What I Really Eat: Saucy Zucchini & Tomatoes

"What I really eat" are my Iron Chef meals. My pantry meals. Shit, my fridge is empty meals. The things that come out of necessity and lack of time. The ingredient list will usually be small and the execution usually simple. Something that is less of a recipe and more of a guideline. If something exceptionally awesome comes out of my Sunday night scramble, it will get posted as a “What I Really Eat” and probably be accompanied with a not-my-best photo.

A less inspired person might look in their fridge and on their counter and see but a single languishing green squash and some dying baby heirloom tomatoes. But me? I saw dinner.

Summer, at times, forces me to become a partaker of the clean out the fridge meal. And typically I emerge a champion on the other side, with a quick dinner and extras for the freezer to boot.

What started as a cross-my-fingers-hope-this-tastes-good endeavor became one of my favorite summer dinners to date. And my boyfriend deemed it one of the meals that defines my cooking style --- homey, comforting, saucy and made of out nothing. He stirred it into some freshly scrambled eggs as he said this. I opted to plop it into some brown rice, and because “treat yo’ self” --- melted a bit of shredded mozzarella on top.

Over the next couple days, most found its way to the freezer for when I’m sad in January and I want a taste of summer. But just so I could show you what I did, I swirled some into brown rice pasta and then had a very good Saturday lunch.

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What I Really Eat: Saucy Zucchini & Tomatoes

Ingredients:

olive oil

2 cups zucchini, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 cups tomatoes, diced

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 cup chicken stock

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

salt & pepper to taste

a touch of butter

¼ cup parmesan, shredded or grated

Directions:

Splash a bit of olive oil into the bottom of a medium sized pan over medium heat. Add diced zucchini to the pan and stir to coat in olive oil. Let the squash cook for about five minutes on its own, then make a well in the middle of the pan and add the garlic. Stir in garlic and let it become fragrant, about 30 seconds, then add the tomatoes. Stir to combine. Add the tomato paste to the pan and stir to coat all the vegetables. Keep stirring the tomato paste into the vegetables and let it begin to brown on the bottom of the pan for a minute or so. Then add the chicken stock and deglaze the pan, using your cooking utensil to scrape up the browned bits on the bottom of the pan. Add the red pepper flakes and season with salt and pepper. Let this mixture simmer until reduced by half and zucchini is nice and soft. Before turning off the heat, stir in a touch of butter and the parmesan cheese to combine. Taste and adjust seasoning if needed.

Stir into all the things.

Makes about 2 cups of saucy vegetables.

Foraged Berry Butter Sauce

There was a day, deep, deep in January when it was probably too cold to be outside and all the vegetables were likely frostbitten and I was at the farmers’ market anyways. I believe I’ve told you about this before, but I will set the scene once again for the sake of this recipe’s story.

I was bundled up like it was the arctic, which I will maintain that New York basically is in the winter. The weary vegetables I had in my bag were few and mostly neutral in color. There were no bright reds, or deep blues, or vivid greens of summer. The sun was shining and it was bright, but only because of the reflection off the three feet of snow on the ground from the day before's storm. But still, I was there, a winter warrior.

Then I stumbled across the cozy stand that is Beth’s Farm Kitchen. Steam rose from a giant pot of soup. Grilled cheese with jam sizzled on a skillet. All of it was too enticing to pass up. So I sidled on over and tried pretty much every type of jam they had. Because, me.

Black Raspberry Jam, though, is where it all ended. The black raspberry brought me instantaneously back to mid-July summers in Connecticut.

This is where we go back even further, back to dreamy Connecticut childhood times where I would trot around barefoot (bee stings be damned) with a colander or sometimes just my hands and pick wild black raspberries and gooseberries from all over my yard. If I hadn’t eaten all of the ones I had picked, I’d bring them to my mother, who would make a simple yellow cake that she doesn’t even have a recipe written down for. Then she would take half a stick of ice cold salted butter and mash it up with a touch of sugar and the black raspberries I had brought her, just like her mother did before her. Yes, you read that right, cold butter. Stay with me.

