With a little foresight, you can have them always in the refrigerator, ready and waiting. I’ve never been one to believe, anyway, that happiness can’t be planned. I think my father would agree.
SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES WITH CORIANDER
this formula is loose enough that it can hardly be called a recipe. I’ve tried it in many permutations, and with good results every time. Sometimes I’ve roasted the tomatoes for 6 hours; other times, I’ve roasted them for 4. (You could even try 8 or 10 hours, if you want. What’s the worst that could happen?) Sometimes I’ve set the oven to 200°F; other times I’ve set it to 250°F. I’ve roasted 10 tomatoes one day and 28 the next. I’ve even carried my experimentation into winter, when the tomatoes are far from ideal, and have come away with summery results.
The quantities listed here are intended to be a starting point. I like to use Roma tomatoes, but you could use almost any. Romas have very little juice and dense, meaty flesh, meaning that they roast very nicely. And unlike their more delicate, juicy cousins, decent Romas can be found almost year-round. That’s good to remember, should you find yourself with a midwinter tomato craving.
3½ pounds ripe Roma tomatoes (about 20 tomatoes)
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt
Ground coriander
Preheat the oven to 200°F.
Wash and dry the tomatoes, trim away the stem end, and halve them lengthwise. Place them in a large bowl, and, using your hands, toss them gently with the oil. Arrange them cut side up on a large baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt and ground coriander, about a pinch of each for every 4 to 6 tomato halves.
Bake until the tomatoes crinkle at the edges and shrink to about half of their original size, 4 to 6 hours. They should still be juicy in their centers. Remove from the oven, and set aside to cool to room temperature.
Put them in an airtight container, and store them in the refrigerator for up to a week.
Yield: about 40 tomato halves
SLOW-ROASTED TOMATO PESTO
a plain slow-roasted tomato is hard to beat, but should you want to take yours a step further, try this riff on pesto. It makes a great spread for a sandwich, especially when there is goat cheese or fresh mozzarella involved. It’s also good as a condiment for pan-fried polenta. And like the slow-roasted tomatoes themselves, you can use it as a sauce for pasta. Just thin it with a splash of olive oil and some water from the pasta pot, and it’s ready.
½ cup olive oil
1 teaspoon lemon juice
¼ teaspoon salt
2 medium cloves garlic, peeled and trimmed
2 cups packed basil leaves
3 cups slow-roasted tomatoes (about 36 halves; see preceding recipe)
½ cup tightly packed finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
In the bowl of a food processor, combine the olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and garlic. Pulse until the garlic is finely chopped. Add the basil leaves and process until smooth, scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Add the tomatoes and process well. Add the Parmigiano-Reggiano and pulse to combine. Taste, and adjust the seasoning as necessary.
Stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator, this pesto will keep for up to a week.
Yield: about 2½ cups
BABY STEPS
I’ve never liked the word blog. It’s kind of weird and lumpy. When you say it, it tumbles out of your mouth with an unbecoming thud. Plus, the whole concept is a little weird: a Web site where a person can write about whatever they want to, inviting comments and feedback from the whole world. At their best, blogs are smart, funny, and informative. At their worst, they’re blush-worthy rants written at 2:00 a.m. after a bad breakup.
I tried to steer mine somewhere in between. I write about food and cooking, and in that sense, I aim to be informative, but I write about my life some, too, since it intersects with food roughly three times a day. I don’t think many of us are terribly interested in recipes that have no stories or real-life context. For me, the two are inseparable. One is pale and boring without the other.
But still, having a blog is strange. I never know whether to be proud (I’m young and hip! I’m with it! I have a blog! ) or sheepish (So, uh, yeah, I have, uh, a blog? I take pictures of my dinner. But enough about me! Let’s talk about you.). It’s a classic love-hate relationship. And like the human-to-human kind, the human-to-blog kind is oddly addictive. It’s hard to beat the rush that comes when you press “Publish,” sending your words out into the ether, or the satisfaction that stems from someone leaving a comment on your site. There’s always a twinge of fear—Will anyone read this? Will I alienate all my friends?—but so long as it’s only a twinge, it’s tolerable. Delicious, even.
