 Watermelon Gazpacho I’m not sure there are two fruits more indicative of summer than watermelon and tomatoes. Is there anything better on a hot summer day than cracking open a watermelon and eating slices of it over the sink? Juice dripping down your chin, the crystals of sweet sugar bursting on your tongue, pausing only to dispatch seeds. Ah, summer. Unfortunately, it appears we just might be done with summer around here these days. The weather forecast for the next ten days doesn’t show one day over 70. We can pretend it’s summer a little while longer though by having watermelon gazpacho for lunch, even if we have to have it while wearing wool socks.
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 Spiced Tomato Pudding - the bits of pink are the fresh currants Before this summer, I’d never have thought about using tomatoes in a dessert. I’m not sure why not. They are a fruit after all, and when you can get them fresh and ripe, they are incredibly sweet. Sungold cherry tomatoes, for example, can have a Brix of 12. Really good peaches have a Brix of 17 or so. Brix is the measure of the sugar content of a fruit, taken with a refractometer. The higher the Brix, the sweeter the fruit. Now here’s where shopping locally and in season is very important. A ripe tomato from a local farmers market vendor can have a Brix of up to 10 or so. The hot house tomatoes you find at the grocery store out of season can have a Brix as low as 2-4. So if you’re going to attempt a tomato dessert, make sure and use fresh, in season tomatoes.
For this recipe, I picked up some nice #2′s from Billy’s at the University District Farmers Market. Since the first step of the recipe is to core, peel, and puree the tomatoes, you don’t have to worry about spending the extra money on the perfect, unblemished higher priced tomatoes. You can make the sweetened tomato puree several days in advance to save on time.
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 Tomato Upside Down Cake Tomato what? Cake? Are you serious?
Yes, actually. I’m very serious. On Saturday night, I made tomato upside down cake. One of our friends has raved about the cookbook Cooking by Hand. Well, John checked it out from the library and I’m hooked. Since we’re on a pretty strict budget these days, we’ve been checking cookbooks out from the library before we even think about buying them. Other than needing to be extra careful about stains while cooking, this has worked out really well. A couple of cookbooks we’ve been able to cross off our “want to buy” list without having to spend the money and a couple others, we’ve verified that they would be money well spent. This cookbook falls under the money well spent umbrella.
But back to the tomato upside down cake. Tomatoes are sweet. When you cook them to concentrate the flavor, they are even sweeter. This cake uses sliced tomatoes, cherry tomato “jam”, and a thin layer of cake for a delicious summer dessert.
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Pasta with Broccoli, Sausage, and Sun-dried Tomatoes
Most nights, we don’t cook elaborate meals. In fact, some nights, it’s all we can do to boil water and make pasta. You see, unlike a lot of food bloggers, this isn’t what we do to pay the bills. We blog because we love it, but we also work other jobs. So when we get home at 6:30 on a Wednesday and nothing’s been chopped, sliced, minced, or roasted, we default to easy, quick, and fresh meals with whatever happens to be in the fridge. Quick, easy, and largely unplanned [...]
 Bean Salad with Roasted Vegetables Even though we both love meat, we have our share of meatless meals. Since we workout so much though, and since John’s diabetic, we have to make sure those meatless meals have a significant amount of protein in them. One of the ways we do this is with liberal use of dried beans. We get our dried beans from either Alvarez Farms, Alm Hill Gardens, or Stoney Plains. Alvarez, in particular, has a wide variety of beans nearly every week. We love picking up chickpeas and making our Spicy Roasted Chickpeas and we regularly cook up some black beans with some pancetta and rosemary.
When thinking about what we could make for our cooking demo at Queen Anne Farmers Market, we wanted something with beans for several reasons. First, I think beans often get overlooked. They aren’t glamorous and on’t have a tremendous amount of flavor on their own. Not to mention there’s the time they require. You’ve got to soak them overnight and only then can you cook them. Second, we wanted to make a dish that was vegetarian. You never know when you’re cooking for a crowd how many people will be vegetarian or vegan.
