Are you up to your ears in tomatoes? Is the glorious love apple gracing your table at least once a day? You should be gorging on them now, the one time of year we can actually get the real deal: perfectly ripe, sweetly fragrant tomatoes dripping with juice. None of those pink, mealy things we’ll avoid like the plague between October and August. The season for tomatoes is so short! If you don’t can, then at least consider freezing. You can take Romas, slice off one end, squeeze out the seeds and, just like that, pop them into a ziploc bag. Or make big batches of sauce and freeze that. You’ll love yourself for this come January, trust me. Right now, gazpacho’s the thing. This classic cold soup hails from Andalucía and there are various kinds, one made with garlic and grapes, one with fava beans and of course the red tomato version. They all include bread, olive oil and vinegar—three key ingredients that really set this apart from V8. It’s almost as if you took the classic Italian bread-&-tomato salad, panzanella, and put it in the blender. Almost.

beautiful romas: the ne plus ultra of tomatoes

Romas are a good choice for gazpacho because they are quite meaty, but really any ripe tomatoes will do. You don’t need to worry about removing the skins; just core them and chop them into manageable chunks.

assemble all your ingredients beforehand

Did you ever see Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown? (It’s now a Broadway show!) Gazpacho plays a key role in that film; there’s a huge pitcher that people keep drinking from as though it were ice water on a hot day. This cold soup is a bit like masala or kimchi—every Spanish cook has her own special take on it. I’ll sometimes add a jalapeño, which is not purely traditional. I encourage you to customize your gazpacho, leaving out the bell pepper, or substituting onion for the shallot. Tinker with the seasoning. But remember that the bread and olive oil are what give it its distinctively Castilian body and soul.

Alex Raij is the chef and co-owner of Txikito, a wonderful restaurant in Manhattan with its own uniquely personal take on Basque cuisine. I have eaten there on many occasions—on my own or with a friend for lunch, with groups big and small for dinner—and she has never failed to impress me with her imaginative and delicious cooking. El Quinto Pino, a more traditional tapas bar, is also part of her empire, which I’m sure will continue to diversify and grow in popularity. Chef Alex was kind enough to agree to an interview and submitted to a quick photo session with G. She even passed along a recipe for the basil pomada served at El Quinto Pino (I’ve done my best to adapt it faithfully). The result is the first of what I hope will be a series of interviews on gluttonforlife.

GFL: With your recent contribution to the Ortegas’ The Book of Tapas and your two New York City restaurants, you’re becoming a well-known authority on tapas. Do you enjoy being so closely associated with this one type of cooking?

AR: I love tapas and especially the relaxed lifestyle they reflect. I find it quite easy to freestyle in the tapas tradition, but I also think we are known for cooking in season in a very personal way that is very satisfying.

GFL: Many people seem to think of tapas as purely restaurant food. But couldn’t they try any number of tapas as the basis for a home meal?

AR: Sure, there are many. But if served at home I think of them more as a picada, a snack. It’s a different type of hospitality, but the same spirit of generosity and the same notion of food and drink as inseparable.

GFL: Can you think of three American dishes that could qualify as tapas?

AR: Off the top of my head: deviled eggs, pigs in a blanket, crackers and cheese.

GFL: Given that food and drink are so inextricably intertwined, especially in Spanish culture, would you like the opportunity to offer selections beyond wine and beer at Txikito?

AR: We do have a couple of cocktails and some spirits, but even they reflect those you’d find in the Basque country: gin and tonic, rum and coke, Pacharrán (a sloe liqueur), chupitos de hierbas, brandy, vermouth, sherry and Zurracapote, a wine cocktail with dried fruits. But ultimately, beer and wine are the most food-friendly, and what I crave when I’m in Spain.

GFL: How did you develop the very unique cocktails on offer at El Quinto Pino?

AR: The summer before I opened El Quinto Pino, I went to Cataluña and Menorca where I drank lots of horchata and first tried pomada, a Menorcan gin lemonade. Very often there they are granizados, or frozen. I wanted to serve our version of them, making the horchata into a milk punch with brandy and adding basil to the pomada. I had no idea it would generate a new interest in frozen drinks!

GFL: How do you characterize the differences between the two restaurants?

AR: El Quinto Pino is a multi-regional tapas bar that reflects just how varied Spanish cuisine can be—even at the tapas level—as well as all the viticultural possibilities. Still, its main function is to show off the delicious convivial atmosphere of a classic tapas bar and have it serve the same social function for New Yorkers as it does for Spaniards. That’s why I started serving breakfast there. The tapas bar in Spain is an extension of the home, and for many people El Quinto Pino is just that.