She would then pour this berry butter sauce all over the fresh out-the-oven cake and I mean, it’s just the epitome of summer. Weird sounding it may be, a Mama Lunetta summer classic it is. It’s magical; butter just has a way of doing that to things. You will understand its sorcery when you try it, which I have to insist that you do. 

Just trust me.

Early Monday morning this past visit home, I was hurriedly packing to make the train back to the city and true to my mother’s nature, she went around the yard and picked a fresh batch of berries and tucked them into one of my bags when I wasn’t looking. I found them when I got to work and immediately knew their destiny...

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Foraged Berry Butter Sauce

Ingredients:

1 heaping cup of wild black raspberries

2 to 3 tablespoons raw sugar (or other sweetener)

4 tablespoons cold salted butter

Directions:

In a medium sized bowl, mash together the berries, sugar, and the cold butter. It’s best to use something like a pastry cutter to potato masher.

Mash until the berries have become soupy and mostly smashed and butter is dispersed throughout in very tiny chunks.

Pour over plain white cake. Or waffles. Or pancakes. But make sure to keep cold until using and then pour over something warm. That’s where the magic happens.

I haven’t ever done it with other types of berries, but this combination won’t be amiss with other components --- red raspberries or blackberries would fair well with more sugar, strawberries would be delicious, blueberries would be great.

The pancakes from the pictures are just these pancakes sans strawberries.

Makes about 1 cup of cold butter berry sauce.

Carrot Top Garlic Scape Pesto

I’m not exactly sure what to say about pesto. Because I’ve felt deeply for most of my adult life, that no, I do not like pesto. But now what I realize I actually don’t like is, I think, basil.

Something possessed me this past farmer’s market to pick up a bunch of baby carrots. It wasn’t a hard sell, they were ridiculously adorable looking and came with a bunch of fluffy green tops and they just screamed SPRING! and HEALTH! I had it in mind to use up last haul’s dill weed up by making this from the archives.

Not sure if you know this, but it’s pretty trendy these days to be a Dan Barber fan-girl. If you don’t know him, he is one of the poster boys for the sustainable food movement. One of his more recent ventures was turning his fancy Manhattan restaurant into a pop-up called wastED to bring attention to food waste. It was already a farm to table establishment, garnering most of its ingredients from Barber’s upstate and New England working farms. So basically he’s running for sainthood. You should check out his "Chef’s Table" episode on Netflix so we can all be fan-girls together. When does the pesto come in? I’m getting to that. 

Between him and resident cool girl, April Bloomfield, whose “top to tail” and “nose to tail” cooking has also inspired many a food waster to cut down. The recent author of “A Girl and Her Greens”, has lately had her roasted carrots with carrot top pesto making the internet rounds. So to state the obvious and get to the pesto, as I was shearing the greens from my baby carrots, I choose not to throw those greens out, but whirled them together with some usual pesto suspects.

It doesn’t taste like the pesto you know, because as noted above, I probably wouldn’t like it. But it’s herby and salty and lipsmackingly slick with olive oil as any good pesto probably should be. Since I used farmer’s market darling, the garlic scape instead of garlic, you can sub in two garlic cloves if you can’t find those.

I’m a total pesto convert, I’ve basically put it on and in everything this whole week. I even started dipping baby carrots in it, it seemed wrong...but also right...

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Carrot Top Garlic Scape Pesto

adapted from “A Girl and her Greens”

Ingredients:

2 cups packed roughly chopped carrot tops

3 garlic scapes roughly chopped (can sub 2 cloves smashed garlic)

salt and pepper

¼ cup packed grated parmesan

¼ cup toasted pine nuts

½ cup olive oil

Directions:

I made mine in my nutribullet, so I just dumped it all in the large vessel and let it do it’s blending thing.

