Last Tuesday, Election Day, I spent the morning in front of Town Hall supporting my candidate and greeting friends and strangers as they came to vote. On this perfect summer day, the people I talked to were thinking more about food than about politics and the most popular topic was peaches.

I was intrigued when I heard Honey and Elizabeth talking about a peach and tomato salad that Honey had made for a dinner party. Luckily, they were willing to tell me about it and I made my version on Wednesday. Here’s how I did it: … read more

The salad  made with a combination of red cabbage and mango brightened the table with the colors of India.

I served it with a roasted chicken from the market. Here’s how I did it: … read more

Two summers ago, when I had more tomatoes than we could eat, I preserved jars of oven-roasted tomatoes for the pantry.

I used them as a base for pasta sauce and for grilled pizza during the gray days of the following winter.

Whether I added them to pasta sauce, used them to top pizza or on toasted bread for brushetta, I always began by pureeing the tomatoes with either a food processor or an immersion blender. The intense flavor of the roasted tomatoes satisfied my tomato desire until I emptied the last jar on Town Meeting Day.

Here how I did it: … read more

For many gardeners, Town Meeting is the reminder that it is time to plant tomato seeds. The tender seedlings must wait on windowsills to be transplanted until the threat of a late May frost has passed. And then, with a balance of sun and rain, a presence of pollinators and an absence of blight and hornworms, local tomatoes thrive and come to market at the end of July.

Last weekend, my friend Veronica gave us a basket of tomatoes from her garden, our first Vermont tomatoes of the season. After the tomato blight of last summer, local tomatoes are even more of a treat. An heirloom tomato, still warm from the sun, eaten out of hand with a pinch of salt is one of summer’s great pleasures. I used thin slices of white bread, a thick slather of mayo, two layers of tomatoes and lots of sea salt and freshly ground pepper to make a platter of tomato sandwiches. Longing for the flavor and scent of just picked tomatoes is a desire that never seems to fade.

When we lived in Singapore, our English neighbor, Philip, was on an endless quest for “a proper English tomato”. The tomatoes grown in Singapore were hard and pale orange with green patches. Although they looked like tomatoes, they didn’t have much flavor; the imported tomatoes, called airflown in Singapore, from more temperate regions were perfectly red, perfectly round and perfectly tasteless. Philip decided to grow tomatoes with seeds taken from a very expensive imported tomato. The seeds sprouted quickly and he soon had half a dozen seedlings. He tied each seedling to a stick and waited for tomatoes to appear. In three weeks, all of the seedlings had died but each of the sticks had rooted and was sprouting leaves. For the rest of his time at the university, he longed for tomatoes from England.

Fortunately, here in Vermont, during the late summer, I satisfy my tomato desire with trips to farm stands, markets and friends’ gardens. When Susan and Bob stopped by with tomatoes from their garden, I invited them to stay for dinner. I made fresh tomato sauce for pasta in the time it took for the water in the pasta pot to come to a boil. Here’s how I did it:

… read more

Although it has been sunny and warm, Saturday was a cold rainy day and the sea was white with rolling waves.

I got wet and cold on a short walk and wanted something to eat, something warm and comforting. Soup! I had carrots and tomatoes so I made tomato and carrot soup. Here’s how I did it: ... read more

This  post is out of order – I blame it on jet lag. After a long night of travel, we finally arrived in Siracusa. We took a nap only to wake up and sleep for ten hours. The following morning, we crawled out of bed into the welcoming sunshine. Charles unpacked suitcases while I checked out my Sicilian kitchen. I found a small refrigerator, a cook-top with three burners, a tiny sink and a window with a view of the blue-green Mediterranean.

There was plenty of space in the nearly empty drawers for my arsenal of can’t-cook-without-it tools I had packed. My knives, the immersion blender that also functions as a mini food processor, the coarse and fine micro planes, a scale, measuring spoons and cups, and an instant read digital thermometer made my Sicilian kitchen seem a bit more like the one I left behind in Vermont. Even with these additions, the kitchen was not as well equipped as I had hoped so we had to set out in search of other kitchen essentials including a small toaster oven.

Life in Sicily is full of serendipity and detours. Our first detour was a stop at the Caffe Minerva for a macchiato and a ricotta filled pastry. Delizioso! Our second detour involved the open-air market. It was already noon, we had slept until ten, and the vendors would be gone long before we got back from our search for the super mercato. We needed food and since all of the fresh food we eat will be from local vendors, I had to shop for food before I shopped for the tools that I would need. The vendors’ stalls line both sides of the street for two blocks along Via Benedictine. My stomach was still on Vermont time, 5 am, so I was drawn to the fruit rather than to the squid and cuttlefish.

I filled a canvas shopping bag with blood oranges,  green skinned mandarines, one very large, lumpy skinned lemon, a pair of tomatoes shaped like deeply fluted pumpkins, garlic, a head of fennel and a container of olives. At the last stall, I bought a roasted red pepper from a vendor who had a small charcoal grill. He wrapped the still warm pepper in a bit of foil, and after I had paid him thirty Euro cents for it, he took the last onion from his grill, wrapped it and tucked it into my bag with a smile. After sampling the fresh mozzarella and buying a liter of fresh ricotta we were ready to go in search of the super mercato.

The third detour of the day occurred when Charles reminded me that since we didn’t have a car and we had to carrying everything we bought, we should take the food to our apartment before we tried to find the super mercato.

Our shopping bags emptied, we boarded the free public bus and confidently set off. An hour later, with a few missteps along the way and the help of three girls riding on the bus we arrived at the SUPER super mercato. It was farther than we expected and many times larger than I had imagined. It had everything I needed – staples including dried pasta, salt and pepper, olive oil, tomato paste, butter, honey and even a toaster oven!
It was raining and we were tired when we got back to our apartment. When I turned on the kitchen light and saw the olives and tomatoes on the counter, I knew that I had everything I needed to make crostini and pasta for our first meal from my Sicilian kitchen. Here’s how I did it: … read more