Txikito is the same in its friendliness, and offers some pintxos (a specific style of Basque tapas), but it is a full-service restaurant that casts a wide net over all the ways one might eat in the Basque country. So, there’s home cooking, casual restaurant food, large cider house steaks and other more creative dishes you would find in a fine dining restaurant serving “Cocina de Autor.” Txikito, with its austere and rustic interior, is meant to evoke a Basque spirit, where the collection of dishes, wines and service are connected by a quiet commitment to quality that leaves a strong impression. That’s just the Basque way.

GFL: What is the advantage to having small restaurants?

AR: I think the small restaurant can be far more interesting, even if it has fewer resources for equipment, staff and PR. Lack of these things can generate an out-of-the-box thinking that is good for food, and certainly a greater intimacy with the product, the dishes, the staff and customers that I find healthy.

GFL: You’ve said that writing a cookbook is contingent upon “having some practical application to the home cook that I haven’t thought of yet.” Is this because you’re a restaurant chef and don’t cook much at home?

AR: No, though that is true most of the time. It’s because I have a deep love for cookbooks and the ones I love are what I consider to be “generous books,” books that give you tools that will forever change how you cook no matter what you’re cooking. I would like any book I write to help expand one’s repertoire, but also enhance one’s comfort making food overall. It should have enduring value.

GFL: What role does your husband, Eder Montero, play? What is the interaction/inspiration like between the two of you?

AR: We are a team. We have very different skills and appreciate each other. Eder is great operationally and finds true joy in driving production. He also knows the dishes of his youth. He doesn’t create that much, so when he does it is very fresh and unencumbered by a particular vision or style. I express my style in very narrow parameters by applying it to Spanish cuisine, so I find creating and drawing connections to be quite easy and satisfying, though never arbitrary. I’m also very entrepreneurial and like to develop businesses. I think I have a sense of what is good and know how to adapt and translate those things so they can be shared with others. This is a very Basque trait, by the way. Who knows where I got it.

GFL: According to you, although female chefs may not get as many awards as their male counterparts, they can have more quality in their lives in many other ways. To what other ways are you referring?

AR: I definitely meant professionally, not that women have more outside sources of quality of life—we should all aspire to that. What I meant was that I know more women who perhaps do not win awards but have more rewarding careers and cook more on their own terms. I guess it’s all in how you define success. I have been commercially successful making very personal food. Sometimes I find that men seem to find personal success making commercial food that it would not please me to make.

I recently saw a blog posting on a reputable cooking magazine’s site that I found so absurd. It was a photo slide-show of the babies of star chefs. I don’t think there was a single individual on the list that had even birthed a child, maybe one. One day male chefs are poster children for fatherhood, and the next are bragging about how they never take a day off. The demands of celebrity are such that one is forced to be inauthentic and to deliver the “right” response. I don’t know too many women chefs who feel they have to do that, and I’m so glad I don’t have to.

GFL: Where were you born and raised?

AR: Born in Chicago, raised Minneapolis.

GFL: What are your first memories of food?

AR: A box of raisins, cinnamon toast, empanadas, cherries jubilee, homemade pizza.

GFL: Which foods remind you of home?

AR: Roast chicken, butterflied leg of lamb.

GFL: At what age did you become interested in cooking professionally?

AR: I always played restaurant, and my first jobs were with food. I can’t remember not being interested.

GFL: You’ve said that you take the notion of “greenmarket eating” as a given. Are you conscientious about how you source all your ingredients?

AR: No. We could do better and should do better and will do better.

GFL: Where do you stand on using organic foods, grass-fed beef, sustainable fish, etc.?

AR: Pastured everything is where I have been challenged, because I haven’t found commercial beef products I love. I spend a lot of time shopping, but I wish people would visit me with samples because taste is everything for me. We buy a lot of our vegetables from the green market in season, and usually choose from farmers who may not necessarily be certified but have organic practices. We buy some dairy and goat’s milk there, too, and fish from Blue Moon. Our olive oil is organic (and very costly—we use tons of it!), and so are many of our wines, though not exclusively.

GFL: Do you read many blogs? Which are your favorites?

AR: I read yours all the time now. I like Michael Rulhman’s, Travelers Lunch Box and Michael Laiskonis’. I learn a lot from the internet, but not always from one particular place. Usually, I just run searches and end up in great places I can never find again.

GFL: What do you think is their current contribution to the food world?

AR: On one hand, they have created a climate of gossip, but there is also a real sharing that is happening that I find just amazing.

