Just Three: Tomatoes, Chilis, and Parsley

Tomatoes, dressed with tomatoes, and not much else

If you've spent any time at all with me, you already know I talk too much, so today's project is to keep it tight. Tight lips, tight keys, tight dish. Put up or shut up. Make it count. Insert cliche here, but make sure it all nets down to a tight little post.

As I've already confessed, I'm a pretty lousy gardener, but - as with most things in life - luck trumps skill, and Lady Luck planted a big, wet snog on my tomatoes this year. Seriously, to judge by my Green Zebras, she might even have used some tongue. If you're lucky enough to live here in the 707, you already understand that tomato season can acquire near-mystical qualities, spoken about in the same hushed tones normally reserved for yield, brix, and how badly hosed the wine industry may or may not be in the latest rags, so I take this bit of fortune seriously: What can I do to flatter all this sexy fruit?

Yesterday's project: Construct a complete tomato dish that even my kids would eat, using only three ingredients, all of which we grew. To hand: Tomatoes (Lemon Boys, not technically an heirloom, with their lower acidity and mildly tangy sweetness; and the aforementioned Green Zebras, their distinctive, racy zing a great match to the Lemons), chili peppers (Serranos, a great go-to chili for heat and flavor, and particularly good raw), and a bed full of herbs (a whole Simon-Garfunkle reunion of parsley, sage, rosemary, and culinary thyme, alongside basil, lavender, and chives), from which - basis the chili - I could have plucked basil, but thought the flat-leaf parsley a bit more interesting and marginally less obvious pairing. The clever if likely unoriginal (296,000 Google hits in 0.21 seconds) insight: A vinaigrette, described (as far as I know) by none other than Thomas Keller as "the perfect sauce", consists of nothing but acid, oil, and seasoning. So, why not use tomatoes as the acid, for a tomato vinaigrette? (A truly excellent discussion of vinaigrettes, citing all my favorite cook-book sources and getting it right, can be found here.)

Tomato Salad with Green Zebra Vinaigrette and a Fresh Parsley and Chili Garnish

The same tomato-tomato salad, but fast-plating version

1. Concasse a few Green Zebra tomatoes, maybe 1/2 to 1 tomato per salad (click the Foodista widget below for an explanation of the proper concasse technique) and, while slightly annoying, can be done in bulk, stored, and used later in any number of preparations). Seed, rib, and finely mince a fresh Serrano (or other red, say Arbol) chili pepper. Pick a handful of small leaves off the parsley.
Tomato Concasse
2. Push the tomatoes concasse through sieve or ricer or whatever to get a smooth texture and ensure that all the seeds have been removed (tomato seeds tend to add an unpleasantly bitter flavor and odd texture to smooth sauces) into a small mixing bowl. Season with a dash of white wine vinegar, finely milled salt and fresh white pepper (you don't want black flecks in it).
3. Whisk olive oil into the tomato base, in roughly equal proportions (a typical vinaigrette requires a 3:1 ratio of oil to acid, which would be fine here as well, but I prefer to let the tomato remain center stage, and its textural weight seemed to hold the oil just fine in this ratio), and adjust seasoning as required.
4. Spoon the dressing to cover the bottom of shallow pasta bowls.
5. Cut the Lemon Boys, remaining Green Zebras, and/or whatever other tomatoes you have to hand (Tangerines, Cherokee Purples, and Early Girls would all look and taste phenomenal; you can't go wrong, just try to balance the zesty acidity and color of the greens with sweeter, and yellow-red colored, cousins) into roughly uniform medium-dice. 
6. Sprinkle a little of the minced chili on the sauce and judiciously place the tomato cubes (skin-side up or not, depending on their look) on the sauce, adding a leaf of parsley to the top of a few of the not-green cubes.

As a speedier alternative, simply give the parsley and the whole tomatoes a rough chop, toss the tomatoes with the sauce, and then sprinkle the chili and parsley over the top.

Just Three: Strawberries, Tomatoes, Balsamic

Cruising the Tuesday market with my youngest daughter, under strict orders to return home with the makings of a salad but little other guidance, we walked by Lou Preston's stall, and were stopped in our tracks by Lou's strawberries. As a rule, I'm not a big fan of strawberries, finding them a poster child for the over-engineered style of supermarket fruit: Big, firm, nice to look at, but overly dry and hard to the tooth and utterly devoid of taste. On Tuesday, however, with the oblique angle of the late day sun glancing off their perfectly ripe, almost impossibly red skins, Lou's teeming baskets of rubescent little berries were like traffic lights stopping our egress down the aisle.