I guess you could say that having a blog is a little like the windows of a house I used to live in during my sophomore year of college. I loved opening them wide during the day, so that the smell of the eucalyptus trees outside could drift in and sweep out the rooms. But occasionally I would come home and find a squirrel on my desk. A live squirrel. He would have climbed up the tree outside and jumped in through the window, and now here he was, rifling with his tiny, scratchy claws through whatever he found, tearing up every paper and scrap. Blogging is a little like that. It’s an incredible pleasure to open the window, to put yourself out in the world that way. It’s even better than the scent of eucalyptus. But occasionally you come home and find a squirrel on the desk, so to speak: a nasty comment, maybe, or even worse, something you wrote yourself, probably late at night, when you should have been sleeping, something that makes your cheeks hot.
I didn’t know what to expect when I started Orangette. But I certainly didn’t expect the e-mail that flew in through the window on April 3, 2005.
Hello,
I’m sure you get this all the time, but your site is wonderful. My friend Meredith (who’s a poet/writer and a damn good pastry chef) found it while searching for a French lemon yogurt cake recipe for a dinner party we’re having. She texted me right away to tell me that I had to look at it. We relate to you because your writing is exactly how we feel and talk about food and life. And it seems that we’ve all spent time in France. I was in Paris for a semester last year; she was in Aix-en-Provence. I forget where you said you were. My name is Brandon, by the way (if you didn’t infer that from the e-mail address), and I’m a musician (composer) getting my master’s part-time in NYC, while being a full-time food snob. Anyway…
The main problem is that you live in the wrong city. Spring’s starting to show its beautiful face here in “The world’s second home.” (It’s our new slogan—apparently “The Big Apple” was outdated.) Also, if you were in NYC, I would like nothing more than to take you out to Balthazar for some French martinis and a Balthazar Salad. Hope you’re enjoying the day as much as you can, with the clouds and all.
~b
Well. This was certainly something new. I wasn’t sure how to feel. He could be anyone. For all I knew, he could be twenty-two and an underwear model, or he could be eighty-two, with sweaters that smell like mothballs. Even worse, he could be some sort of Internet serial killer, stalking his prey among the food blogosphere, following the scent of banana bread and Ed Fretwell soup.
But I was strangely intrigued.
He’s a musician, I thought. I like music!
He’s a composer. He must be smart!
He mentioned Balthazar. How bad could he be? I’d had a terrific meal there once, cold seafood and a beet salad, on a trip to visit my sister. It was big and bustling, French to the core, all polished wood and tile and café tables.
I had no idea who this person was, and the mention of this Meredith girl made me suspicious—was she his girlfriend, or what?—but still, I was intrigued. I decided to write back. I’d write a little low-key letter, just to say thank you, and maybe ask about his music. That’s all.
Hi Brandon—
Thanks for your e-mail, and no, I don’t get that sort of thing all the time! It’s always so nice
to know that people are reading and enjoying my site. Thank you for letting me know.
And please thank your friend Meredith on my behalf for sending you over. It’s good to meet fellow food-loving Francophiles! I see that you were in Paris for a while. Where in the city were you? I was there for two quarters as an undergrad, living in the 15th with a host family, and then I lived and worked there for almost a year after graduation, from late 2001 to mid-2002. I rented a little studio in the 11th. I miss it terribly, but Seattle grows on me all the time. If I’m going to be in the States, this isn’t a bad place to be. I’ve toyed with the idea of New York, but I’m a West Coast girl at heart. I do love Balthazar, though, and I’d take you up on your offer in a heartbeat, were I in the area…
Speaking of which, where are you doing your master’s? And what type of pieces are you composing? I’m not well versed in the world of classical music, but I have a weakness for nights at the symphony. Is that the sort of stuff you’re working on?
