Chocolate Eclairs in Real Time

We have a quarterly supper club that meets tonight. Our theme for this meal is "air." All the components have to have some relation to air. That relationship can be as vague or as specific as desired (and if someone says, "I'm serving rack of lamb, because lambs breathe air," I won't be the least bit upset). The hostess provides the entree, and the other three couples provide an appetizer, sides, and dessert. We rotate who does what, and tonight I'm to provide dessert.

I cast aside the obvious "air" references in dessert--meringue because it looks like the clouds, souffles because they're airy. Instead I chose chocolate eclairs--the heated air is what causes the choux pastry to puff. Choux pasty is so easy to make, it's a shame people don't make it more often.

I decided to do this recipe in stages. That way, if any one step failed, I could chuck the whole thing in the garbage and go buy a pavlova or some Miss Meringe cookies at the grocery store. So I thought I'd share this as I made it.

Step one is the pastry cream, because it needs to cool for at least an hour, and it was the most intimidating piece to me. I've made choux pastry many times, but I can't recall ever having made pastry cream. Anything where I'm heating up raw eggs or yolks to the point where they could potentially scramble makes me a little uneasy.

And truth be told, I think I did scramble it a little, but at the end of the recipe the pastry cream gets folded into whipped cream, so I think the stirring I'll be giving it prior to the folding will take care of any little lumps.

But here's the result of my efforts:

Not bad. This spoonful went right in my mouth, of course, and I can report that it has a nice vanilla flavor. It looks like vanilla pudding, and I guess that's pretty much what it tastes like (indeed, pretty much what it is). But I'm pleased that it turned out and I don't, at this point, at least, have to make a grocery run.

Vanilla Pastry Cream
Enough for 12 – 13 éclairs
From Fine Cooking magazine

1 cup whole milk (I was out of whole—I used ½ and ½)
3 large egg yolks
¼ cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Warm the milk in a medium saucepan over medium heat until tiny bubbles appear around the edges. In a medium bowl, combine egg yolks, sugar, and salt. Whisk to combine. Add the cornstarch and salt and whisk. Pour half of the hot milk into the egg yolk mixture and whisk well. Add remaining hot milk and whisk again. Return the milk mixture to the saucepan and cook over medium heat, whisking constantly. Continue cooking until mixture thickens to the consistency of vanilla pudding. This will happen all of a sudden. One minute you’ll be whisking milk, the next minute you’ll look up to see how hard it’s raining and when you look down, you’ll have pudding. It may look lumpy as it starts to thicken, but it will smooth out.

Remove from the heat, and scrape into a clean bowl. Whisk in the vanilla, and cover with a sheet of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the pastry cream. Refrigerate until chilled, at least an hour.

Next up: the dough and the ganache, but not until this afternoon.

Where Have I Gone?

Nowhere. I'm still here, and I still cook. Lately, however, I've been too exhausted to actually photograph what I've cooked.

Let me 'splain.

For reasons that I can no longer recall (probably because of the aforementioned exhaustion), I decided it would be a good idea--no, a great idea--to run a half marathon. Of course! Because since high school, the only running I've done has been out of patience, out of time, out of money, and out of energy. And of course picking up one foot and then the other didn't play much of a role in any of that. So why on earth would I not run a half marathon? I can see no way in which this carefully constructed plan could possibly fail.

I picked the Seattle half marathon, which is held the Sunday after Thanksgiving each year. The choice was based more on convenience than on any characteristic of the race, or out of consideration for how spectacular the weather will be (because if there is anything the weather in Seattle will be on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, it is not spectacular). I started training. By about last Sunday (six weeks out from the race), I realized I was hopelessly undertrained. I had only been training for five weeks prior to that. So I reconsidered. I had seen an ad in a running magazine for a half marathon at Walt Disney World in the spring, A quick internet search revealed the Disney Princess Half Marathon on March 7th.

I posted a Facebook status asking if anyone wanted to do it with me. One friend, a dedicated half marathoner, said she would. And so, dear reader, I am comitted to training between now and March 7th for a half marathon. This means I get up at 4:30 a.m. many mornings (I sleep in until 5 on the weekends) and run on a treadmill in my basement. As a result, I am exhausted. I manage to get through work and evenings with my kids, but I spiral down quickly from the time I turn out their lights. I am a lot of fun to be around.

