Recipe Links: Wisconsin Week 9
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Artisan cherry tomatoes, dragon tongue beans, maxibel French green beans, broccoli, bright lights chard, cucumbers, assorted peppers, Italian red onions, zucchini or Mediterranean squash, Kentucky wonder pole beans, basil, early bicolor sweet corn, patty pan squash, assorted tomatoes.
Dela said it best, this is a delicious time of year. So much beautiful color and so many delicious varieties at our fingertips this week. And, tomatoes! I love tomatoes. Of all the produce I yearn for in the summer, red, juicy tomatoes are the ones I miss most. Maybe it's because there are all those insipid grocery store tomatoes and pale greenish slices on restaurant burgers sitting there, reminding me of what I'm missing. In any case, summer tomatoes are here now and until they're gone, we'll be celebrating them with fresh, perfect BLTs, beautiful panzanella and caprese salads, and French tians.
Corn
For tastiest results, be sure to eat your corn right away. The longer it sits, the more sugar in the kernels will be converted to starch. We made this recipe for grilled corn with lime and chile on Thursday night.
Tomatoes
This week, we halved all the slicing tomatoes in our share, pressed slices of garlic into each tomato half (min 2 per tomato half), laid them cut-side-up in a baking dish, sprinkled it all with a hearty pinch of kosher salt, glugged a generous amount olive oil over the top, and roasted them at about 300 degrees for about 3 hours, until the tops dried out and caramelized a little and the juices from the tomatoes mingle with the olive oil. The result is delicious over toasts, or, even better, tossed with fresh croutons and topped with Parmesan cheese. (We're eating the crouton version tonight).
Green beans
Last night, I stumbled on another herby sauce for green beans: I minced 1/3 of a bunch of cilantro, 1 of the red onions from our share (including the top), a pinch of salt, a hearty pinch of cumin, and 2 small hot peppers (aji limons from my garden, to be precise), then mixed those ingredients with a little red wine vinegar and enough olive oil to cover.
Summer squash
The summer squashes from our shares often end up on grill, brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt. Sometimes we make skewers, but other times, we're just not in the mood for all that prep. That's when we fall back on a technique Blake read in a Cook's Illustrated guide to grilling: cut the squash lengthwise into long planks at least 1/2 inch thick instead of slicing lots of small rounds. For patty pans, I make thick slices. After we take them off the grill, I like to add an herby sauce of some kind, usually containing garlic, lemon, and olive oil and whatever herb we happen to have on hand. This week's basil would be a great choice.
