Category: Uncategorized

Few delights of summer are more satisfying than a fresh tomato, plucked from your own backyard vine, warm from the sun, sliced and eaten raw or with a touch of fresh mayonnaise. The aroma – even before you slice it – the rich red juice, the firm red flesh – ah. Few are the delights indeed that are better than a fresh tomato.

But in winter, if you try the same slicing and eating mostly raw with the tomato-like objects you find for sale in the grocery, it is not the same. In place of juice, there is watery pinkish fluid that’s vaguely tomato-ish. The texture is mealy or tough. In salads, as garnish, on a sandwich, these tomatoes are mostly worthless.

Or so I thought for years until I started roasting and searing and grilling these otherwise useless tomatoes. I was, you may say, very pleasantly surprised.

Quickly, here are a few things you can do that yield lovely results:

Slice a whole winter tomato in half and sprinkle the cut side with chopped garlic, dried thyme, kosher salt and fresh pepper. Top with fresh bread crumbs – just pop some bread in a food processor – and drizzle with olive oil. Roast hot until they wilt and crust over.

Or slice a winter tomato and sear it in a hot smoking skillet with a little canola oil. Let it cook till it blackens and flip it. Use it on top of eggplant or your morning eggs.

Or take some (also tasteless) winter cherry tomatoes. Cook them whole in a hot skillet with olive oil and toss until they burn a bit on the sides. Season and add to other cooked vegetables, or use them to garnish a pork chop or grilled chicken breast.

I’ll also cut winter plum tomatoes in half, squeeze out the juice and toss with a lemon-olive oil herb vinaigrette and roast them at 500 degrees or so.

In all these cases, what you’re doing is cooking off the watery fluid and concentrating what flavors are still there. Because despite what the tomato engineers have perverted in the cause of durability, shipability and shelf live, they are still, deep down in their round little souls, tomatoes. You just have to cook off the dross and flavor them a bit.

Let me acknowledge at the outset that there is no question of contradiction in the notion of “family meals” made outside the family by someone not remotely connected to the family.

But I did name our new service (four days of meals ready on Monday afternoon) deliberately. Our “family meals” are intended to be the same kind of food someone with time, inclination, basic skill and experience would provide at the evening table if the conditions of his or her life would permit it.

For many families, that’s not possible now. If both adults work, there’s no time. If you grew up with fast food everywhere, instant food available out of the freezer at the market, you just may not be familiar with how things as simple as roast chicken are put together. And, it is very possible that, never having watched it happen or be around to taste the results, you may not know how to cook.

Family meals when I was growing up were the work of my mother. They were made from basic ingredients. A cake, for example, she made using flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, eggs, milk and vanilla extract instead of a cake mix. Fried chicken from a whole chicken, cut up, floured, seasoned and fried in bacon grease. Not that she had any problem with using prepared food – it just wasn’t quite so prevalent as it is now.

With that base, I began my life as a cook by trying to make things instead of buy them. Making a tomato sauce with tomatoes, instead of just opening a jar. Throwing away the bag of powder from the little mac & cheese blue box and making a sauce with butter, flour and real cheese. When I did cook something out of a can or from the frozen meal section of the supermarket, I would adjust (increase) the seasoning so that it tasted a bit better. You get the idea.

Now, we’re providing this kind of simple food, made by chopping, blending, roasting and other simple-if-time-consuming techniques for people who, we hope, will sit down together around a table and enjoy a family meal.

I love getting new cookbooks, and recently my son, who understands my enthusiasms, sent me a copy of Donald Link’s Real Cajun. This is his first cookbook and is focused on a rich family history of cooking good food out of the Louisiana pig pens, rivers and swamps. It’s also the inspired work of a great chef.

Link runs Herbsaint and Cochon in New Orleans, two remarkably good places to eat in a city full of fine restaurants. I particularly like Cochon, having dined on pigs with great gusto most of my life, including an evening at Au Pied de Cochon (pigs foot) in Paris. Link, like the French, takes his swine seriously and makes all his own bacon, sausage, tasso, boudin, pork belly cracklins and andouille. I highly recommend tasting a sampler, his boucherie plate, as a heavy appetizer to acquaint yourself and the table with his skill.

Link has the heart of a butcher and as a devout meat eater he reluctantly includes dishes for vegetarians. But, he’s also a good husband and his wife doesn’t share his devotion to meat. Hence his recipe for Maque Choux, a dish I’ll be serving from his recipe July 31 at the third Hot Rock Hollow dinner concert at the Flying Monkey. I’ve had various versions of this simple corn, pepper and tomato dish, but Link’s is lovely. It’s spiced with fresh thyme, basil and bay leaves. It has a bit of heat in the peppers, but not too much, and it is especially good this time of year in Alabama when the tomatoes, corn and peppers are fresh out of the field. Vegetarians will love it, as will the meat eaters.

Jambalaya is also on the menu, though the version I’ll be preparing is more of a Creole version, according to Link, since it is cooked in stock with tomatoes and includes shrimp, chicken and tasso served under a rich tomato sauce. Cajun jambalayas lose the tomatoes and are heavy on chicken and sausage to flavor the rice. Not a bad combination, either.

I highly recommend the book to lovers of Louisiana cooking, and if you don’t want to bother with the book, or with cooking, do come taste some good food while you listen to good music at the next dinner concert.

If modern Americans were close to farms, as our grandparents were, we would now be changing our diets to accommodate the new season. Not because we wanted to necessarily, but because that would be all we would have to eat. Local food was all there was. Importing oranges or strawberries or tomatoes from California or Latin America was just too expensive. And factory food, except for canned vegetables and meats, wasn’t so prevalent. That meant winter squash, cool-weather greens, sweet potatoes and the like would grace the table, replacing fresh corn, tomatoes, cucumbers and watermelon.

Even with markets full of trucked-in produce from around the world, I often crave food that goes with the season. Cooler weather makes me want warm, filling and comfortable dishes. Like garlic chicken, braised lamb shanks, daube of beef (beef stew), slow-cooked beans, roasted vegetables and potatoes. It’s as if the appetite responds to the need to stay warm, to add a little winter padding to the body’s outer layer and help it survive the cold winter coming.

Garlic chicken is a great example. This simple dish uses 50 or 60 garlic cloves buried under browned chicken pieces and cooked with wine and stock. Serve it over hot cajun or plain rice. Soak up the juices with some good bread. Wash it down with a light pinot, or Brouilly, and you have prepared yourself for the next chilly autumn day.