As a second circumstance in all of this--and another major contributor to my lack of posts--is that I am doing more of my own recipe development. I still read all the wonderful food magazines I get, but I'm spending a lot of time using those as inspiration, rather than as instructions. It takes a lot longer, I'm discovering, to perfect something you dreamed up, instead of making something from a recipe that someone else has spent hours conceiving and perfecting. And it goes without saying (although here I am saying it anyway) that it takes even longer still when you have a full time job in an industry unrelated to food, four kids, a husband, and a house (no dog--come on, I'm not crazy, you know). I have a couple of things in the works, but to tide you over until then, here's the Chicken Pot Pie I made for dinner last night (and was too dead tired to photograph). Because I make this for my kids an average of twice a month, I've got the recipe down.

Chicken Pot Pie
makes enough for two adults and four hyper-picky kids with leftovers for the adults' lunches. It would probably serve 4-6 normal people, depending on how ravenous they were.

Filling
3 boneless skinless chicken breasts
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream, ½ and ½, or milk
About 1 c frozen peas (no need to thaw)
About 1 c frozen pearl onions (no need to thaw)
2 large carrots, peeled and cut into ¼” dice
Salt and pepper

Poach chicken breasts until cooked through and set aside to cool. When cool enough to handle, shred meat and set aside.

Preheat oven to 350. In a large saucepan melt butter over medium heat, and add flour. Whisk over medium heat, about three minutes. Add chicken broth and whisk until slightly thickened. Add cream (heavy cream tastes best, of course, but if you can’t bear the thought of the fat, use half and half or milk; it will still be good, just not as rich). Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add shredded chicken and vegetables. Continue cooking until thickened, about 10 minutes (the ice on the frozen vegetables will thin the sauce down, but it doesn’t take long to thicken back up). Taste and correct seasoning. Pour chicken mixture into a 2 quart casserole coated with cooking spray. Top with biscuits. Bake about 15 minutes, or until biscuits are golden.

Biscuits

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons cold butter, cut in small pieces
1 cup buttermilk

In a food processor, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Pulse two or three times to combine. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal (maybe 12 or 14 times). With the motor running, pour the buttermilk into the feed tube slowly, watching the consistency of the dough. Once it pulls together, stop pouring and turn off the machine. Check dough by giving it a pinch—if it sticks together, it has enough liquid in it. Odds are you will not need all of the buttermilk.

Turn dough out on a floured surface and pat out to about ¾” thick. Using a biscuit or cookie cutter, cut out as many biscuits as you can. (I have used cat shaped cutters, hearts, stars and plain circles—be warned, the more complex the shape, the less likely it is to “work” as a biscuit. Kids think the shapes are cute, though.) You’ll probably have about 16 biscuits. Place these on top of the pot pie filling and bake as directed above.

Quantity Note: you can make more of this casserole, and cook it in a 9”x13” pan. To do so, you’ll need an extra tablespoon each of butter and flour, an extra cup of broth, and about an additional half cup of cream or milk. You’ll also want to up your vegetables and poach another chicken breast. I don’t make it in that big a pan because my kids eat like anorexic sparrows doing a Ghandi imitation, and I used to wind up with three tons of leftovers. While I like this chicken pot pie, I prefer not to eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a whole week. I'm just fickle that way.

No! Not Gourmet!

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/conde-nast-to-close-gourmet-magazine/?hp

I am shocked! I get that ad revenue is down, I get that they need to cut costs, but to close down Gourmet! Get rid of Lucky, get rid of one of your golf titles, cut Architectural Digest down to six months a year, but please don't get rid of Gourmet!

I have to be completely honest--when Ruth Reichl took over, like so many others, I declared the magazine to be ruined, and let my subscription lapse. I felt a little like I did in high school. You know, you're friends with someone early on, then they join some club or team and you feel like their new friends change them. The new person they've become just isn't someone you want to be friends with at that point in your life. You both move on. Then, one day several months or years later, you find yourself interacting with this person--maybe you're both on the yearbook committee now, or you're both in the spring musical production--and you realize that you've both changed more, and now you can be friends again.

Well that's how it was with me and Gourmet. Gourmet's new friend Ruth changed it, and not for the better in my opinion at the time. Then, one day, maybe two years ago now, I picked up a copy on the newsstand. I don't know what prompted me--maybe it had a pretty cover. Maybe I had read something on a food blog about a recipe that sounded good (let's be honest--that was probably it). Whatever the motivating factor was, I picked it up and kept picking it up. And then I subscribed. And now I make probably two recipes a month out of it, and flag even more for future use. I love what Gourmet has become--it's much more in synch with how I cook today. Lots of weeknight recipes, with a nice mix of fancier stuff for weekends and holidays when I have more time for cooking.

