Tasty Tomatoes

For Xmas this year I was gifted with a cookbook entitled, The Improvisational Cook, by Sally Schneider. I'll admit I was skeptical...I tend to rarely use cookbooks, and when I do, I tend to stick to the stained, spotted, greasy old faithful ones. But this one is very interesting. Rather than sectioning the book into courses (as recipe books are wont to do), this one is more of an instructional textbook in the physics of food. The vast majority of the book is comprised of lessons in pairing flavors, building dishes, texture, temperature, and function. And these lessons are taught in the process of teaching some basic building blocks to innovative cooking - a chapter on oil, one on fries, one on vegetable soup, one on roasted red peppers, one on risotto etc. The author deconstructs the recipes, discusses the component parts, and then builds them again in different ways explaining how the substitutions affect the end product.

Since Christmas, I have learned how to make a delicious risotto using brown rice and only a bit of butter (varying the flavours), I have adapted cornbread to a variety of uses, and always have a supply of roasted red pepper and carmelized onions sitting around the house. But my latest favorite thing are slow roasted tomatoes. I go to Costco, and pick up big flats of them and do a whole bunch and throw them in the freezer in packages of about 10. Then I'll take them out one bag at a time and leave them in the fridge so that they're ready to use whenever I want them. They're simple - quarter tomatoes, add sea salt, pepper, a touch of sugar, and drizzle with olive oil, and roast in the oven at a low temperature for hours. They are so unexpectedly and unbelievably good - depth of flavor, tantilizing your tastebuds, just delicious. And they can be added to anything your mind can conceive - pastas, soups, salsas, canapes, tarts, pizza, even jams or antipasto plates.

Enter improvisational lunch: a twist on a standard BLT. I used this nutty, squirrelly type, gluten free bread...lots of seeds and stuff (I really stress about the healthfulness of my bread...in particular...I don't know why I'm so focussed on it but ads for things like Wonderbread make me very upset. I'm considering buying a bread maker just so I can be confident in the quality of my bread). I spread plain low fat cream cheese on the toast, then covered the cream cheese with arugula (I buy that fancy lettuce mix, which is great when you want salad, but even better when you want just one particular type cause you can just pick it out rather than buying a ton of it at the store). Then I added some of the slow roasted tomatoes and sprinkled the top with lots of pepper, a touch of salt, and crispy bacon. I ate them open faced and they were mighty delicious. The tomatoes are so flavorful, sharp and deep and a bit sweet and tart all at the same time. They were clearly the highlight...well my experience has been that they are pretty much the highlight of any dish you add them to. The other ingredients balanced out the tomatoes in ways that I hadn't expected. The cream cheese served to mellow out the sharpness of the tomatoes, it sort of lengthened and rounded the flavour. The slight bitterness of the arugula was a nice contrast to the sweetness of the tomatoes, centering the flavor. And then the saltiness of the bacon...well aside from rounding out the whole flavor of the sandwich, doesn't bacon just make everything taste better.

Hmmm...I'm thinking back to university when every Sunday we used to eat Everything bagels, from Fairmount Bagels in Montreal, with creamcheese, fresh tomatoes (poor man's lox) and S&P while doing the crossword puzzles. I bet these roasted tomatoes would be out of this world on those bagels. Or you know what...even better would be to mix some of the tomatoes, chopped, right into the cream cheese - hmmm maybe I'll try it next weekend. Now if only I could find a half decent bagel in this city.