Have a great week,
Molly
See that bit about the symphony? Total lie. I don’t know what got into me. I didn’t know whether to pat myself on the back—go get ’em, girl!—or to punch myself in the eye. In the end, I did neither. I sat by the computer all day, waiting for his name to appear in my inbox. And that night, it did.
Hello Molly,
Thank you for writing back so quickly. It was so much fun to call Meredith and tell her that our good friend Molly e-mailed me. She had no idea that I wrote to you!
On Paris…I still dream of the macaroons at Ladurée, the hot chocolate at Angelina’s, the exotic creations of Pierre Hermé, the smell of flaming Calvados on crêpes at Crêperie Suzette (did you ever go there?), the falafels with salade turque in the Marais, the view from the escalators in the Centre Pompidou. I could go on forever…
On music…I’m currently studying at the City University of New York, taking classes at Brooklyn and Hunter colleges. I’m studying with an amazing woman from Cuba whom I refer to as the Buddha, because of her never-ending knowledge of all things. I play saxophone, but as for the type of music I write, I guess it’s considered classical. Or “art music.” I usually write for choirs or orchestras or chamber groups, although sometimes I use electronics or make sound sculptures or installations. I guess I write pretty out-there music. But I try to keep an eye on the beauty of the outcome. For a food analogy: I won’t create salads with raw chicken, lychee, pork rinds, and lemon zest with a motor oil-goat cheese-olive dressing, just because no one has done it before. I try to make “dishes” that taste like nothing else, but that also taste good. Being a composer is really no different from being a chef or a choreographer. Anyway, enough about music and too much about me.
How are you? I hope you’re having a great day.
~b
Oh my. This was very interesting. This was very good. Ladurée? Pierre Hermé? And Crêperie Suzette? That place was a ten-minute walk from my old apartment. I used to pass it almost every day. Sometimes, especially in the winter, I would stop at the to-go window for a hot crêpe smeared with apricot confiture. It came folded in a thin paper sleeve, and I would eat it as I walked, holding it in one hand and my soggy umbrella in the other. I had forgotten how much I loved that.
I kind of liked this guy.
So I sent another letter, and he, for his part, replied. Then there was another, and another. Soon he knew that my mother was an identical twin, that she had once owned a brown faux-fur dress and wore it to a Christmas party where she danced with the man who would become my father, and that I was conceived in Marin County, California. He knew that I used to have a T-shirt from Marin Brewing Company, a brewery near the town where my parents did the deed, that said BREWED IN MARIN across the back, and that I loved it, because I was. Soon I knew that his parents were former hippies and that he had been a vegetarian since birth; that he had been in a serious long-term relationship that had ended about a year before, in Paris; and that he was conceived in Allendale, New Jersey.
“Every time we passed a particular house, my mom would say, ‘Did you know you were conceived there? Right in that little white house?’ This was before I even knew what it meant to be conceived.”
I really liked this guy.
One day, he happened to mention that he’d been on Friendster, the major social networking site at the time, and that, oh, what a small world, one of his friends was So-and-So, who was friends with another So-and-So, who was a friend of mine. I was never a big fan of Friendster, but I certainly did love it that day, when I logged onto my account and clicked through, friend to friend to friend, to Brandon’s profile, where he’d posted two photographs of himself.
In the first, he was halfway out of the frame, smiling and seemingly laughing. He had hazel eyes and brown hair that fell in loose curls to his earlobes. There was a good-sized freckle on his left cheek, next to a dimple—he had dimples! on both sides!—and he had nice white teeth. (My mother always told me to look at the teeth.) The second shot was in black and white. He was looking squarely at the camera, mouth relaxed and lips slightly parted, and wearing what appeared to be lightly tinted, John Lennonesque glasses and that same, lovely, messy hair. I could forgive him for the glasses, I decided, because of that hair. He was adorable. He was handsome. He was hot. I wrote him another letter.