In fact, so completely have I about-faced on Gourmet that when a friend told me she had old issues from 1999 - 2004 or so that she would let me I have, I jumped at the chance. That span represents the almost entire time that Gourmet and I were estranged. I got a second chance! The stash even included the September 1999 issue that was the first one on which Ruth Reichl worked, and which created such an outcry (both for and against), as well as the November 1999 issue in which said outcry was recorded. I also have the August 1999 issue, which was the one just prior to Reichl's taking over, and which followed the older format. It's fascinating to read the two together.

Of course, the magazine has come even further now, with bigger changes that are nice to see and note. In the period BR (Before Ruth), Gourmet's opinion was clearly that there were no restaurants worth troubling with anywhere but New York and LA. Ruth expanded the restaurant reviews to the whole country. Gourmet used to be full of huge beautiful pictures of Italy, Francy, Germany, Laos...big glossy shots of places far away, along with travel tips for when you got to go (ha!). They still cover some travel, but it's not the main focus any more. The main focus is clearly food. Food that you could cook on Thursday night, as well as things you could make for your guests on Saturday night, or for Thanksgiving dinner. I feel it's more well-adjusted in the past couple of years. The Quick Cook or Gourmet Every Day columns from so long ago often had things like oatmeal cookies and cranberry sorbet. Perfect! Just what I serve for dinner every night! No, now you get things like steak, pork chops, and shrimp, as well as vegetarian choices. Much more useful.

I'm just hoping Conde Nast gives Gourmet a second chance. I looked at the Conde Nast website, bu there was no "contact us" button, so I guess I'll send an email directly to Gourmet. They can't do this! I already subscribe to Bon Appetit, Food + Wine, Martha Stewart Everyday Food, Cooking Light, Fine Cooking, and Donna Hay Magazine. On the newsstand I often buy The Food Network Magazine, La Cucina Italiana, and Delicious. I refuse to buy Paula Deen, Rachel Ray, anything Taste of Home, and anything Cook's Illustrated publishes. There will be a sad hole left in my cooking life.

A Little Grown Up Food

I type that title as I sit here eating a "bus cookie" (it's a cookie in the shape of a school bus--what else?), but I've been starting to feel the need in my life for a little adult food. Something a kid wouldn't eat in a billion years, and frankly, I wouldn't expect them to. For the last month I've been reciting the mantra, "You will eat what we eat" (OK, not that heavy-handed, but that's the been the gist of it, I assure you) and serving my kids dinners that are sort of a middle ground between the more elaborate meals we used to eat at 9:30 at night, and the microwaved chicken nuggets and canned corn that the kids used to get at 6:30.

So we're eating Chicken Enchilada Casserole (yes, I know that's not what it's called, but that's what we call it), and simple sauteed chicken breasts and the like. And it's going pretty well. I think the kids have finally realized this is one of Mommy's crazy ideas that's not going away any time soon (like that pesky tooth brushing thing, and that annoying thing where she makes us put our trash in the trash can...if you can imagine).

But yesterday I sort of had a craving for something I knew they wouldn't like. You see, as much as I'm ashamed to admit it, and as much as I try not to do it, I do find myself getting huffy and offended when they won't eat the food I cook for them. My rational brain knows full well that they're not rejecting me, but food is such an extension of me, and I feel so personal about it, that I have to fight my irrational brain over this one. So if I made something that started out with things they didn't like in the first place, and then combined them in a way that I knew they wouldn't like much in the second place, I wouldn't get all snitty when they gave me that lip-curl when I told them what it was.

Result: Cream of Mushroom Soup. What kid likes mushrooms? I'm sure there's one somewhere, but none of them are mine, so mushrooms were an easy starting point. When it comes to soup they eat it's Campbell's Tomato made with 2/3 of a can of milk only. Period. Nope, not even chicken noodle. Isn't that strange? Maybe we'll try chicken noodle again this winter, but last winter it was roundly rejected.

Anyway, yesterday was a perfect soup day because it really was the first day of fall here in Seattle. We've been having this incredible Indian summer thing where the temperatures were in the 70s and the sun was shining and no rain. Well that all ended this morning. As I trudged to the bus stop, I found myself thinking, I'm cold. And my feet are cold. These are stupid shoes to be wearing. And this jacket isn't heavy enough. And I need a scarf. And maybe some gloves. And to top it all off, it's raining. Well, sprinkling, but drops are hitting me on the head and on my inadequate-weight jacket and dampening the toes of my stupid shoes, so I classify that as rain.

