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You are here: Home / Food & Recipes / Cooking / Sunday Garden Chat: “How to Make the Most of Gorgeous Late-Summer Tomatoes”

Sunday Garden Chat: “How to Make the Most of Gorgeous Late-Summer Tomatoes”

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Since I’m out of garden pics, here’s a recipe for the use of gardeners. Mark Bittman, in NYMag:

… We think of tomatoes as summer food, and they’re the best thing to eat right now. For the next couple of weeks, you can make the best late-summer pasta sauce there is, though it’s probably the most ingredient-dependent pasta sauce, too. That is, if you do this with supermarket ingredients, you’ll be rewarded with decent sauce. If you do it with Sun Gold cherry tomatoes; fresh-picked basil; strong, ultrasticky garlic; and top-notch olive oil (mine happened to be Californian), you’ll end up with something mind-blowing.

Getting the ingredients is the hardest part — the actual prep and cooking are simple. Let’s say for two servings you want 30 or 40 cherry tomatoes, cut in half. You want a couple of big cloves of garlic (or a few smaller ones), slivered, and, say, a quarter cup of oil — maybe a little more. A small fresh chile is not a bad addition.

As you start the water for the pasta, grab a medium pan and begin cooking the garlic in the oil very slowly (add the minced chile, if you’re using it). By the time the water boils, the garlic should have begun to color. Add the halved tomatoes to the garlic and crank the heat a bit. A minute or two later, start the pasta. I’d use long pasta for this if you have it, but I’m not slavish about shape. A decent serving size is 75 grams, but 60 is good for a snack, and 100 if you’re hungry.

When the tomatoes have broken down a bit, throw in a lot of roughly torn basil leaves — an entire supermarket-size bunch isn’t too much. Add salt and pepper, of course, and toss the whole thing together. It does not need cheese; a little shredded basil on top of it all is nice….

Bittman also includes a recipe for a tomato “galette/crostini/free-form tart”, for which you’ll have to click the link.

***********
I’ve got a friend coming out from the midwest to sightsee, so my blog participation this week is liable to be spotty and unreliable. Good thing there are other front-pagers to take up the slack — here’s hoping for a slow news week…

What’s going on in your garden(s) this week?

Reader Interactions

88Comments

  10. 10.

    satby

    @OzarkHillbilly: my garden is looking pretty bedraggled. But I’m still getting lots of orange tomatoes, no idea why I only got a couple of reds and only 1 purple one. All the plants grew like crazy. I’m assuming they just needed more watering.
    Edited to add, got about five lbs of purple potatoes from 1 lb of seed potatoes. Should have watered them more too, but the frequent scant rains we had fooled me into thinking it was enough until late in the season.

  14. 14.

    HeartlandLiberal

    I think the deer and I have entered the next level of the arms race. Despite the three water scarecrows surrounding the tomatoes, about ten of the remaining large ones that were starting to ripen have disappeared over the past week. I suppose next year I will be researching how set up motion detection triggered lights and noise. Maybe a scarecrow that moves when it detects motion.

    Geeze, who knows, these urban deer gangs are out of control in this town.At 9 am a couple days ago, as we were driving up the street to leave our neighborhood, which is a dead end loop, little traffic, a large doe ran across the street right in front of the car.

    Recently the town council again agreed to fund a controlled hunt in the wooded area near the small older reservoir north of town, because study after study shows the deer over population has destroyed the undergrowth and native plant species. Of course they had to fight those who oppose killing ANY deer, at all, because poor Bambi. Poor Bambi has no natural predators, and parts of this town, in densely residential areas, are literally overrun with deer all the time. In yards, in the streets, destroying flowers and gardens.

  21. 21.

    satby

    @Baud: guys he knew. He was a cop, remember.

    @Amir Khalid: my friends and I were hippies, the guys all had long hair and beards. My uncles and several of the parents’ friends were more conservative. And there would be alcohol flowing freely. No trouble developed at all, everyone had a nice time; but my dad was a smart guy who had pretty good instincts. He just didn’t realize how much a string quartet as entertainment kept things (and people) classy.

  23. 23.

    Lapassionara

    Good morning, everyone. In lieu of photos, here is what I managed to accomplish in my garden this past week:

    1. Pulled up the ugly brick walkway to nowhere and laid fescue sod where it used to be.
    2. Planted a red maple in the backyard.
    3. Moved an arborvitae to a sunnier spot (this involved digging up a boxwood and finding a place for it in the backyard).

    I should be feeling good about all of this. Instead I woke up worrying about that stupid Cassidy/ Graham monstrosity that seems to have a good chance of passing. Yikes!

  24. 24.

    satby

    @satby: another funny wedding story: my groom and his parents were caught by a freight train and were 1/2 an hour late to the church. This was the days before cell phones, so we had no idea where they were. People were getting restless, so my dad went to the front of the church and told the assembly that the wedding was off but to come on back to the house for a great party anyway. He gave it about two beats for the general shock to sink in, then confessed he was only kidding.
    My now ex showed up about two minutes later.

