 This salad is a wonderful way to use up a late summer glut of tomatoes. Here I call for one of my favorite varieties, the Early Girl. Early girls have thicker skins and are often dry farmed in Northern California. This results in wedges that are less likely to fall apart in salads and a more concentrated tomato flavor that will uplift any recipe.
This dish should really only be made in the summer and early fall when the tomatoes are in season and taste as tomatoes should: tangy, sweet and just a hint of richness. It’s also a terrific way of using up bread that has been lingering in your pantry too long and has gone stale. If you don’t have stale bread simply toast the bread cubes in the oven until they crisp up.
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 Heat waves are not very common in the San Francisco Bay Area but when they strike we don’t tend to handle them very well. I was lucky enough to time one with a farmer’s market purchase of 25 pounds of dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes (a little over 11 kg). I’d never had this variety before coming to California but now it is my go-to tomato. The dry-farming allows the flavors to concentrate more which results in some of the most flavorsome tomatoes I’ve ever had.
Since we are relying on fresh, raw vegetables we must also heavily rely on our palates and judgement to guide us. Think of the recipe below as a template, a guide to the final outcome. This soup will really require you to discern whether or not to add more salt, or bread or vinegar… or not! Perhaps you grabbed a very bitter cucumber? Maybe you couldn’t track down Early Girls and used a different variety that is a bit sour? Was the bell pepper not as sweet as you were hoping? I recommend that you taste all the individual produce components of this soup separately before chucking them into the blender.  I like to make this soup in late summer when pepper season has just begun to crest and you know that autumn is right around the corner. There is a certain smell in the air and the way the sunlight falls causes the middle part of the day to appear fuller and richer. I think that I make this golden broth to imitate the Northern Californian sun dappled afternoons.
This is a simple but decadent soup that allows the key flavors of roasted pepper and saffron to shine. There aren’t many moving pieces to it and I find that it can be easily assembled while you are chatting distractedly or attending to a more complicated dish. Serve with a crust piece of sourdough and a simple green salad to round out your repast.  Calabrian chile paste has become one of the ingredients du jour at pizzerias where pizza is taken very seriously. Hailing from the Calabria region of Italy, this pepper adds a surprising amount of heat to dishes so take note if you are not wildly fond of spicy meals. There is both a sweet and a spicy version of Calabrian pepper, which I learned the hard way. Let’s just say that not paying attention to what I was grabbing out of the pantry led to a soup that was deemed too spicy by someone who won’t travel without hot sauce or red pepper flakes in her bag.
Cooking the chickpeas with a chile de arbol infuses a subtle heat into the beans, which is lovely but the dish will still work without it. By roasting the vegetables we develop the natural sweetness in the fennel and the onion while increasing the umami flavor in the mushrooms. Both of these tastes provide a wonderful base for the Calabrian chile to really shine.  Cookies! Now! Do you have a hankering for a baked good but can’t be bothered to break out your Kitchen Aid? This recipe comes together quickly and easily, no mixer required.
I really do love cookies. However, I don’t really like how I feel when I eat the standard cookie that is made with mostly refined flour and sugar. I developed this cookie to be comprised of minimally processed ingredients that are, mostly, pantry staples. The one, more oddball ingredient is reishi. Reishi is known as the longevity mushroom and I like adding it to things when I feel that I need an immune system boost. The flavor is slightly bitter but you won’t be able to taste it when it is mixed into the earthy peanut butter and rich chocolate. |
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