Tomatoes

A simple summer salad

Makes: enough for 4
Takes: 20 minutes

Ingredients

Salad:
2 cups red quinoa
4 cups salted water
200 g strawberries
200 g mixed cherry or vine tomatoes
100 g snow peas (baby pea pods)
small handful mint or basil
half a red onion
2 T cider vinegar
100 g water cress
1 block tofu
1 t cooking oil
1 T soya sauce

Dressing:
2 T balsamic glaze
4 T oil of choice
1 T sumac powder
1 t dash lemon or white vinegar
1 t pomegranate molasses (optional)
salt and pepper

Method

1. Prepare the components for the salad one by one, beginning with the items with the longest lead-time, like the quinoa.

2. Cook 2 cups quinoa with 4 cups salted water in a saucepan (15-20 minutes) or pressure cooker (10 minutes). Once cooked, remove from pan and spread it out to cool down.

3. Cut onion in half and leave it to quick pickle in 2 T cider vinegar and pinch of salt.

4. Meanwhile, slice tofu into thin strips and fry with a small amount of oil in a frying pan. Cook for 5 minutes on each side at a medium heat. Once both sides are browned, add 1 T soya sauce, which will immediately be soaked up by the tofu. Remove from heat and leave to cool.

5. Boil 300 ml water. Prepare bowl of ice water. Blanch whole peas for no more than one minute and then tip into the ice water. Cut off any woody ends, then cut on the bias into slices.

6. If needed, rinse watercress and pat dry or use a centrifuge.

7. Slice tomatoes and strawberries into 1/2 cm slices.

8. Mix all dressing ingredients (2 T balsamic glaze, 4 T oil of choice, 1 T sumac powder, 1 t dash lemon or white vinegar, 1 t pomegranate molasses) together and season generously.

9. Finally, put together your salad, starting with a base of cool red quinoa, then layering the other ingredients. Rip the tofu up as you toss it over the salad then strew the herbs over top. Keep in the fridge until ready to eat, then dress and serve.

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The story behind the recipe…

Well here goes. I’m playing the tomato card at long last. It’s been an ace in my hand since I began this newsletter in January. You can get tomatoes all year round, sure, the miracle of Dutch greenhouses makes that possible. You’re reminded of them everytime you fly into The Netherlands as darkness is approaching and you see the endless glowing cubes of the greenhouses, lighting up the land like spaceships. Incredibly, the Dutch are reported to grow more than a billion tonnes of tomatoes every year. But the challenge I set myself was to cook with seasonal vegetables each week, so until now, tomatoes were out.

Cooking seasonally has forced me to confront my cooking habits. I’ve realised how often I would reach for a can of tomatoes as a cheap and cheerful base for just about everything. That reflex was honed during uni days, when my flatmates and I would take turns to cook giant communal pots of a sort of chilli/soup/stew/veggie mash-up with tins and tins of the cheapest tomatoes. Of course, tinned tomatoes are incredibly useful, but it has been a good challenge to try and cook without them. Now the days are tipping over into July and we’ve waited long enough. Tomatoes have been biding their sweet time all year and now they are here, ripening on vines, the tender, grassy smell of them.

The problem of cooking with tomatoes, of course, is how on earth to choose what you’re going to do with them? Tomatoes are the base of so many brilliant recipes. There is a simple pasta sauce, eaten with beans, chickpeas or pasta, one component of the best lasagne. Marcella Hazan’s recipe with its onion and wad of butter is rightly famous, but I prefer to enrich my sauces with sundried tomatoes (my mother-in-law’s trick, she also adds the oil and slow-cooks them down with whole tomatoes for the sweetest sauce you ever tried) or roasted capsicum, which I then blend in. Half a can of tinned tomatoes whizzed up with garlic, a dash of oil and some dried oregano makes an authentically Italian pizza sauce. A thicker, more reduced tomato sauce, with a little nutmeg, malt vinegar and sugar added, makes something akin to the Wattie’s tomato sauce I ate on everything as a child. My grandmother would put a very kitschy tomato-shaped squeezy bottle full of Wattie’s on every dinner table, next to the salt and pepper. Kiwis love it so much, Wattie’s even made a special release tomato-sauce flavoured icecream. I kid you not. Raw or roasted vine tomatoes will have a more complex taste than their more watery canned counterparts, but if you’re going for canned then look for cherry tomatoes, which usually have a better flavour and a bit more flesh than larger tomatoes.

A few years ago we visited a tomato greenhouse in Iceland called Fridheimar, which is heated with geo-thermically warmed water. The tomato plants, grown under artificial lighting, are flown-in from The Netherlands along with the bumble bees that pollinate them, and the whole greenhouse was a high-tech masterpiece that opened and closed itself automatically and could be controlled remotely. Although it was bizarre to watch bumble bees hatch from small cardboard boxes and fly off towards the small yellow flowers, hemmed in by glass, it was also strangely touching to see this warm, buzzing greenhouse against the harshness of the volcanic, other-worldly landscape. And this option is much more efficient than importing the tomatoes themselves, in a country where so much of their food is already imported. The menu in the restaurant, unsurprisingly, was tomato-centric. There was an intensely concentrated tomato soup and fresh bread, but mostly I remember a simple carpaccio of raw tomatoes with a few basil leaves and olive oil as being the highlight. Strange, isn’t it, how simply slicing a vegetable can transform it into something delicious.

So this week too, I went for simplicity. The best way to pay homage to tomatoes in their prime is to eat them as is; raw, sliced, paired with other wonderful fragments of summer, fresh strawberries that have a concentrated syrupy smell, snow peas, watercress for bite, a flash of basil or mint. To round it out into a meal, add quinoa, ripped chunks of tofu, quick-pickled red onions, a sweet-tangy-sour sumac and balsamic dressing. Make sure you get a small piece of everything on your fork. This is a wonderful summer salad as it is perfect served cold and can be prepared ahead of time. Embrace the theme and serve it with shots of strawberry and tomato gazpacho or a warm tomato soup, with fresh bread, or with a tray of roasted potatoes. Enjoy.

Amelia.