MENORCAN BASIL POMADA

adapted from El Quinto Pino

serves 6

I used lemon basil but everyone agreed the drink would work better with regular basil

1 packed cup fresh basil leaves

1 cup sugar  (I used organic cane sugar but, yes, the whitish stuff)

3 cups water

1 cup fresh lemon juice

12 ounces gin (Alex recommends Plymouth or Beefeater; I used Boodles)

Combine sugar and basil in cuisinart and process until very finely ground.

Scrape basil-sugar into a small bowl and pour the lemon juice over. Set aside to let sugar melt, stirring occasionally, about 15 minutes. Then combine with water and gin in your ice cream maker, and run the machine until the pomada is slushy, similar to a frozen margarita. Pour into a rocks, a highball or a martini/margarita glass and garnish with a sprig of basil. Sip on a porch or beach while wearing sandals and feeling very Menorcan!

Have you been to Txikito yet? As its name indicates (a Basque version of  the Spanish “chiquito,” which means tiny), this Chelsea restaurant has only a few tables, and you’d be lucky to grab one on any night (or at lunch). Chefs and owners Eder Montero and Alexandra Raij turn out some wonderful regional Spanish food that takes me back to the years I spent in that beautiful country. My father was a professor of Spanish literature and, every seven years, would take his sabbatical there. I attended the 4th and 10th grades in Madrid, and went back for two semesters off when I was in college. I fell in love with the place, the people, the food, the language. Some of the dishes at Txikito work upon my memory in the way that Proust’s madeleine did his: the fat, silky white asparagus of Navarra; the crisp croquetas with their centers oozing creamed cod or chicken; the boquerones, subtly saline white anchovies; but, most of all, the ensaladilla rusa. (Little Russian salad, supposedly invented by a Russian in the late 19th century.) I used to eat this delightful version of potato salad, a classic Spanish tapa, almost every Sunday morning when I lived in Madrid in my twenties. They served it at a little café right on the edge of el rastro, the big flea market. The most outrageous punks would go there, flaunting their sky-high mohawks, tight leathers and scary piercings. I remember feeling super cool, kicking the sawdust on the floor, smoking my Marlboro reds and taking leisurely bites of this rich, creamy salad. Txiquito’s version—potatoes, peas, carrots and bits of green olive bound together with homemade mayonnaise and mounded atop a salty layer of oil-cured tuna—takes me right back there.

I recreated the recipe to the best of my ability and I think it turned out de puta madre. (That’s high praise.) It’s usually served with crusty bread, though at Txikito they offer little squat breadsticks, and at our house we ate it with rice crackers. It’s mostly just a vehicle to help you shovel it in your mouth faster. ¡Buen provecho!

ENSALADILLA RUSA

serves 2-4

2 russet potatoes, peeled and cut in thirds

1 large carrot, cut in thirds

1 cup frozen peas

2 hard-boiled eggs, diced

10 Spanish green olives (if you can find the ones marinated in anchovy oil, nab them)

1/2 cup mayonnaise, preferably homemade (make this plain version)

1 cup Spanish oil-cured tuna

roasted red pepper

Place the potatoes in a large saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat and cook until just tender enough to pierce through with a fork. Do not overcook. About five minutes before the potatoes are done, add the carrot to the boiling water, and a minute later toss in the peas.

Meanwhile, in another small saucepan, hard-boil the eggs. My method is to cover them with cold water, bring to a boil, then turn off the heat and cover the pan with a lid. Rest for about 10 minutes, then remove the eggs and run them under cold water until they are cold. Crack the shells by running the eggs over a hard surface, and peel them under cold running water. Dice as you did the potatoes.

Remove tender vegetables from heat and drain them in a colander. Rinse with cold water to stop the cooking. When cool enough to handle, chop the potatoes and carrot into 1/4″ dice. Place in bowl with the peas and refrigerate while you prepare the other ingredients.

Cut the olive meat away from the pits and roughly chop. Drain the tuna, flake it and add a little salt. Slice the roasted pepper into long, thin strips.

When the refrigerated vegetables are almost cold, remove them from the fridge, add the olives and diced  eggs, and mix in the mayonnaise. Stir well to combine and season to taste with salt.

Now take two or more small ramekins or bowls (I made this in two that were 4″ around by 2″ deep), or even one larger bowl, and press the potato salad into the bottom. Make a layer of tuna on top, pressing down well so that the salad is well compacted. Refrigerate for an hour or so.

To serve, slide a knife all the way around the edge of each ramekin or bowl and invert it onto a plate, tapping it to loosen the salad. Decorate the top with strips of red pepper (see photo) and offer some crusty bread, breadsticks or crackers alongside.