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 Smoked Salmon and Vodka Cream Sauce On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… eleven pipers piping…
Honestly, this one threw us for a bit. We just made breadsticks, the obvious “flute”. So what to do, what to do?
Then we thought ‘How about piped cookies of some kind?’
Well, sure, but we already had cookies planned for another day that fit a lot better.
Or we could go for the more traditional piper. Bagpipes were made from sheep’s stomachs back in the day. Ooo, we could make Haggis! Well, if we were the Herbfarm, maybe we would. But we aren’t, so we won’t even start to think about where we could locally get some sheep’s stomach.
So let’s take this and turn it on its side. Pipers. Pipes. Tobacco Pipes. Smoking. Smoked. Salmon.
How about something with smoked salmon? Which brings us to Smoked Salmon Vodka Cream Sauce.
Continue reading 12 Recipes of Christmas – Pasta with Smoked Salmon Vodka Cream Sauce
 Saffron Spiced Black Cod and Tomato Soup When the wind blows and the temperature drops, I can’t help but want soup. There’s something comforting about soup. Soup is warm. Soup is relaxing. Soup is forgiving.
Forgiving? Yes. Forgiving. You can play around with soups. A pinch of this, a teaspoon of that, substitute one ingredient for another… there are a wide variety of tricks you can use with most soups. Since we cook local, being able to substitute for a few ingredients is key. For today’s soup, we took some delicious pieces of black cod that we picked up from Wilson Fish at the Ballard Farmers Market. Wilson’s salmon season is over for the year, but they’re fishing for black cod, ling cod, halibut, and rock fish these days. The cod and rock fish are a good bit cheaper than their salmon, so you can pick up a solid pound for a very reasonable price.
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 Baked and Stuffed Peppers I think I’ve mentioned before that we just don’t really care for stuffed peppers. It always seems like we end up with too much pepper and too little filling. The pepper overshadows anything you put inside and never seems to cook quite enough for my tastes. Yet despite all of this, I still love the idea of a stuffed pepper recipe and I’ll try just about any recipe I find that sounds appetizing.
Enter this recipe from Martha Stewart. Please. Go look at that photo. Isn’t that gorgeous? The way those tomatoes set there, nestled in the pepper, with the little bits of cheese and basil…I’m salivating just looking at that photo. So we tried again to love a stuffed pepper recipe. Did we succeed?
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 Stuffed Eggplant I admit to a bit of a love/hate relationship with eggplant. Don’t get me wrong, I love eggplant. But the hate comes whenever I try to recreate one of my very favorite dishes ever, the Eggplant Parmesan appetizer at Pasta Freska. I’m not even sure I can do this appetizer justice in my description. The eggplant is thin, barely crusted, and cooked with a delicious tomato cream sauce and a very mild cheese. I can make a great Eggplant Parm, but it is nothing like this one. I’ve tried frying the eggplant, baking it, and roasting it. I’ve tried multiple variations of sauce and cream and cheese. I’ve tried baking for long and short times. No matter what I do, I just can’t recreate this perfect dish (though every dish I have made has been excellent).
So after I’ve tried a couple of times in a row to recreate the Eggplant Parm, I give up and move on to something easy and nearly impossible to screw up -Stuffed Eggplant.
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 Summer Vegetable Soup with Purslane I admit, until this week I’d never tried purslane. In fact, I’m not sure I’d ever even noticed it at the market tables. However a couple of weeks ago, at the Ready. Set. Cook! event at the University District Farmers Market, both chefs used purslane in their dishes. So when we saw it was an option for our Growing Washington Local Choice Food Box, we ordered a bunch.
Purslane has long been considered a weed, but you can eat it just like you eat a leafy vegetable. The flavor is sweet, salty, and sour all at the same time. I think it tastes like a succulent bit of romaine lettuce. Purslane has more Omega-3 fatty acids than any other leafy green. It is also high in Vitamins A, C, and B (beta-carotine).
There are a variety of things you can do with purslane. Chop it up and throw it in salads, add it to soup, or make a pesto out of it.
For this today’s recipe, we made a minestrone type soup and add a bunch of chopped purslane to the pot right before serving.
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