smitten kitchen

You know when you see someone cooking something on television and your stomach nearly lurches into a grumble and you know instantaneously what you will have for dinner that night? Isn’t it even better when it’s healthy?

That’s what happened when I was getting a lot of work done watching the Martha Show a couple weeks ago and one of her producers came on to show a quick little dinner she’d been making for her family that involved a quick tomato sauce with eggs cooked right in it. It reminded me of the baked egg dish I cannot resist ordering when we go out for brunch at a deliciously Art Deco place in our neighborhood, that I still couldn’t believe I hadn’t tried at home.

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About a month ago, I told you that tomato season is the highlight of my culinary year, or at least the highlight of the parts I can buy at a Greenmarket. And then I went on about slow-roasted tomatoes for a few paragraphs and proceeded to leave you right there. At slow-roasted tomatoes. Because you know what? Once you discover them, you might lose the few weeks that follow.

But eventually, you get into what I call Tomato Season, Phase 2. This means you’ve already had a month of slow-roasted and simply dressed tomato salads, and you’re ready to actually use tomatoes as an ingredient again. You get curious. You forget that you’ve got interminable months ahead of dry, flavorless, pink-hued cotton-like tomatoes, believing that there are enough tomatoes to last you until spring. I’ve got four recipes like this in the queue.

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Right on the heels of getting caught up from our last weekend away we skipped town again this past weekend, this time in celebration of (I was going to say that I hope you’re sitting down for this, but I suspect it is only us who are bowled over by these numbers) our three-year wedding anniversary and our five-year dating anniversary. Whoa.

I had been angling to go out to the North Fork of Long Island ever since a friend went on and on about what a wonderful place the Table and Inn was. Run by four former restaurant-types, including the fantastic pastry chef, Claudia Fleming, her husband, the everything-else chef, and two former front-of-house managers, the place is cozy and delicious.

In a way, these people are living the dream; away from the frenzy of the New York City food scene, they get to cook the food they want and know the people who supply them with it–mostly from the nearby farms and wineries.

We got to live the dream, too, so to speak, spending the first afternoon at a near-deserted public beach. (So different from Brighton, you know, New York City’s take on a public beach, I had to giggle.) Saturday, or the day that storms threatened to ruin our weekend, we used the gray day to visit six (6!) wineries and my, my, do I love New York wines. In fact, I find them to be the polar opposite of the current Napa style, so light and bright and delicious, it took restraint to limit our purchases to thirteen bottles of wine. That night, we had a dinner so good at the restaurant, it defies words, though I suspect they’ll slip through in the coming paragraphs and weeks.

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If you’ve made as many brownies as I have in my life–and that’s a lot. I mean A LOT. Just ask my hips.–you come to realize a couple things: There are no bad from-scratch brownies.* Seriously, not even the batch that I forgot to add the flour to when I was in middle school, that I am pretty sure my mother still brings up whenever someone mentions what a great cook her daughter is, was destroyed. A little charred at the edges, perhaps, but they still quite tasty in the middle. Because you know we totally ate them anyway.

And if you’re me, the other thing you will likely realize is that it is impossible to have any brownie loyalty in this world. I can’t tell you how many times I have made a brownie and declared it the best one yet, and the one that would end all brownie-making experiments going forward. “Fat chance,” smirk the not-yet-auditioned brownie recipes, though I can never tell if they mocking my aforementioned hips, or simply my insistence that I will never have to look any further for Brownie Nirvana.

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This is me admitting defeat. You see, all summer I have been discussing this “queue” of recipes that I have auditioned and photographed, but never told you about. They’ve sat on my hard drive like a to-do list, taunting me, certain that I’ll never get to the bottom of it. Every time I swear I am going to bang them all out in a week of daily, brief posts, something better comes across our counters and I must discuss that first. Like bourbon peach hand pies. Or a dimply plum cake. You understand, don’t you?

The queue won’t go away and summer is more or less over, which means that it’s time for me to admit that the things left in the queue aren’t that great. Oh, they’re not bad. They’re not inedible. We did clear our plates, though certainly not the leftovers out of the fridge the next day. They’re just not wonderful or magical or seriously, why have you not dropped everything yet and run to your kitchen to get this started. And I think that there are enough recipes out there, and in here, that are show stoppers that it’s not necessary to make ones that drew a big “eh!” from our mouths.

So, in the interest of me zeroing out my blogging-to-do list once and for all, let us get this show on the road:

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