  27. 27.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @satby: It used to be said that no South Side wedding is complete without the mostaccioli or a brawl, and there was more than a little truth to that. Fortunately the guests at this wedding were a little classier so neither showed up at this one.

  32. 32.

    magurakurin

    well, that’s that. Typhoon Talim has left our little corner of the world on Shikoku Island. Nothing but crickets chirping outside now. It got fairly windy and some heavy rain, but nothing very troubling right here. The mountains got heavy rain, though, and they had to open the dams. That’s a good thing…all our water is up behind the dams in the mountains. The storm is crossing over to Honshu Island now and the big cities of Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto. September in Japan.

  34. 34.

    magurakurin

    @Baud: this one wasn’t very much of a worry. And the city I live in is a somewhat sheltered spot. We usually miss the worst of the storms. There are lots of mountains, bays, coves, twists and turns in Japan that provide lots of micro climates.

    nowhere to hide from the earthquakes though….

  36. 36.

    Betty Cracker

    Speaking of wedding disasters… My husband and I used to hang out at a neighborhood pub a lot before we got married, and while I made sure to invite our friends from that establishment to our wedding, the mister was feeling even more generous one evening prior to the ceremony and issued a general verbal invitation. This was eagerly taken up by the hardcore barfly contingent when they learned there would be an open bar.

    One of the barflies (a woman) showed up to the wedding with her teenage daughter, who was dressed in her (the barfly mother’s) wedding dress from the 80s. So, not only did someone wear white to my wedding, an unexpected guest actually showed up in an old, moth-eaten wedding dress.

    Also, one of my brothers-in-law brought a stripper as his date. He didn’t hire her just for the occasion; they were involved romantically for a month or so. Anyhoo, this BIL caught the garter, and his date made quite a professional show of it when he put in on her leg. A chair was involved.

    Our caterer (a very dear friend) and one of my redneck uncles nearly came to blows because the caterer kept pretending that my uncle was directing his suggestive remarks at the (male) caterer rather than the (female) servers my uncle was attempting to sexually harass.

    A memorable evening!

  40. 40.

    magurakurin

    @Betty Cracker: thanks, same to you. This was nothing like what you folks just went through in Florida. That was just a fright. I’m a yankee so, I never saw many hurricanes back home, but I’ve lived through 20 years worth of typhoons now. I’ve seen a few Category 3 storms, but nothing like Irma. I’m glad there was a relatively small loss of life. It could have been so much worse.

    The back winds of the storm are blowing now. I love the back winds. No rain. Almost total calm in the lulls. The stars slowly starting to appear. There is a lot of beauty in tropical cyclones in spite of their danger and destruction.

  47. 47.

    Betty Cracker

    @magurakurin: You’re right about the backside of tropical storms. The weather has been relatively pleasant here ever since, which was a good thing for the folks without power.

  48. 48.

    magurakurin

    @satby: yeah, knock wood. They just showed Dohtonbori in Osaka, which is sort of the Times Square of Osaka. No rain or wind at all and mobs of people out. The center of the storm is only about 60 miles to the southwest now. Osaka is really oddly sheltered and often misses the bad weather. Very little snow in the winter, too.

  51. 51.

    O. Felix Culpa

    Good morning, all! It’s our first wedding anniversary today. We’re looking forward to another wonderful year (and more).

  52. 52.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @satby: But then you wouldn’t have your sons.

    My caterer little brother last night: “I feel like I need to go in the kitchen and get busy. It’s been at least 15 years since I didn’t get paid to go to a wedding.”

  57. 57.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @satby: I made your baked tomato sauce recipe, which was wonderful. Used farmers’ market seconds, since my tomatoes were mostly a bust this year. We had -and have – lots of other good veggies though. My Swiss chard and butternut squash have done particularly well. I recently planted my fall/winter greens.

  61. 61.

    Schlemazel

    @Betty Cracker:
    OMG! That may be the most redneck wedding I have ever heard of!

    My niece was very pregnant(with her 3 child by 3 different guys) at her wedding to a guy she had been a pen pal with while he served Federal time for drugs and guns. I think they all wore cammo. What made it funny was both sets of parents felt their child was marrying down & spent a great part of the evening letting each other know it. Yes, fights were involved.

  63. 63.

    Ohio Mom

    Feel a little bad changing the light-hearted feeling of this thread but Whoa, if Cole was impressed with last Sunday’s Cincinnati’s Enquirer look into the opiod epidemic, look at this: today’s front page story is “Far right drives most extremist violence in region.”

    The cynic in me thinks, Yeah, the Enquirer loves hatchet murder stories and what a good opportunity to revisit a few, but really, it is good to see the mainstream press say it aloud: a good number of those deplorables are sociopaths emboldened by the rhetoric of the right.

    If you want to take a look at “When Extremism turns into Violence,” I suggest you hurry, the Enquirer puts up that paywall pretty quickly.

  65. 65.

    bystander

    @satby:

    @Betty Cracker: you should have had my dad do your wedding planning ?

    Yeah, then we could have had a discussion about the fatality statistics of the different weddings we’ve all been to.

  67. 67.

    Another Scott

    @satby: And receptions.

