As I prepare to leave you for a month (my last post until after Labor Day will be on Friday), I realize I have shared very little of this summer's garden. I've spent so many back-breaking hours weeding it, and almost as much time picking off the great variety of insect predators that seem to be assigned to each tender vegetable and herb, that I haven't had much occasion to just wander through with my camera. It's bigger and more bodacious than ever. My favorite thing is to take friends on a smelling tour: lovage, anise hyssop, four kinds of mint, wild bergamot, sage, lavender, roses, chamomile, lemon verbena...it massages the senses. But wait. That might be my second favorite. Because what I like best is eating our bounty straight from the ground, still cool from the earth and vibrating with sunshine. And doing things to it first in my kitchen.
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My fascination with all things powdered and crumbled continues. During our recent dinner at Stone Barns, a tomato powder was served with the bread course, and it added a tart and savory note to the fresh creaminess of their cultured butter. Tomatoes have high levels of naturally occuring glutamates, which are the compounds reponsible for the full, rounded, "meaty" flavors known as umami. It's a big part of what we all love about things like Parmesan, mushrooms and soy sauce. So after making and freezing loads of tomato sauce, I used the last few scarlet beauties of the year to make a jar of powerfully red tomato powder. Sprinkled on a piece of cheese or—mixed with a little salt—on an apple or radish, it adds a lip-smacking tang I find positively addictive.
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We had tons of yellow cherry tomatoes from two plants this summer, and they continued to produce long after I could figure out what to do with them. They filled bowls and trays, rolled around our kitchen counter, and generally beamed up at me like small blonde children. In the end, I came up with a perfect way to preserve—and even intensify—their sunny sweetness. I simply roast them in the oven at a relatively low temperature and then pack them into jars with olive oil. Are you familiar with Craisins? They are Ocean Spray's attempt to make dried cranberries more palatable by piggybacking on the popularity of raisins. Well, in a stroke of pure marketing genius, I have dubbed mine Tomaisins. Although they aren't totally desiccated, and I don't especially foresee adding them to trail mix, I think they have a lot of potential.

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The tomatoes just keep on coming. Every morning, G goes out to the garden to poke around, and inevitably returns with a handful of cherry tomatoes, some kale, maybe a squash, and lately the big yellow beefhearts. This week I made an Indian dal with lentil-flour flatbreads and a tomato chutney spiced with curry leaves and black mustard seeds. Tomorrow, I'm planning to serve icy cold bloody marys made with fresh tomato juice and spiked with celery bitters and horseradish. What do you make when you have a surplus of tomatoes? It's been raining for about 24 hours straight at this point, so a pot of soup is really a no-brainer. I think this creamy, dairy-free version is just what the doctor ordered. 
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I finally made the tomato aspic! I found the perfect mold the other day at a local antiques shop that sells lots of great kitchen paraphernalia. (They also had some wonderful lidded earthenware crocks that will be perfect for pickles.) And with our many heirloom tomatoes crying out to be used the time was—dare I say?—ripe. The whole process could not have been easier, and I am already fantasizing about delicious desserts that will not hover forever about my waistline. Concord grape jello? Hello? I'll be playing around with honey and agave nectar as sweeteners, and seeing what happens when I substitute agar agar for the gelatin. Savory aspics are divine in their own right. A slice of cucumber aspic with tiny poached shrimp, perhaps. Beet aspic with creamy goat cheese and walnuts? Gorgeous! But let me tell you about the tomato aspic and how it plopped out perfectly, with a gentle wiggle and a color like the blush in a virgin's cheek.
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A tomato by any other name...My friend Nina told me that she dubbed my delectable Spicy Tomato Jam (which I can't recommend highly enough as a way to use some of the many tomatoes flooding your farmers market at this very moment) Love Apple Jam and gave jars of it away as the favor at her wedding. Genius! Tomatoes were probably given this lightly erotic moniker due to their alleged aphrodisiac qualities. We all know how lusty those Italians are, right? At any rate, if you're not making jam with your love apples, you're undoubtedly dabbling in sauce. ("Gravy," if you're Italian-American, or have watched too many Sopranos episodes.) We have several divine varieties of heirloom tomatoes that G brings in by the armload every day and I've been making batches of sauce and freezing them—in glass jars, in ziploc bags—to squirrel away for the winter months. Can you just imagine eating spaghetti with sauce made from your own tomatoes in the middle of January?
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I love all the trappings of an American summer barbecue—pickles, ketchup, chips, mayonnaise. But now that I've become so conscious of what goes into the industrialized versions of these classics, I will never set out a bottle of Heinz again. It's loaded with high fructose corn syrup and corn syrup, salt and "natural flavoring," which could easily mean MSG. So sad, considering the origins of this wonderful tomato condiment. The word "ketchup" (also "catsup") derives from the Chinese ke-tsiap for pickled-fish sauce, a widespread condiment since ancient times. (See here for my reference to its Roman origins.) The English added mushrooms, nuts and even oysters to it; the Americans added tomatoes from Mexico. So ketchup was originally a lacto-fermented sauce, full of nutrition, enzymes and good bacteria, and not the sugar-laden, heat-processed junk we consume to the tune of half a billion bottles annually. Guess where I'm going with all this? Straight to making our own ketchup. It's easy, really good and keeps in the fridge just like your Heinz. But plopping it on your kids' burgers won't send their blood sugar through the roof or rot their teeth. You can also modify this ketchup to suit your own tastes: add a little curry, or a couple of minced jalapeños, or some toasted, ground fennel seeds. The basic recipe tastes pretty close to the bottled stuff, though it's a little funkier, more complex in a palate-pleasing, umami way.
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Last summer I got it together to can a bunch of beautiful produce from the farmers’ market in Union Square. Among the best things I made was pickled okra and this addictively sweet-spicy tomato jam, which is unbelievably delicious. The nice thing is, if you are canning-phobic, you can make this recipe as written and just keep a pint in your fridge. It’s chunky, gooey and absolutely divine slathered on a cracker with goat cheese, alongside grilled meats and roast chicken or straight from the jar on a spoon. I multiplied the quantities by 10 for canning and would do so again—in a year when I am not otherwise occupied in packing to move house.
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