It’s tomato season here in MN, hooray! After a very cool summer, the tomatoes are finally taking off here… but all at once, of course. So, before I get to today’s recipe, I wanted to offer a quick tomato tip if you’re harvest (or CSA haul) is taking over your kitchen: just wash them, check to make sure they don’t have any blemishes, toss them in a ziploc bag, and freeze them. While the tomatoes will lose some flavor due to the chilling – tomatoes have a flavor enzyme that shuts off when exposed to below 40 degree temperatures – they will still make better tasting sauce than many of the tomatoes you’ll find in your grocery store. I think you can do this with most any tomato variety, but it works particularly well with sauce/canning tomatoes like Romas (and perhaps not as well with grape, cherry or Brandywines, which are best enjoyed fresh).

We needed to clean out our chest freezer today to make room for some really good stuff (fodder for a few other posts) and I found a bag of frozen romas and frozen sugar snap peas. Mike brought home some potatoes from the farmer’s market, and I had some chicken… the perfect combination for a chicken dish my mom (Nanay in Tagalog) used to make. It’s actually based on a beef dish called Kinamatisan (literal translation: tomatoed, or tomatofied), which I make more frequently and will try to post soon.

Nanay’s Chicken with Peas

INGREDIENTS

1 pkg chicken quarters (or just drumsticks or thighs, whatever you can find)
2 lbs roma tomatoes, OR 1 each 28oz and 15oz diced tomatoes
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium red bell pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp olive oil
1 bay leaf
1 tsp oregano
1 tbsp ketchup
2 tsp soy sauce (or 1 packet from chinese takeout)
salt and pepper

4 medium red potatoes (about 1.5 lbs), cubed
1 cup frozen peas

prepared rice or noodles

DIRECTIONS

1. Heat oil in large pot over medium heat. Add onion and red pepper, cook 4-5 minutes, stirring a few times. Add garlic, cook another minutes. Add bay leaf, oregano, ketchup, soy sauce, and salt and pepper to taste. Reduce heat and simmer for at least 30 min (longer is fine!).

2. Add chicken and potatoes. Simmer for 20-30 min until chicken is cooked through and potatoes are softened.

3. Add frozen peas and cook another 5 min. Serve hot over rice or noodles and enjoy!

Hi everyone,

So last night we repurposed some grilled steak into steak fajitas, made simply by caramelizing some onion and blistering some red and yellow pepper slices, tossing in thin slices of the steak, and wrapping in a tortilla with cheese and sour cream. I decided that I’d try to make guacamole again, this time going with an Alton Brown recipe from Foodnetwork.com.

(Short aside: Neither of us really liked guacamole until we went to a restaurant in New Mexico like 5 years ago and one of the servers came up to our table with a guacamole cart and made it fresh. With a mortar and pestle. Now that is badass! I’ve tried to make it about 2 or 3 times since, without much success.)

At any rate, I tried Alton’s recipe, with a few tweaks, and it was excellent! I’d highly recommend it. Here it is, directly copied from the Food Network website:

3 Haas avocados, halved, seeded and peeled
1 lime, juiced
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 medium onion, diced
2 Roma tomatoes, seeded and diced
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
1 clove garlic, minced

In a large bowl place the scooped avocado pulp and lime juice, toss to coat. Drain, and reserve the lime juice, after all of the avocados have been coated. Using a potato masher add the salt, cumin, and cayenne and mash. Then, fold in the onions, tomatoes, cilantro, and garlic. Add 1 tablespoon of the reserved lime juice. Let sit at room temperature for 1 hour and then serve.

** A few recommendations: first, go easy on the cayenne. I have a fair tolerance of heat (I enjoy hot wings and even like the Mango Habenero sauce from BW3s) and I added a little less than the 1/2 tsp cayenne, and that was enough. Still very tasty, but warm. And kinda really warm for my husband. Second, adhere to the 1 tbsp of reserved lime juice at the end – otherwise it can get too tart. Third, if you are using limes that appear small, use the juice of 2 or 3. I probably ended up with about a 1/4 cup of juice from 2 limes, which was a good amount to coat the avocado. Last, if you don’t buy your avocados ahead of time and let them soften (and like me, you buy them the same day you want to make this and they are still pretty hard to the touch), put them in a paper bag with 2-3 apples for as long as you can. The gas emitted by the apples will ripen the avocados rapidly, and you’ll likely be able to work with them even if you bought them the same day. This won’t work miracles, but it can help. Try to avoid the rock hard avocados if you’re making this tonight!

This weekend, I went out for breakfast at a local place called Lazy Jane’s Café and Bakery. This place is famous for it’s scones, and I can attest that they make the second best scones in town (after Masako’s, naturally).Lazy Janes is one of those places where you stand in line, order your food, give them your name, and then go sit until they call your name to tell your food is ready.Often, whenever I am asked for my name in a situation like this I give my last name, which tends to cause much less confusion and anxiety and clumsy name-mangling than “Padraig.” But I learned a nice trick that makes my, and pretty much everyone else’s, day. I give my name as “His Majesty.”Usually, everyone gets a big kick out of it, and I get to walk slowly and regally to pick up my food.