    In high school I helped out a cover band with roadie-type things. Once they played a wedding reception. There was one guy who was a guest there who was getting increasingly drunk and obnoxious. The band had just finished their set and we were taking things down when increasing drunk guy stabbed the groom. It didn’t seem to be life-threatening, but there was blood all over his white tux. We left very, very quickly…

    Far too many people shouldn’t drink, but never seem to learn that. :-(

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  68. 68.

    oldgold

    I garden year round.

    West of Eden, formerly the Rabbit Feeding Zone, despite my worst efforts, produces a few scrawny vegetables from May through October.

    The Weed Test Plot thrives from November through April. It is my pride and joy. Every year it produces an abundance of new and exotic subtropical noxious weeds. Even my neighbor and self proclaimed master gardener, Noah Tall, says he has never seen anything like it!

    Yesterday, Noah Tall called from Naples to inform me that the Weed Test Plot has suffered a set back.

    Not to worry, I have the gardening skill set to return it to the talk of the neighborhood within a few weeks: piss poor planning, pathetic procrastination and pedantic posturing. And, I plan on having Trump pay for it.

  69. 69.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Betty Cracker: That’s so much more exciting than any of the weddings in my family. They are like boring WASP weddings with a lot more ceremony, great food but no booze. They are almost nothing like the fun Punjabi weddings shown in Hindi movies.

  76. 76.

    magurakurin

    @Aleta: it was hot in the West but East Japan had some cool weather. But even in Western z
    Japan the heat and humidity ended at least a month early.

  78. 78.

    TomatoQueen

    One spring the local Bambis infuriated my mother by eating the blooming crocuses, more than 300, planted the previous fall. Our suburb was carved into public watershed land, which meant fallen hickory trees for the big stone barbecue and otherwise benign forest visitors, and the Bambis. We thought of all the messy ways of dealing with them, and decided on the neat if weird-looking method of dangling Ivory soap bars. String through a hole in one end of the bar, and a long afternoon hanging them all over 3/4 of an acre of woody shrubby garden, at varying heights. The next afternoon, evidence of jaw prints on most of the bars, and by the end of the week, no further browsing damage. Also, my father discovered that a neighbor was putting out food for the Bambis “because they’re so cute” and raised some hell.

  79. 79.

    Mel

    @HeartlandLiberal: A couple of years ago, we had a Mama deer who was pillaging all the gardens on our street. People tried scarecrows, foil pans tied to posts, Deer Away type sprsys, etc. Nothing worked.

    We decided to make the fence around our raised bed garden 7 feet high (1 foot raised bed edge, plus 6 feet of fencing height) instead of an easily breachable four feet high. We decided to use firm but flexible plastic fencing, and for good measure, I secured netting across the top. (One neighbor had installed a five foot wire fence, only to look out her window and see the deer casually standing on hind hooves, lounging across the partialliy bent down wire fence, and eating all of her higher growth from her staked green beans. Hence, netting the top to negate the temptation factor.)

    For tthree days, the garden was unmolested. On the fourth night, I heard a “crack”, “crack” and a weird creaking noise from outside at around 3 a.m. Turned a flashlight on the raised bed, and there was Mama deer, lounging on top of the netting, blissfully eating the lettuces, carrot tops, beans, and baby tomatillos that were now poking through the netting.
    She hadn’t been able to nibble through the netting when it was elevated above the veggies on the 6 foot fence, and she hadn’t initially been able to reach through the new fence because of the fine gauge mesh.
    So, she apparently had decided to leap onto the top of the netting, and just ride it down, Cirque de Soleil style, as the fence and poles bent inward and downward under her weight. She was hovering just a foot or so over the (now accessible) veggies and greens. It was like a hammock with room service.
    Meanwhile, her fawn was happily eating our roses.

    I lived on a farm for decades, but the deer in this city herd are the plumpest deer I have ever seen. We have three large parks and a nature preserve nearby, so they have a pretty large wooded range.

  84. 84.

    HeartlandLiberal

    @Jeff: At this point, next year I will consider anything. I was even thinking plastic mesh fencing wrapped around small groups of plants. Hanging Dove soap bars around the periphery. Sparying Deer Off on the plants every few days. This is a disappointment, the water scarecrows have worked for several years very well. I will be planting smaller next year, thanks herniated disk and deteriorating back, but I refuse to give up completely, and fresh heirloom tomatoes and a half dozen varieties of grape and cherry tomatoes have been a part of my life from growing up in the country 71 years ago to date.

  86. 86.

    urlhix

    I market farmed in rural middle GA for 13 years and a combination of things worked for me. Put up a 10 foot tall fence. Goat fence on the bottom, deer netting from there to the top and a strand of electrical one foot and five feet from the bottom and across the top. Then take some metal strips cut from empty beer cans, smear them with peanut butter and fold them over the two lower electrical strands at regular intervals. Worked for me, and I would regularly see 14+ deer on other parts of the property.

  87. 87.

    Cowgirl in the Sandi

    @OzarkHillbilly: Where I grew up in Illinois (Belleville, across the river from St. Louis) mostaccioli was THE thing to serve at funerals. That’s the only time I can remember having it. When we moved to California, no one had ever heard of it!

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