And did I mention that sunrise is now around 7:05? Somehow a 7 p.m. sunset doesn't bother me, but when the sun comes up at 7 a.m. and I should really have a flashlight out at the bus stop (so the bus sees me, and stops, you see), well, that's winter to me, baby.

So really I didn't intend for this to be a long-winded whine about summer being over and gone. I love fall, really I do. I like Halloween and all the fall festivals and apple picking and making things with apples and using winter squash in stuff and Brussles sprouts (oh, how I love Brussels sprouts!) and I don't mind the weather being colder, but I also don't like being caught unprepared. Tomorrow I know not to wear stupid shoes, to dig out my warm pea coat and scarf, and to bring the big bulky sweater I bought in Ireland ten years ago in to the office so I can be warm all day.

And tomorrow, like today, I can have Cream of Mushroom soup for breakfast again (yes).

Cream of Mushroom Soup with Sage


1lb mushrooms cleaned and sliced (I used Cremini)
2 slices thick bacon, cut in 1/2" dice
2T chopped fresh sage
3T butter
3T flour
2c chicken broth
2 cans 2% evaporated milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
Salt & pepper to taste

In a large saucepan over medium heat, saute bacon until crisp. Remove from pan and set aside, reserving drippings in the pan.

Over medium heat, saute mushrooms in reserved drippings until all water evaporates. Add chopped sage for the last minute of cooking time. Remove mushrooms from pan and set aside.

In the saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Add flour and whisk to form a roux. Cook 1-2 minutes. Add chicken broth and cook until thick. Add evaporated milk and return 1/2 of mushrooms to pan. Thicken slightly, about 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Remove pan from heat and using an immersion blender (or blender or food processor), puree (be careful when blending hot liquids).

Return pan to heat and add remaining mushrooms to soup. Cook until thickened slightly 5-10 minutes. Add heavy cream and stir to combine. Taste and correct seasoning. Serve sprinkled with reserved bacon bits.

(Alternatively, all mushrooms can be returned to the pan at once prior to blending.)

A Glimpse

I'm dipping in here to assure that I haven't been run over by a cement mixer, or fallen off a ferry or any such thing. I've been somewhat lacking in imagination and motivation lately. I notice this across the food blogging nets--oh sure, some people are devoted and regular publishers (Cate, for instance, and also Deb--and if a woman who gave birth and could post about it two days later can post, what kind of a worm am I??), but a great many of the blogs I read on an ongoing basis are showing a sort of end-of-season lagging.

Oh sure, I've cooked--we have to eat, after all. But nothing has been very inspired, and even the things I've made for fun, as opposed to those things I've made out of the utilitarian need to provide sustenance for my family, seem to let me down. I made a Nutella swirl pound cake just this weekend that disappointed me horribly. It was my own fault, I'll allow that--I didn't realize one of my ovens had such a ghastly hot spot in it--but the fact remains that I was let down.

Is this the change of season? I always think of Ma in "The Long Winter" saying, "Well, it's to be expected; it's the equinoctial storm," or words to that effect when the autumn rains started early before that long winter began. Maybe this is, for me, an equinoctial storm of sorts, in which I hit a lull or down period before the weather officially changes and the seasonal foods change over. I want very much to make Brussels sprouts, or beef stew, but it's not time yet.

I did spend several hours this weekend making tomato sauce out of my San Marzzano tomatoes. I still need to put it through the food mill, but the tomatoes are cooked down. And may I say right now how much I love my food mill? A blender or a food processor, while they do an admirable job of pureeing things, doesn't strain out the icky bits. The seeds, the skins, any woody or fibrous bits, get left behind with the food mill, where they remain with the blender or the food processor (oh sure, you can strain, but that's an extra step; the food mill does both at once).

On another up note, a friend gave me several years' worth of old Gourmets and Bon Appetits she found while she was cleaning out. I mean like two boxes full. And old--early 90s. But food never goes out of style (even if the plates it's served on do, and let me tell you, the prop styling completely dates these things, to the point of hilarity). We're even having two dinners this week that are from a 1996 Gourmet. That's the year I got married.

So I'll be back shortly!

A Minor Miracle

While I have no pictures to accompany this, I had to post about it, because it’s just such a thrill to me. I had to share.

First I must start with a basic, albeit rather embarrassing fact: my children do not eat What Mom and Dad Are Eating. Or rather, they didn’t (but I’m getting to that).