If you are using a food processor, you are going to want to lightly pulse all the ingredients except for the olive oil until mostly combined. Then set it to process on a low setting and slowly pour the olive oil in through the opening of the top of the processor, blitzing just until it comes together.

Use on and in everything.

Store in the refrigerator in an air tight container with a light layer of olive oil on the top. It also freezes well.

Makes about 1 cup

Note: A few days later I smothered some grilled vegetables in this pesto and topped it all with burrata. Recipe here.

Blackberry Sauce with Olive Oil Yogurt Cake

I was aiming to post this before a weekend since it’s a dessert and baked things sometimes take a bit more time to produce but I wanted to get this up here before blackberries are but a distant memory of the summer.

The cake itself is super quick and easy. The sauce takes a bit more hands on time but it’s worth every second, at least I think so. Again, this is one of those summer standbys. We have huge blackberry bushes lining the entire length of my mother’s giant garden in Connecticut.

So I grew up eating this sauce all of August on top of Eggo waffles and on ice cream and on a simple yellow round cake that is similar to the cake I made here.

This cake though is gluten-free. It also utilizes yogurt, which for awhile there I was drowning in after having worked on a shoot for a certain big Greek yogurt company. Yay for perks of working on the culinary team! I made out like a damn bandit.

With the sauce I also decided to see if I could use something less refined like maple syrup instead of regular sugar and it worked like a charm. Careful using a wooden spoon with this, it will get stained a lovely shade of magenta.

I think it’s an improvement really.

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Blackberry Sauce

Ingredients:

1 ½ pints blackberries

¼ cup maple syrup (you may need to add more depending on the sweetness of your berries)

squeeze of half a lemon

Directions:

Throw your blackberries, maple syrup, and lemon juice into a small saucepan on a low to medium heat. Stirring occasionally and keeping at a low simmer. It will take the berries about 40 minutes to break down and for the sauce to be the right consistency. It will seem juicier than you think it should. But wait there’s more to come.

After 40 minutes, take your cooked berries off the heat. Gather a medium bowl, a small-medium fine mesh strainer and a spoon.

Place the strainer over the bowl and pour just a bit of the sauce into the strainer. Using the back of the spoon begin to press on the remaining chunky pulp getting as much solid berry as you can through the strainer. You should be left with mainly seeds once you’ve gotten as much as you can out of the pulp. Dump the seeds and start again with another pour of cooked berries. Continue in small batches until your saucepan is empty and your bowl is now full of strained berry puree.

Use this sauce to pour over the below cake, or other cake of your choice. Or ice cream. Or waffles. Or yogurt. Or anything…….should last about 2 weeks in the fridge.

Yield: approximately 2 cups

Olive Oil Yogurt Cake

adapted lightly from this cake from Canelle et Vanille

Yield: 1 nine inch round cake

Ingredients:

small amount of butter for greasing/flouring pan

3 eggs

1 cup raw sugar

1 cup full fat Greek yogurt

1/2 cup olive oil

Zest of 1 lemon

1 cup brown rice flour (mine was sprouted and organic), plus a bit extra to flour pan.

1/2 cup millet flour

2 tablespoons tapioca starch

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions:

Heat oven to 350 degrees

Line a round 9-inch cake pan with parchment paper. Then butter and flour the sides of the pan.

Set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, yogurt, olive oil and lemon zest.

Once mixed, add in the brown rice flour, millet flour, tapioca starch, baking powder and salt. Whisk again to thoroughly incorporate.

Pour into the cake pan and spread it out evenly.

Bake cake for 30 to 40 minutes or until it’s edges have turned a lovely golden brown and a cake tester comes out clean.

Let cake cool in pan and then run a knife around the edges and flip onto a plate. Remove the parchment paper from the bottom of the cake then take your serving plate or platter and flip cake again so the top is now the top once more.

Serve slices with blackberry sauce drizzled on top and I mean it’s not like ice cream on the side would be out of place either.