I'm always looking for that little extra something that makes a bowl of food shine. It is the hero, the one people praise when the meal is over. That one ingredient that you try to get into every mouthful; keeping a little bit aside to be sure it's the last thing your mouth remembers. On a meat-centric plate the cut of meat is often that hero and gets all the attention. In a plantbased kitchen you have so candidates just lining up to have their turn. As with most things, you get out of plants what you put into them. You can turn anyone into the hero with the right care and attention, there is no ugly duckling or under-dog left behind.
Having said that, no one could ever consider tomatoes the under-dog. Tomatoes are one of the most cultivated crops in the world. They are essential for numerous cultures and exploited in a myriad of different ways. Taken from South America by the Spanish, they’ve managed to colonise the globe and weave their way into lives and pantries the world over. The abundance of tomatoes is part of why the Mediterranean diet is considered so healthy. The lycopene which is behind that rich red colour is a powerful antioxidant, connected to reduced incidence of various cancers. While the high and celebrated vitamin C levels of tomatoes are diminished as they are cooked down, their antioxidant and lycopene levels rise higher and higher, making that rich tomato sugo as good for your cells as it is for your soul.
The oppressive darkness of winter has arrived, as promised, and our supply of chewy, semi-dried tomatoes is running dangerously low. That’s not to say the cupboards are entirely bare, winter has so many wonderful things to offer. Unfortunately, it is true that the grass is always greener and I can’t stop thinking about summers bounty and its days of kitchen pottering and the endless processing of surplus produce. These bursting delights are based on the classic Italian sun-dried tomatoes. Not the ones we pull from a jar, drowning in oil, but the ones lovingly laid out by Italian families when the glut of tomatoes is too large for pasta sauce alone. Perhaps based on is the incorrect phrase. ‘Inspired by’ may be better. It’s the process that appeals to me, not any experience with their specific flavour. I’ve never eaten a joyfully wrinkled tomato, fresh from weeks of laying in the sun. But I adore the inventive ways of exploiting plants at the height of their production, when the flavour of each fruit is at it’s absolute climax. This appeals to me. Every culture and every context has their variation.
The oppressive darkness of winter has arrived, as promised, and our supply of chewy, semi-dried tomatoes is running dangerously low. That’s not to say the cupboards are entirely bare, winter has so many wonderful things to offer. Unfortunately, it is true that the grass is always greener and I can’t stop thinking about summers bounty and its days of kitchen pottering and the endless processing of surplus produce. These bursting delights are based on the classic Italian sun-dried tomatoes. Not the ones we pull from a jar, drowning in oil, but the ones lovingly laid out by Italian families when the glut of tomatoes is too large for pasta sauce alone. Perhaps based on is the incorrect phrase. ‘Inspired by’ may be better. It’s the process that appeals to me, not any experience with their specific flavour. I’ve never eaten a joyfully wrinkled tomato, fresh from weeks of laying in the sun. But I adore the inventive ways of exploiting plants at the height of their production, when the flavour of each fruit is at it’s absolute climax. This appeals to me. Every culture and every context has their variation.
I am not even the slightest bit Italian, but I do know a little about family preserving. My parents were, and are, preservers. Driving out to ‘pick your own’ tomatoes when they were at their lowest price, spending the day sitting around our outdoor table in the sun, cutting tomatoes into giant pots and bowls. Some were stuffed into jars and heated in boiling water to seal the jars. Pots with tomato, onion, garlic, and copious amounts of basil were boiled on the stove and poured hot into jars to be the base of pastas and ratatouille for the coming year. When my parents bought the orchard it was the same thing, but with fruit, a copper jam pot and a dehydrator. One of my clearest memories of my nana is sitting on the deck, over-looking the orchard and sitting across from her cutting fresh figs for the dehydrator. I was having so much fun tearing them in half unceremoniously, putting one half in my mouth and the other on the tray. My tiny little Nana was sitting there in her fine clothes, beige apron, the table at chest height despite the three cushions she was sitting on, delicately cutting the soft fruit in half and laying them out in perfect rows. Her thin gnarly fingers working slowly but with such care.
Our global food system has taken this away from us in many ways. We aren’t so connected with the seasonal flow of produce. We may see prices rise and fall slightly in the supermarkets but, unless you shop at farmers markets, practically everything is available in a continuous flow via various countries and technological growing methods. We are not forced to use our imaginations and utilise the abundance when it presents itself. In the same way, we are not forced to improvise when the ingredient we want is out of season. We live in a world where recipes dictate the contents of our fridge rather than vice versa. Our relationship with produce is flippant, we grab items from the shelves without a care for what they are, where they’re from, or any particular love for them. The seasons create the flow of daily lives. Just as the tides follow the moon, our environment, our sleep, even our clothing, are all aligned with the seasons. Yet somehow we have managed to remove diet from this list. We have found a way to artificially regulate the tides contrary to the moons pull. We have worked hard to win perpetual access to strawberries but we have lost our connection with the fluctuations of seasonal produce that is there to guide us through each season. It seems so counter intuitive to eat cooling foods like watermelons in mid-winter when nature has lovingly provided us with grounding pumpkins and sweet potatoes, perfect for hot soups. If we follow the piles of 'on special' produce we generally find just what we need.
Semi-Dried Tomatoes
When the cherry tomatoes are available in one kilo tubs it’s an opportunity not to be missed. Standing in the kitchen, slicing each one in half and finding it a place on the tray, gave me so much satisfaction. I sliced mounds of tomatoes, stopped, and arranged my little gems in organised rows. Once the tray was practically full I had to slow to slicing one at a time, hunting for a gap to stuff them in. A little salt and pepper. I just happened to be at a friends house when they were pruning their rosemary and smuggled home the overgrown stems, so a full branch – flowers and all – was stripped over their happy little faces. Somewhere between 50-80 degress (celcius) for as long as you can bear. By the two hour mark there will be no where to hide, the smell of sweet, sticky tomatoes gets into every corner of the house. After an afternoon of pottering around the house in a haze of pasta fantasies and floral rosemary, I put a few pieces of bread in the toaster around the 3 hour mark. I left the tray in the oven while it was cooling down to draw out a little more moisture, but I had to steal a few. I really couldn’t wait much longer. Warm from the oven, smeared over some crunchy toast, it tasted exactly like the house smelt. They were still plump and juicy in the middle, with leathery little edges and the crunch of dried rosemary. Sweet, a little tart, and just bursting with an exaggerated tomatoey-ness. I just sat happily, chewing, the smell of tomatoes all around me, fantasising about the jars of chewy, sweet morsels to sprinkle over salads, add to pasta sauces, throw all over pizzas, or fish out of the jar to nibble on like some sort of plantbased jerky.