But I was starting to get nervous. I still hadn’t heard his voice, and for all I knew, he could be some frisky teenager, setting up a very elaborate ruse. I really didn’t think so, but still. Also, I had noticed in his Friendster profile that under “Hobbies and Interests,” the first item listed was “dinner parties.” I’d never heard a straight man say such a thing. I was worried. Then again, he also listed as interests “hot sauce,” “beer,” “bread,” “bourbon,” “anything with the consistency of salsa,” and “thinking too much.” I decided to give him my phone number.
The next night, he sent me a text message that read, simply, “Baby steps…” I was a goner. Using the number in my cell phone memory, I called him the next afternoon, and we talked for three and a half hours. Three days later, he called to tell me that he was coming to Seattle. He’d been out in New Jersey, he said, visiting his parents, and his father happened to mention that he was taking a business trip to Seattle in a week or so, and would Brandon like to come along? He could get a companion fare. It would be easy.
So it was that on April 25, barely three weeks after that first e-mail, I walked into the lobby of the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle, where his father had booked a room, and met Brandon. He was about 5'10'', wearing a leather jacket the color of dark chocolate and a pair of old jeans. His smile was bigger, giddier, than in the photograph, and his hair was wild and curly, just brushing his shoulders. He was still wearing those weird glasses, but the hair, people, the hair. I wore my favorite jeans and my purplish leather ankle boots with the pointed toes, the ones I call my Peter Pan Boots. We eyed each other shyly, grinning, as I walked toward him through the revolving doors. I was so nervous that I could hardly see straight. He discretely looked me up and down (a move he still denies, though we both know he did it) and wrapped me in an enormous hug. He is a very good hugger.
Then I realized that I’d forgotten to put money in the parking meter. I told him to hold on, that I would be right back, and I ran, my boots slap-slapping the pavement, down the block to the car. It occurred to me only as I was walking back to the hotel, trying to catch my breath and checking to make sure that I hadn’t sweat through my shirt, that he might think I’d fled the scene.
If he did, he didn’t say a word. He was waiting, smiling, on a bench in the lobby, with a shoulder bag at his feet. We walked out onto the street, yelling over the noise of the monorail above, and I pointed us toward the new downtown library. It had opened not long before, and it was impressive, a massive, misshapen Rubik’s Cube on a hill amidst the skyscrapers. Talking all the while, we absentmindedly took it in, the mezzanine with its curving red hallways, the chartreuse escalator
s. On the top floor, under the sloping windows, we sat in foam chairs that looked like Lego bricks and talked about hometowns and secrets. He told me that as a kid, he used to shoplift candy bars and eat them in the bathroom, because his mother wouldn’t let him have them. In high school, he confessed, he sang in a rock band called “Um….” I admitted that I’d been a debutante in the Oklahoma City Beaux Arts Ball. I am not really debutante material, but the chair of the selection committee that year was the mother of my senior prom date Billy, and I think she had something to do with it. My invitation was nearly revoked when I showed up for bow practice the day before with my nose pierced, but on the night of, no one said a word, and I got to come out, my arm looped over my father’s, in my big white dress. My mother occasionally still runs into people who remember me as The Girl Who Got Away with a Nose Piercing at the Beaux Arts Ball. As far as secrets go, my debutante days lie at the dark end of the spectrum, but Brandon didn’t flinch. We bought cups of gelato and sat on the Harbor Steps, facing the water, and talked some more. Then we went to Pike Place Market to buy ingredients for dinner.
We weren’t aiming high, and I was too nervous to have much of an appetite, so we decided to make a salad. It was early spring, and ramps—those skinny wild leeks, like scallions with flat leaves—were in season. We bought a small bunch, along with some romaine and a fat avocado. Then we stopped for a round of Cowgirl Creamery’s Mt. Tam cheese—made in the county where I was conceived! Oh, the coincidence—and, on the way back to the car, a baguette and beer.
A Homemade Life Page 16