That’s right, 100 notches on my blogging bedpost. Although gluttonforlife launched on Christmas Eve, I had been accruing posts for quite a while before that while we worked on the design. If you look back in the archives, you may run across my recipe for Spicy Shorties, another of my concoctions singled out on Food52′s editors’ picks this week. It’s always an honor to be included among the many talented chefs and interesting recipes in that diverse coking community. I hope you’ve been enjoying the blog thus far, and always welcome your comments and requests. As Sandra Bernhard so eloquently put it, without you, I’m nothing.

But, in the grand scheme of things—and I’m in this for the long haul—100 posts is just a drop in the bucket. So there will be no recipe for a torchon of foie gras here today. I’m saving the lemon soufflé for a truly special occasion. I seem to be on a bit of a seafood roll (watch your mercury intake!), so I’ll stay in that vein with this easy dish of shrimp, onions and saffron. I was first served this in the home of a friend in Spain, and I remember being impressed with its simplicity, its intensity of flavor and its beautiful yellow color. It’s also reminiscent of my mother’s shrimp scampi, a dish requested by my sister Sarita on her birthday every year. It goes well with crusty bread (a whole wheat baguette?), or try serving it with some brown basmati rice to soak up the juices. And a glass of icy Sancerre, of course.

Don’t throw out the shrimp shells! Keep them in a ziploc bag in the freezer for making delicious stock. Check out this recipe from last week’s Times for an easy shrimp bisque. I’ll probably try it sometime soon.

SAFFRON SHRIMP WITH ONIONS

serves 4

¼ cup olive oil

1 large yellow onion (or two smaller), diced

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

½ cup dry white wine

large pinch saffron

large pinch red pepper flakes

2 tablespoons butter

1 pound large shrimp, peeled and deveined

In a large heavy skillet, heat the olive oil and sautee the onions and garlic over medium heat until translucent and soft. Do not brown. Add the wine, saffron and red pepper flakes and turn the heat up a bit to reduce slightly. Sautee for a few minutes more before adding the butter and the shrimp. Turn them over once, until just cooked through, another couple of minutes. Remove from heat and season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper.

I’ve been in Minneapolis for work the past couple of days. Staying at a rather nice boutique hotel, The Chambers, that was recently acquired by Starwood. It’s known as “the art hotel,” because it’s actually full of paintings and installations by “real” artists. The work in my room, however, is nothing to write home about. Had some lovely mussels here today. I once threw up out the door of a cab while driving up West Broadway, after having eaten a bad mussel at Caroline’s comedy club in the seaport. This was sometime in the late 80s, but I still have a deep mistrust of these bivalves. They can be strangely murky and unpleasantly chewy. But ignoring the siren’s call of the thin-crust pizza, I ordered a large bowl of the creatures. They arrived, plump and velvety soft, swimming in a creamy broth, scented with wine and garlic. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT? Not a thing. With these and a crisp green salad, I was happy. The meal put me in mind of another business trip, this one to Seattle, where I dined on a delicious bowl of Manila clams in a green coconut curry. And that reminded me that I’ve been meaning to share with you this wonderful recipe from Casa Mono, a Mario Batali side project where they serve delicious Spanish-influenced small plates.

photo by george billard

Cockles are very similar to Manila clams, and I think both are superior to the popular littleneck, which tends to suffer from that particular rubberiness I shun. At any rate, make this recipe with whatever small clam you can get your hands on. The addition of chorizo to the seafood is typically Iberian (the Portuguese like it, too) and the fideos (pasta) help you sop up all the divine broth.

FIDEOS WITH COCKLES AND CHORIZO

adapted from Casa Mono

serves 4

16 ounces angel hair pasta

2 tablespoons olive oil

8 ounces chorizo, skin removed and chopped

2 large cloves garlic, sliced

1 pound cockles (or other small clams)

2 cups dry white wine

2 cups chicken stock

1 pinch saffron

1 pinch red chile flakes

Salt to taste

Preheat oven to 250 F.

Wrap pasta in a kitchen towel and break the strands into small ½ to 1-inch pieces. Lay pasta on a baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes or until toasted. Cool and break into smaller pieces if necessary.

Heat olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add chorizo and garlic and cook until garlic is browned on edges, about 2 minutes. Add white wine, bring to a boil and reduce slightly.

Add pasta, clams, chicken stock, saffron, chile flakes and salt, and stir to submerge pasta in the liquid. Bring to a boil again, cover and steam for 5 minutes or until pasta is cooked and clams have opened.

Place clams on a plate and top with pasta. Finish with a dollop of aioli and a splash of extra-virgin olive oil.