Tomato Archives - Hungry Travelers

Tomato

At the heart of northern New Mexico tomatoes

Posted on September 21, 2024September 21, 2024 by Pat and David

We first visited northern New Mexico back in the 1990s to write about chile peppers being bred at New Mexico State University's extension service farm. Rather than develop hybrids, the breeders were cross-pollinating traditional chiles with desirable characteristics to develop chile peppers with various heat levels that were suitable for different growing conditions. In other words, they were taking a scientific approach to seed selection the way farmers have been doing it since the advent of agriculture roughly 12,000 years ago. This fall, at the Santa Fe Farmers' Market, we discovered that the practice is alive and well with all sorts of plants. We spotted a chip-n-dip bowl with three piles of diced tomatoes and a jar of toothpicks. “Free samples” the sign advertised. Post-It...Read More

Icelandic sea salt explodes flavors of summer favorites

Posted on August 29, 2021August 29, 2021 by Pat and David

We had planned to be in Iceland about now—until the late summer flareup of the novel coronavirus. We had hoped to go to Reykjanesi way up in the northwest quarter of Iceland called Westfjords. The plan was to visit the Saltverk (saltverk.com) facility there, founded in 2011 by Björn Jónsson and Gísli Grímsson. (If you caught the Iceland segment in season three of Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, it's Gísli who shows the Scottish chef around.) Sea salt harvesting has a long history in the Westfjords, where the king of Denmark established a saltworks in the late 18th century. It used geothermal energy, since Iceland is basically one craggy cap on a rift in the earth that leaks hot water, steam, and sometimes lava. The Danes needed...Read More

Imagining a legendary dinner with Monet at Giverny

Posted on June 19, 2021June 18, 2021 by Pat and David

Long before there was Instagram, there was Claude Monet. His 1883 painting of peaches could make any art lover's mouth water. The only things Monet loved as much as painting were his family and his meals. Once he tasted Yorkshire pudding at the Savoy Hotel in London, he badgered his cook Marguerite until she could replicate the version. But mostly he indulged in fresh vegetables, many of which he grew in the gardens of Giverny. (‶I am good for nothing but painting or gardening,″ he reportedly quipped.) Monet is just one of the celebrities featured in Legendary Dinners: From Grace Kelly to Jackson Pollock edited by Anne Peterson (Prestel 2021, $40). Dinner guests ranged from painter Paul Cezanne to novelist Guy de Maupassant to the...Read More

San Marzano DOP tomatoes to the rescue

Posted on November 13, 2020November 13, 2020 by Pat and David

When our garden was hit with the first killing frost (and four inches of snow) on Halloween, we were lucky. We had harvested all our green tomatoes and a bucket of partially ripe cherry tomatoes before the mercury plunged. So we will still be cooking with fresh tomatoes for another week or so. But end-of-the-season tomatoes can't hold a candle to the sweet, juicy beauties of summer. Ditto the greenhouse tomatoes that we buy over the winter. Every year we talk ourselves into their virtues and overlook their faults. At some point great canned tomatoes are superior to just okay fresh ones. Finding the best canned tomatoes in the world We look for cans labeled ‶Pomodoro San Marzano dell'Agro Sarnese-Nocerino DOP.″ Sometimes it's a subtitle...Read More

World on a Plate: eating fried green tomatoes

Posted on September 11, 2020September 10, 2020 by Pat and David

Now that it's September, we're entering another phase in our tomato watching. We're coming to the end of the ripe tomato season for the determinate varieties, but the indeterminate tomatoes have kept flowering and setting fruit. From an evolutionary perspective, this is a pretty dumb move. Frost will kill the plants and spoil the fruit before it ripens. Even the seeds will be too green to sprout another year. So while we enjoy the last plates of insalata Caprese, we're considering how to turn the immature fruit to good use. Before any of you readers bombard us with pickle recipes, we're going on record that we already have enough pickles to last the winter. So now we're trying to think of good ways to eat...Read More

Greek tomato soup far surpasses anything canned

Posted on September 8, 2020September 5, 2020 by Pat and David

The Greeks have legitimate claims on inventing western civilization, but we're pretty sure that they didn't invent tomato soup. But they might have perfected it, which doesn't really surprise us given all the delicious tomatoes we ate while we were in Greece. After a hot, humid summer, we're delighting in the kind of bright, fresh early fall days that New England is known for. That first hit of cool air always makes us start thinking about soup and this Greek recipe for tomato soup is a great way to use up the less gorgeous but still tasty end-of-season ripe tomatoes. It makes a rich and satisfying soup that has only the most remote kinship with the stuff that comes in cans. We like our soup...Read More

World on a Plate: Kelowna, B.C. cherry tomato salad

Posted on August 21, 2020August 21, 2020 by Pat and David

We took the photo above at the Terrace Restaurant at Mission Hill Family Estates Winery (missionhillwinery.com) in Kelowna, British Columbia. The property sits at the northern end of the Okanagan Valley, where Canada grows some of its best table wines and a lot of astonishing fruits and vegetables. Before it was wine country, it was peach and cherry orchard country and those stone fruits still thrive there. In more recent years, Okanagan farmers have expanded their row crops as well. Some of the best cherry tomatoes we're ever tasted were grown in the Okanagan. This tiny salad of fire-peeled cherry tomatoes, blueberries, prosciutto, Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, and paper-thin sourdough toasts was an amuse bouche at Terrace. It's seasoned with a couple of dots of balsamic...Read More

Facing an uncertain future with the promise of seeds

Posted on March 31, 2020March 30, 2020 by David

At the cusp of March and April in this pandemic year of 2020, it's time to face the future. We are still four to five weeks away from the last frost here in Zone 6 (Cambridge, Massachusetts). And although we are being told that the incidence of illness will only continue to climb for the next few weeks, it's time to plant. The rhythms of the seasons are oblivious to human care. The new moon arrived last week, so I began to chart the summer garden. On the previous new moon I planted basil. Nurtured in a cold stairwell under a glass skylight, the sprouts turned into seedlings and have grown tough and sturdy under the adversity of cool temperatures. In my urban apartment building,...Read More

Canned tomatoes from Europe recall the taste of summer

Posted on February 11, 2020February 10, 2020 by Pat and David

This time of year we really start pining for summer tomatoes. Even the best hothouse tomatoes don't measure up. They're not as sweet or as acid and even the ripe ones are usually far too firm. Mind you, we always have some homemade marinara sauce in the pantry, but cooked sauces are no substitute for fresh vegetables. We've tried using any number of U.S. canned tomato products, and they too fall short. But the same isn't true for certain European canned tomatoes—especially those grown and packed in Italy. And, more to the point, those grown and packed in southern Italy and packed without added calcium chloride or preservatives. This may not be immediately obvious, since the front of the labels don't carry the European geographical...Read More

Fundraiser gala fare channels Shaker spirit

Posted on August 15, 2018August 9, 2018 by Pat and David

In early August, we had the pleasure of attending the annual fundraising Gala at Hancock Shaker Village (hancockshakervillage.org). One of the more prosperous of Shaker communities in the Northeast, “The City of Peace,” as its inhabitant called it, reached its height in the 1830s. More than 300 Shakers worked 3,000 acres of land just west of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the heart of the Berkshires. Since 1959, the community has been a history museum with 20 original buildings, a working farm, a wealth of Shaker artifacts, and many excellent interpretive programs. The village's signature building is the Round Stone Barn, pictured at the top of the post. It's a landmark structure in America vernacular architecture. We ate dinner at tables in the hayloft level. Shaker beliefs...Read More