Farmer's markets are all about quality over quantity, and the rest of the stall was a case study: Small, compact, efficient, and I wanted to eat everything in it, the rainbow-in-a-box of plump tomatoes, the short and squat sweet peppers and the long, lean, twisting, and vaguely sinister fiery ones, the progressive shading of green into crimson and yellow tracking the late-season maturation of the fruit. On the corner of the table, a wicker basket full of crusty sourdough loaves, labeled "country white", but, to my taste, more closely resembling a dense, chewy version of the classic French miches, with its distinctive tang of rye flour. (Etymological specificity notwithstanding, I took a loaf home. It barely lasted through breakfast the next day.)

Anyway, back to dinner, and our latest installment of "Just Three". Armed with strawberries of such high sugar content, I wanted something with a bit of bite to provide ballast to the dish: Green Zebra heirlooom tomatoes (the little guys in the upper left corner of the picture), with higher acidity and more tartness than most of their heirloom cousins, would balance the flavor profile and a splash of color at the same time. Now, strawberries and tomatoes may or may not sound odd to you - they are both fruits, after all - but the what makes the match particularly interesting is that the tomato is a berry, while the strawberry is not: A botanist will insist that most of what we instinctively classify as berries (with the notable exception of the blueberry, which is a true berry) actually comprises a peripherally related cousin-class called aggregate fruit (many little fruits grouped together), while tomatoes (and bananas, which always surprises me)with their fruit, comprised of flesh from a single ovary, are true berries. Lest you think that's the end of the story, the strawberry is, in fact, neither berry nor aggregate fruit, but is instead an accessory fruit, in which the edible portion has not been produced from the ovary (apparently, the little bunches of seeds are the true "fruit" of the strawberry, but I don't really get that).

What Would Mae West Say? A Tomato Manifesto.

Lemon Boys and Pesto, on Cranberry-Semolina Sourdough

I thought it was Mae West who said something about good sex being great, and bad sex being pretty good too, but I can't find the attribution, so maybe I'm wrong; apparently of similar mind, I did come across one Jimmy Williams (and again, I'm honestly not sure which, but my money is on the old Red Sox manager), who said, “Sex is like money, golf and beer - even when it's bad, it's good.” Whatever the case, I'm going to argue that sex is a really lousy analogy for tomatoes.

Because the thing about tomatoes is this: There is perfect, there is nearly perfect, and there is wholly unacceptable. "Middle ground" is a term better reserved for debating the relative merits of cooking beef to rare vs. medium-rare specifications, or figuring out how to get your tween daughter to clean her room. No, with tomatoes, the territory between "good" and "bad" is more like a DMZ: It's right there in front of you, it's clear and well-defined, and if you spend too much time inside it, you're likely to end up shot. Or, if we're talking about the kitchen, with a mouthful of mealy, watery, flavorless red mush of only the most casual, and likely offensive, relation to what your palate had greedily anticipated. Come to think, maybe that's the better analogy: If your favorite, wisened grandparent, full of love, spark, and pithy bits of folksy wisdom, were a succulent, ripe heirloom cultivar, then the drab supermarket tomato, mass-farmed for the ketchup-and-shitty-pasta-sauce market, picked sufficiently close to granite-like hardness that it will endure hundreds (if not thousands) of miles of open roads, piled en masse atop eighteen-wheeler bin trucks, without suffering so much as a blemish, is a bit like that woebegone uncle or black sheep cousin in a Chevy Chase family vacation movie (or, perhaps, from your own Thanksgiving table). You know that if you actually went out and ran a DNA test, it would confirm that he does in fact share genetic code with the rest of the family, but no empirical evidence, physical nor behavioral, exists to support that conclusion.

Putting down roots

Salad of Purple Cherokee, Green Zebra, & Roasted Peppers

I'm a slow learner. I can live with that, provided the  emphasis ends up on the noun rather than its descriptor, at least in the main. You might think that slow learners would also be gradual learners, that the rate at which we assimilate knowledge might be in some sense proportional to the time it takes for the process to complete. You might think that, but you would be wrong, as I just learned from the tomato plant.