A hazard of blogging for a long time is that you may start to repeat yourself.
Garlic Chives
One year ago today, I posted the exact same thing we ate for lunch today – Garlic Chives and Pork. That’s the long version, but to summarize, the recipe came from Saveur magazine in a feature on Taiwanese home cooking. It’s ground pork, garlic chives flower buds, chile peppers and soy sauce.
I served it with a cucumber salad containing garlic, chile peppers, rice vinegar, sugar, salt, sesame oil and sesame seeds.
Tonight, I’m making the Potato-Tomato tart I wrote about in August 2007. I didn’t post any visuals at the time I wrote it, but in August of 2008 I posted on Picasaweb a series of photos showing the process of the roasting the tomatoes for the first part of the dish. If I wrote anything about it in 2008, I can’t find it…..so, here are those photos. When I make it again today, it will look almost the same.
Step 1: place cut-up tomatoes in roasting pan with olive oil, salt and pepper
Step 2: after 45 minutes in a 400F oven, add coarsely chopped garlic
Step 3: after 45 more minutes in the oven, this is the finished product
The roasted tomatoes are good all by themselves, but we dug the potatoes on Friday and there’s nothing better than fresh potatoes, so I’ll spoon the tomatoes on top of a roasted potato galette, which is nothing more than spiral layers of thinly-sliced potatoes drizzled with olive oil and salt and pepper roasted in a 400F oven for 30 minutes.
The recent rain has made for fast growth in the garden. I swear the okra has grown 2 feet in the last week.
Okra 'Emerald'
Eggplant plants are making eggplant fruit.
Eggplant 'Listada de Gandia'
Lemongrass is thick.
Lemongrass
There are more peppers than we can use fresh, so I’m going to start packing them into plastic bags in the freezer.
Pepper 'Chapeau de Frade'
This is my contribution to this week’s Garden to Table Challenge at Greenish Thumb. What’s cooking in your garden?
Update, August 15: a photo of the actual finished Potato-Tomato Tart, just before we ate it.
Potato-Tomato Tart
The garlic chives flowers look very similar to the wild garlic flowers – like sparklers.
They’re attractive to beneficial pollinators too, so I like to let them bloom, but they’re very enthusiastic self-sowers. So far it hasn’t been a huge problem and I just move the seedlings around or pull them out. I even planted some in my flower beds.
That tart looks delicious!!
Thanks! This is the actual finished product – last night’s dinner.
Oops, the photo didn’t post in the comment. I’ll move it up to the main post.
The tomato tart looks fabulous, Entangled – once we ever cool down to where using the oven seems reasonable instead of nuts, I may try your idea with farmers market potatoes.
Also will watch the Garlic chives to see if they make buds. I’ve had them for years and they haven’t spread much – guess our weather helps keep them under control.
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
Annie, you probably practice good gardening on the garlic chives and deadhead, right?
Those seedheads just get away from me sometimes…
I’m afraid to look at any Texas garden blogs lately – I’ve read the weather headlines and they’re scary enough. I hope you get a nice benign tropical storm to start the change for the better.
that looks delicious!!! I love the ways those tomatoes are cooked down. Bet the taste is amazing.
It really concentrates the flavor – enough that it even works with just so-so tomatoes.