Hits and misses

Over the weekend I warmed up for MoFo with a few smaller items. Some of them-- revisiting old friends-- worked, and some of them-- unknowingly putting a new spin on said old friend-- didn't.

This summer was a pisser in Portland. I think it only got into the 90s (Fahrenheit) twice. Hell, it only got into the 80s a handful of times. My tomatoes suffered.

To me, the best use of a few tomatoes is a fresh (aka lazy) tomato sauce. You just roughly chop tomatoes, onions, garlic and simmer for as long as you've got. The tomatoes melt into a bright, sweet sauce that's perfectly summery. I made some earlier in the summer, and a few weeks ago with Shetha-- that one was a lovely big batch with gorgeous tomatoes from her garden, not my sad, piddling amount. Well someone at work brought in a bunch of good, sturdy plum tomatoes, and I thought I'd make more fresh sauce.

Lest you, too, think this is a good idea, allow me to point out the glaring problem: plum, or paste, tomatoes must be skinned. My previous fresh tomatoes worked because they were eating or slicing tomatoes with thin skins. Tomatoes meant to make sauces are drier, with thicker skins that never disintegrate in the heat of simmering. So my sauce had chunks of tough skin. Ew. That one's the miss.

My other two little cooking projects shown here are the hits. They are, respectively, peanut butter cups and roasted tomatillo salsa. Go try those recipes immediately-- you can't mess them up!