all summer long! It's time to make the sauce. 

HOMEMADE TOMATO SAUCE:

20-25 large, ripe Roma, San Marzano or plum tomatoes

1 large yellow onion 

3 large cloves of garlic

1 cup of white wine

A splash of balsamic vinegar

1/4 cup of dried mushrooms, preferably Porcini

4 stems of fresh basil

Handful of fresh parsley

1 tsp dried oregano

1/2 tsp red pepper flakes

1 tbsp. salt

1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

You can make your own tomato sauce with just about any kind of tomato, but certain varieties are better than others. The best tomatoes for sauce are paste tomatoes, which have low water content and fewer seeds. You won't have to cook them as long for the sauce to thicken. Save the juicy tomatoes for salads and sandwiches, they taste much better fresh than they do cooked.  Find yourself some plum tomatoes for the best sauce. 

The tomatoes need to be peeled before you can cook with them. The best way to do this is to blanch them in hot water until the skin loosens, then put them in ice water and they peel quite easily. I had a lot of tomatoes to process, so I set up a staging area with my swinging bowl of garden tomatoes, a pot of water over medium low heat, a bowl of ice water and another bowl to hold my peeled tomatoes. I put a small slit in the bottom of each tomato, just to see when the skin begins to peel away from the tomato. I put three or four tomatoes into the pot at a time, allowing them to sit until the skin started to roll back from the flesh, then scooped them out and dropped them to the ice water. While they were cooling, I put the next batch into the pot. By the time I had peeled the first batch, the next one was done blanching. Once I started, the whole operation went pretty quickly and in 30 minutes, I had processed about 25 ripe San Marzano tomatoes. 

Peeled tomatoes

With the tomatoes standing by, it was time to get the sauce started. First, I put the dried mushrooms in a small bowl and covered them with hot water to rehydrate. I diced the onion and threw it into a deep saucepan over medium high heat with some olive oil. I like to add my spices at the beginning to cooking so they have a chance to bloom in the oil, so in went the salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and dried oregano. I let that cook for about 10 minutes until the onions softened and just started to turn golden brown. Now, when it comes to adding the garlic, there are a few different ways you can go. If you crush your garlic, it releases more of its essential oils and you get a very pronounced garlic flavor. You can just smash your garlic cloves a bit, leaving large pieces that will impart mild flavor but that you can fish out later. You can cut your garlic into large chunks, which basically has the same effect as leaving it whole. I like to slice my garlic for sauce. You end up with beautifully soft and sweet garlic slices that impart their flavor without being overpowering. Given that my garlic was really fresh and came out of my own garden about a month earlier, it was pretty assertive to begin with. I thinly sliced three medium cloves of garlic and added them to the onions. If you add the garlic too early, it burns and tastes a little bit like gasoline, so wait until your onions are cooked before you toss that garlic in. 

I let that go for a few minutes, allowing the garlic to release its flavor into the olive oil and letting the onions brown a little bit more.  All these steps help to build additional depth of flavor. Allowing the onions to caramelize and the garlic to cook and the spices to bloom adds nuance to your sauce. When everything was a little brown around the edges, I added the white wine, which sizzled and boiled when it hit the hot saucepan. This step of deglazing with wine or stock washes the caramelized food off the bottom of the pot, adding more flavor to the sauce. Wine tends to be acidic and needs to cook down to burn off the alcohol and concentrate its flavor, so I let this reduce over medium high heat until there was very little liquid left, at which point I added a splash of the water from the mushrooms and a splash of balsamic vinegar. I don't normally measure stuff like this, so a splash might be about 2 tablespoons, but you can let your own taste buds be your guide. I let that reduce down as well until there was almost no liquid left. 

Sauce before and after cooking and blending

Now that everything had cooked and simmered and reduced down, it was time to add the tomatoes. I crushed them with my hands so they were all broken up before adding them to the pot. I removed the hydrated mushrooms out of the water, which was now barely warm, then chopped them finely and added them to the pot. I made a small bundle of the basil and parsley, tied it up with kitchen string, dropped it into the pot and gave it one final stir before turning the heat to low. I wanted the sauce to reduce and thicken, which happens when you leave the pot uncovered and allow the excess liquid to cook off, but I didn't want my entire kitchen to be splattered with tomatoes, so I made a cover out of aluminum foil and draped it loosely over the top, leaving plenty of gaps for the steam to escape. 

I came back a couple times and stirred the sauce, just to see how it was coming along. After an hour, I fished out the fresh herb bundle, whipped out my immersion blender and blitzed that sauce until it was almost smooth but still had a slightly chunky texture. I tasted and WOW, it had intense sweet and zingy tomato flavor. It was delicious as it was, but I let it cook down for another 30 minutes just to thicken up a bit and voila, the sauce was done!

Most sauces, especially tomato sauce, taste better the next day when it has time for the flavors to meld and marry into an amazing symphony of deliciousness. I left mine sitting on the counter to cool off before putting it in jars and putting it in the fridge. My yield was about two quarts of homemade sauce and I had plans for it the following day, which included rolls of roasted eggplant and zucchini stuffed with cheese and pesto, meatballs and gnocchi. It was all scrumptious and I'm saving the rest of the sauce to serve over my own homemade pasta. So there it is - how to make your own tomato sauce that will blow the lid off any jarred product you can buy at the supermarket. If you don't have a garden, I highly suggest you go to your local farmers market while the tomatoes are in season, stock up on the right variety and give this recipe a try.