One of the nicest things about food shopping in September and October here in the States are the ‘heirloom’ tomatoes which can be found everywhere in the supermarkets and farmers’ markets. 

Traditional varieties of lumpen, misshapen, thin-skinned tomatoes all bursting with juice and flavour, and all such beautiful colours.  I have no idea why such things are not available in the UK.

As a result we have been eating a lot of ‘pappa al pomodoro’ (which translates as ‘tomato gloop’, the word ‘pappa’ is also used for baby food).  Most cookbooks translate this as a soup, but it is much more filling than that.  Use it instead to replace a pasta first course and follow it with a bit of cheese or prosciutto and a salad or a side dish of spinach with butter and nutmeg.

We use the recipe from the first River Cafe cookbook which we’ve adapted a bit (mostly because the original recipe serves 10).  It’s definitely one of those recipes which is much more than the sum of its parts and highly recommended if you have a good supply of tasty tomatoes.  The recipe’s use of huge quantities of olive oil is, however, not for the faint-hearted.  It is necessary to give the dish its creamy, rich texture but I doubt if it’s going to be showing up on Weight Watchers any time soon.

 

Pappa al Pomodoro

2kg tomatoes

2 sliced cloves garlic

4 fl oz (ish) olive oil

salt & pepper

1 loaf ciabatta (large) or similar well-structured bread

basil

Take about 2kg of delicious-looking tomatoes, drop them in boiling water to skin them and remove the seeds. You can also add some tinned chopped tomates if you don’t have enough gorgeous fresh ones. And take ‘2kg’ as a guideline, it should just read ‘a lot’.

Chop the fresh tomatoes into bits.  Here’s the Husband chopping ours at the speed of light.

Put a very generous chug of good olive oil in a pan and gently soften two sliced cloves of garlic.  Don’t let the brown. Add the chopped tomatoes and simmer gently for about 40 minutes or until the tomatoes become concentrated. 

Add salt and pepper and 1/2 pint of boiling water and bring every thing to the boil. Cut most of the crust off the bread and then add it in chunks to the soup, with a handful of torn basil leaves.

Add another very generous slug of olive oil, turn it off the heat and leave it to cool slightly. Add a bit more boiling water if it’s too thick.

Serve in bowls. Add a bit more olive oil to each bowl if you’re very thin.

 

So, you’re back from a weekend away and there’s hardly any food in the house, but never fear, if you’ve got a box of sweet, ripe cherry tomatoes to hand you can always make this – the quickest, easiest and scrummiest pasta dish you’ll ever taste. 

I first ate this one New Year’s Eve in Naples when staying with my Neapolitan relatives there.  It’s the perfect quick lunch for one person, but also so delicious I serve it all the time for friends.

Suffice it to say, we’ve eaten quite a lot of this this week.

Spaghetti with Cherry Tomatoes

Set the water boiling for some long thin pasta, such as spaghetti or linguine. 

Take a punnet of sweet, very ripe cherry tomatoes – thin-skinned ones work best – and cut each one in half (a serrated knife is always best for tomatoes, I sometimes use the bread knife). That’s the most work you’ll have to do.

Put the pasta on to cook before you start the sauce (yes, it’s that quick).

Take a large frying pan and heat up a generous splosh (about 1tbsp) of good olive oil. Peel a clove of garlic, halve it and fry it in the hot oil until it turns golden brown. Remove the clove of garlic.  If you have garlic-infused oil use that instead and skip this step.

Get the flavoured oil really hot on the highest heat and add the halved tomatoes.  Take care as they will sizzle and spit at this stage.  Keep frying them on a high heat until they collapse and melt down into sauce, prodding with a wooden spoon helps. Stir occasionally to stop them sticking.  Season with salt, pepper and half a teaspoon of granulated sugar unless the tomatoes are very sweet.  If they’ve turned into a sauce before the pasta is ready keep cooking the sauce over a gently heat to keep it warm but don’t overcook. If you’re feeling fancy stir in a handful of chopped Italian parsley at the end and give it time to wilt.

When the pasta is ready stir it into the fried tomatoes adding a tablespoon of the pasta cooking water.  Add another generous slug of olive oil (not garlic oil this time).

And that’s it.  It doesn’t need cheese and you really mustn’t remove the skins.   They’re the best bit.

Recipes are returning to the mirrormirror blog because Helen and I have decided to stop writing the Year of Living Gorgeously.  

It’s made us really sad to do so, but we’re both just up to our eyeballs with other projects now and we couldn’t keep it up to the standard we wanted. It’ll stay up there for some time and eventually I’ll move all my recipes and stuff over here. For those of you who are readers of both blogs thanks for all your support and comments and I hope you’ll stay and play on both our personal blogs.

Run to check out Tastespotting. 

This beautiful website is full of glorious photos of food and foodie things which click through to the relevant webpages giving details of the stockist or recipe.

 

I’m particularly liking the idea of a chandelier made of Gummi bears.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or else these beautiful homemade potato chips.

Look what fell into my shopping trolley this weekend.

It was a completely necessary purchase, since all my cookbooks are still in storage together with our other possessions awaiting our new home (another thing I’m feeling grumpy about) and I really do need to practice using my Christmas Kitchen Aid. Also the pictures are divinely beautiful and the recipes looked fab. 

But mostly I was rather jealous of Helen’s new book.

Today I made the Brown Sugar Chocolate Chip cupcakes. 

I ended up having to cook them 10 minutes more than the stated amount of time and I’m not sure they’ve risen enough. Are American cupcakes generally flat on top like this? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a American cupcake ‘naked’ before and I’m used to the more domed appearance of an English fairy cake. I’ve subsequently read the customer comments on Amazon and it seems that people are having problems with some of the other recipes, so I’m now a bit wary of this book. Serves me right for buying on impulse.

Nevertheless these cakes did taste really good, though they did contain an obscene amount of chocolate chips – next time I think I’ll cut that back.  And how anyone can actually eat them with frosting and not immediately die of a massive coronary is beyond me.

By the way, how sad am I to be desperately in love with a spatula?