I decided to take a break from the Maine posts to ask you a question: Do you have tomatoes coming out of your garden like crazy right now? Could you use a few different ideas for ways to use them up? My tomatoes are ripening and begging to be used, so I thought I’d offer you a few of my favorite recipes.
For my first favorite, I really don’t have a recipe though! Oops! But I can tell you how to do it and how you can make it to your liking : Fresh Salsa!
My ingredients:
Tomatoes
Hot Peppers – any kind; we grow jalepenos, cayennes and thai dragons
onions
cilantro
garlic
Chop up an onion and garlic cloves. Place them in a strainer and pour some boiling water over them and let them sit for a few minutes. Chop hot peppers with gloved hands! Remove the seeds; depending on how spicy you like it, remove some or all of the inner membranes. More membrane = more heat. Chop tomatoes. My basic proportion is about 1-2 hot peppers per 3 tomatoes, more if you like it extra hot and spicy. This gives what I would call medium heat. Dice some cilantro leaves and add in enough until you have a nice sprinkling of green among the red. Stir, and let sit for a few hours. Enjoy within a few days for best flavor.
This recipe I got from Cooking Light magazine, but I’ve made an improvement to it.
Quick Panzanella with Chicken:
Ingredients
- 4 (6-ounce) skinless, boneless chicken breast halves
- 3/4 teaspoon salt, divided
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, divided
- Cooking spray
- 2 cups (1-inch) cubed tomato
- 2 cups diced ciabatta bread (about 4 ounces)
- 1 cup thinly sliced celery (2 stalks)
- 1/2 cup fresh basil leaves, torn
- 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
- 1 small red onion, thinly sliced
- 1/2 English cucumber, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced (about 1 cup)
Preparation
1. Heat a grill pan over medium-high heat. Sprinkle chicken evenly with 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Coat pan with cooking spray. Add chicken to pan; cook 6 minutes on each side or until done. Remove from heat, and chop.
2. Place tomato in a large bowl; sprinkle with remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt and remaining 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. Let stand for 5 minutes. Add chicken, bread, and the remaining ingredients to tomato mixture, tossing well to combine. Serve immediately.
Taking that bread and toasting it into croutons makes this recipe over-the-top delicious! I toss the bread cubes in a frying pan with olive oil and some herbs snipped fresh from my herb barrel. I also cook the chicken on my George Foreman grill with some Greek seasoning, rather than just salt and pepper. I mix up all the veggies and vinegar and oil before adding the chicken and bread:
Add the warm croutons and the chicken right before serving, and this is what you get:
Delicious!
This last recipe is a recent one I’ve tried. It was good, but there was definitely room for improvement. You can find the full recipe here. I started with these for my ingredients:
I pretty much followed the recipe straight except that I had frozen ravioli instead of fresh and big garden tomatoes instead of grape tomatoes. I par-boiled the frozen ravioli and that seemed to work out fine. The dish turned out beautifully in my opinion:
It was lacking a bit in flavor, however. I think both the tomato sauce and the raviolis could have benefited from more seasoning in the cooking process. Maybe some basil ( duh, why didn’t I think of that when I was cooking?) for the tomatoes, and some garlic or maybe even a dash of some cajun seasoning on the ravioli. Meghan and I ground some garlic salt over the ravioli when we ate them, and that helped. I wanted to include this recipe because I think it most definitely has some potential. Why don’t you give it a try and let me know how it comes out?
P.S. to Jennifer: yes here’s another that could have been a guest post for you! Feel free to use the new “reblog it” feature if you’d like!
Karma's When I Feel Like It Blog 