Soooo I got the crazy idea to try and cook whole meals using one key ingredient, darn you Iron Chef America and Alton Brown. The first one I decided to try was tomatoes. So here are a few tomato recipes. Hope ya'll like them as much as I did. I used a pile of different tomatoes as you can tell. The big red ones are Beefsteak, the greens are Greens, the yellows and purples are heirloom varieties, and the others are Romas, grape, and cherubs.
This is a chilled tomato soup. Honestly there are no good pictures before this because I basically used every tomato scrap from preparing the other dishes. But here is the recipe. Hope you like it.
- 2-3 cups diced tomatoes, like I said it was a Motley Crue (minus Tommy Lee haha)
- 2 tablespoons basil
- 1 tablespoon thyme
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- EVOO
- Salt
- Pepper
Put a little EVOO in the bottom of the sauce pan. Add all the tomato pieces and cook them until they have become soft. Add the sugar, basil and thyme then puree the mixture. Salt and pepper to taste, then chill in an ice water bath.
This is a pseudo-bruschetta, the base is a ciabatta bread that I had made the day before, no pictures and it wasn't my recipe so I won't but on here. The topping is made with juliened romas and sun-dried tomatoes. Then I covered it all with 1% mozzarella a baked it until the cheese melted, goes really well with the soup.
These tomatoes all ended up being a stacked tomato salad. These were all marinated with a little olive oil and my three favorite herbs; rosemary, thyme,basil, and salt, pepper, and sugar. Then I stacked them up from largest to smallest topped them with a little mozzarella.
The final part to this meal is a tomato covered steak. The fifth taste is umami (Japanese for savory) things that have umami flavors are beef, pork, tomatoes, mushrooms, and cheeses (there are more this is just a short list). As it turns out when you combine two ingredients that have taste umami taste the umami is augmented exponentially, 1+1=3 in this case (if you'd like to know more about umami go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn5Iy7bfdbQ). So this portion of the meal was designed with this in mind.
- Three 6-8 oz steaks of your choice (sirloin, flat iron,
or chuck steak will work, chuck steaks will require the most cooking.) - 2 cups sliced tomatoes
- Kosher salt
- Pepper
- Garlic
- Feta Cheese
- Basil
- EVOO
Place some (1-2 tablespoons) EVOO in the bottom of a large frying pan. Then coat the steaks in pepper, kosher salt, garlic, and basil be generous unless you have an aversion to flavor. Sear the steak on medium-high to high in the frying pan. Then cover with the sliced tomatoes and cover the pan. Cook for about 5 min on medium-low until the tomatoes soften then add the feta and recover and cook another 5 min on medium-low until the feta melts.
Well I hope ya'll enjoy this meal I sure did.
The secret is to start with good tuna. I'm in Kansas now so it's hard to find fresh tuna so I used vacuum packaged and frozen tuna, but if you are on a coast use the freshest you can get.
I coated the tuna with a simple rub of kosher salt, black pepper and parsley.
Then I seared it on high for about 1 1/2 mins on each side in a pan with EVOO, rice vinegar and a drop or two of soy sauce. Then thin sliced it to serve it with the meal. I personally add a drop of wasabi behind each slice but I love wasabi so don't put it if you can't handle it.
The apple and avacado salad was a lot better then I expected. It is one gala apple and one avacado sliced and stacked and topped with some blueberries and a homemade blueberry-pomegranate vinaigrette, that I adapted from my dad's recipe.