When my oldest was a baby, I made a conscious decision. Alex and I both worked 45 minutes from our home (or more, depending on the traffic). Although we left work at 5 each day, we didn’t get home until around 6, which meant I had to choose: feed the baby “our” dinner, which might take as much as an hour to cook, or feed him something “fast” (read: frozen and microwaved) and get him into bed at a reasonable hour. It’s to be noted that we had (and still have) an early-to-bed-early-to-rise kinda kid. By 7 p.m. he was spent and ready for sleep. I felt that forcing him to eat then would be Just Plain Wrong.

Thus it was that my child (and his subsequent siblings) embarked on a diet of chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, and frozen pizza. What they lost on the nutrition front they made up for on the well-rested front. Parenting is about making choices.

Flash forward six years. Add to the image three more children, a commute that now involves a ferry ride (making for a very reliably-timed arrival home), and two parents who are tired of eating at 9 p.m. or later. Also, consider that over the past couple of weeks the two middle children have been coming downstairs for one reason or another after they’ve been tucked in and putting away the remains of what Mommy and Daddy ate very happily, including a chicken breast with anchovies and capers. Bells and alarms went off in my head quite loudly. This. Would. Change.

Yesterday was what I was calling the Dawn of a New Era in our household. My pediatrician told me awhile ago that by school age, children should be able to eat with the family and eat what the family eats (meaning, there’s no need to fret about undiscovered food allergies, or be excessively concerned about things like choking hazards). I have a good friend who is driven batty by my descriptions of what we had for dinner, and my comment that, Lord no the children did eat that; are you kidding me? The combination of the doctor, my friend, the willing consumption of seemingly non-kid food by half my children, and my own impatience with the situation all contrived to push me into this New Era.

As of last night, my children will eat what we eat. Sure, sure, I may modify it for them—the broccoli we’re having tonight will be steamed plain for them, while the plan is to snazz it up for us with things like soy sauce—but the general rule is: one meal for all. The oldest begins first grade tomorrow, so the time is right.

And last night was pretty successful. I sautéed chicken breasts in oil and a little butter, then made a pan sauce with some chicken broth, Dijon mustard, and a splash of heavy cream. I roasted potatoes in the oven, and glazed carrots for the grownups. The kids got raw carrots to dip in the dip of their choice, with the participants being evenly divided into the ketchup camp and the blue cheese dressing camp. Everyone tried what was new and weird, ate carrots and apples, and made pretty good inroads into the weird stuff.

Good times.

I am now planning meals with my kids in mind, which means nothing that requires two hours to cook on a weeknight, and looking for things that can be modified if necessary. Tonight we’re having roasted pork tenderloin with Asian flavors (said flavors have yet to be identified, but I predict hoisin sauce will play a significant role in the preparation), the aforementioned broccoli, and rice. Only the pork will be labeled as “weird” by my kids. Rice and broccoli are big favorites. We shall see how this goes.

And so, because I can’t leave you with no recipe at all, here’s the carrot recipe I used. Sorry there’s no picture.

Glazed Carrots
from Ten Dollar Dinners by Melissa d’Arabian

½ cup water
½ cup chicken broth
1 Tablespoon butter
1 Tablespoon brown sugar
½ teaspoon ground cumin
¾ lb carrots, peeled and cut on the bias into rounds
Salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Chopped parsley to garnish

Combine first 5 ingredients in a medium skillet (water through cumin). Stir, and allow to come to a boil. Add in carrots, stir to coat, and cover pan. Allow carrots to steam, about 5 minutes or until tender. The original recipe says to reduce the sauce to a glaze with the carrots in it, but I thought they might get overdone, so I removed them to a bowl with a slotted spoon, cooked down the glaze, and returned them to the pan, stirring to coat. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Remove from the heat, add lemon juice and stir. Garnish with chopped parsley.

Tomato Dilemma

Tomatoes. When I say the word, you immediately picture a big juicy beefsteak, or possibly a humorously misshapen San Marzano, so perfect for sauce. Probably what does not spring to mind is a sweet little cherry tomato. Cherry tomatoes are often mere accessories to a salad, tossed on at the last minute, exploited for the color they add to plain greens, but without getting much in the way of respect or appreciation.

This was driven home for me this summer when I decided to grow tomatoes. We have a 40+ foot long porch on the front of our house. Because we spent most of our budget on kitchen appliances, we had nothing left over for landscaping, so our “lawn” strategy was, “Let a bunch of weeds grow and keep them cut short and guess what? They look like grass.” So this year we invested some money in raised beds and topsoil. Rather than put in a bunch of ornamental plants, I went with the more practical (and certainly more delicious) vegetables: four kinds of tomatoes, zucchini, swiss chard, carrots, lettuce and peas (and note to self, next year MORE PEAS! The kids will eat them out of the pod off the vine; we want to encourage this behavior). The front of the house is a southern exposure, so we were pretty much guaranteed success.

This has been a particularly sunny and uncharacteristically hot summer in the Pacific Northwest (in fact, so much like where I grew up has it been this year that I’ve begun referring to it as the Pacific Northeast. Ha, I’m such a card). Day after day the sun blazed down on my garden, and the carrots came up and the chard flourished. The tomatoes got enormously tall and set fruit, and then they refused to ripen. There were these huge green tomatoes all over my plants, but they simply wouldn’t turn red. I came within an ace of turning them all into one of my favorite side dishes, fried green tomatoes, and calling the tomato season a bust. I was counseled to have patience. My time would come, I was assured.

But then! One tomato ripened. One…yellow cherry tomato. A yellow cherry tomato? Well, beggars can’t be choosers, and shortly I had lots of ripe cherry tomatoes, mostly yellow, but a few red. What was I going to do with these? Oh sure, I could put them in a salad, but as I said, I think that’s so dull. It’s that whole exploitation thing I was just on about. I had to be true to myself and actually do something with them. But what?

And just as I was about to cave to the defeatist voice in my head, the one that kept saying, “You have to do something with them, you can’t just let them rot in that bowl. Go on, just make a salad and put them in there. You really have no other choice,” (this, incidentally, is the same voice that almost had me rip all the green tomatoes off the plants and fry them up—a persistent but so often wrong voice that should really just shut up, but I think I’m stuck with it), along came the August issue of Gourmet magazine, with a solution for my dilemma. Take your cherry tomatoes, blanch and peel them, then sauté them. Their suggestion was vodka, my rebuttal was white wine and anchovies.

Normally blanching anything seems too fiddly and time consuming for me, but cherry tomatoes slip from their skins so easily it’s no trouble. The little hussies seem anxious to disrobe for you. It’s almost obscene. And then you’re left with these slightly mushy little characters that (in my case) get rolled around in some olive oil over medium heat until they’re warm through, then they’re jolted with a shot of white wine and get some anchovies mashed around with them, and the whole thing cooked down to a syrupy consistency. You should taste before salting, but a grind or two of pepper is nice. I scattered these with chopped flat leaf parsley because I have so much of it in front of my house that people walking past can be heard referring to it as, “that house with the parsley shrub in front of it.” You could use chives or sage or oregano, depending on which herb is taking over your herb garden this year.

This would be a different summery side dish, something you don’t see every day, and lovely with roast chicken. A friend to whom I described this said it sounded to her like it would make an excellent topping for a bruschetta, which I think it would. You’d want to smash the tomatoes and cook off some of the juice that’s released, but then they’d be perfect on a toasted or grilled slice of Italian bread, rubbed with a clove of garlic if you’re feeling particularly devilish. If you’re serving them as a side dish, take care not to heat them until they pop. If they do, well, when life hands you overcooked cherry tomatoes, make bruschetta.

White Wine-Anchovy Glazed Cherry Tomatoes

adapted from Gourmet magazine

24-36 medium cherry tomatoes (a mix of yellow and red, or all one color; the round ones are easier to work with than the grape tomatoes)
1 tablespoon olive oil
¾ cup dry white wine
6 anchovy filets, patted dry
Freshly ground black pepper
Kosher salt (optional)
Chopped fresh parsley (or herb of choice)

Using a sharp paring knife, cut a small X in the bottom of each tomato. Drop in a pot of boiling water for 10 – 15 seconds. Scoop out and plunge immediately into a bowl of ice water. Remove skins from tomatoes.

In a large skillet, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add cherry tomatoes and cook for about 5 minutes, or until tomatoes are heated, but not bursting. Add anchovies and wine to pan, and mash anchovies with a fork to encourage their disintegration. Taste for seasoning, and add pepper (you probably won’t need salt, but you can add it if you think it needs it). Reduce over medium heat, another 3 to 5 minutes, or until sauce has a syrupy consistency, but tomatoes are still whole.

Remove from heat and scatter with fresh chopped herbs. Serve immediately.