BLT + chee

BLT + chee = BLT with goat cheese instead of mayo.

What better use of a fresh-off-the-vine yellow tomato than a fresh, homemade BLT? I used fancy applewood-smoked bacon, with baby beet greens instead of lettuce, fresh yellow tomato, and a smear of goat cheese on toasted homemade bread.

It was an AWESOME sandwich.

In fact, I see a lot of BLTs in my immediate future.

Whiskey smash

I got the idea for this drink from the restaurant where I'm currently working. It's yummy.

Fresh mint
1-2 lemon slices
Ginger syrup (made by adding fresh ginger to simple syrup, and letting it steep; see below)
Bourbon
Dash of club soda

Muddle 10 or so mint leaves with a lemon slice, and add 1-2 tablespoons of the ginger syrup. Add bourbon (technically, 1.5 ounces, but we all know we'll end up using more bourbon than that), shake with ice, and serve over ice in a rocks glass. Top with a dash of club soda and another lemon slice. Adjust to taste.

To make the ginger syrup, combine 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water in a saucepan, along with several slices of fresh ginger. Stir over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Cover and let steep until cool. Strain out the ginger, and refrigerate.

It's like a mojito, only with bourbon.

Tomato and wheatberry salad

There's going to be a lot of variations on the "tomato and ____ salad" theme. But hey, they're all tasty.

This is essentially tabbouleh, made with wheatberries instead of bulgur wheat. There's more prep involved, but there's also a chewier, more toothsome texture. If you like that sort of thing.

2 cups wheatberries
4 medium tomatoes, diced
1 cup cucumber and/or celery, diced
3 tablespoons lemon juice and/or olive oil
1 tablespoon each sherry or tarragon vinegar and balsamic vinegar
Crumbled feta, chopped fresh parsley and mint (amounts to taste)

Soak the wheatberries in water at least one hour or overnight. Pour them with the soaking water into a saucepan, bring to boil, then cover and simmer for an hour. Let sit 15 minutes. Drain, and add the rest. Let that sit one hour, and serve at room temperature.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Well, loyal readers, if you haven't heard the news from me otherwise, I've been laid off.

This is the second corporate layoff I've endured in three years, and you know what? I'm getting off that merry-go-round. I'm tired of corporate b.s., tired of being last-hired-first-fired, tired of living in perpetual paranoia. I only had that particular corporate job to pay the bills anyway, it's not like I had any emotional attachment to it, so sayonara.

However, I still have to pay the bills.

So I've gone back to the restaurant industry.

Let's be honest, that's a fancy way of saying I've gone back to waiting tables. But I prefer waiting tables to what I was doing before. It's hard on my feet and back, but easier on my ass, and I don't have to spend large portions of my day trying not to look bored. (Bonus: I'm already losing weight!) The money is okay for now; I'd like to be earning more, but I think that we'll be able to pay the bills in this way.

I'm hoping to leverage this waiting-tables thing into a real stake in the restaurant industry--management, menu planning, even one day having my own place.

Or becoming a bartender. Right now I'd totally settle for being a bartender.

So how does this affect you? Because of the reduced income, husband and I are moving to the city where he works, where rents are cheaper and he won't have a soul-sucking commute. I'll work at my current restaurant until we move, at which point I'll just get a new gig in the new city. But that means we'll be, of course, MOVING.

So in the next few weeks, I'm going to be eating down the pantry. Look for creative recipes involving things in the back of my cabinets.

After that, we'll be tightening our belts a little, so you can look forward to creative recipes involving very little money.

(I've already switched to two meals a day, instead of three--with all the hours spent on my feet, I eat a big breakfast, wait tables through lunch, scarf down something around 4, wait tables until 10 or 11 pm, then collapse from exhaustion. See above re: losing weight. But hey, that's already one meal a day I don't have to worry about or pay for!)

For the upcoming week, I'll be making a lot of things with tomatoes.

Tomato, chard and egg white frittata

(There's going to be a lot of tomato recipes on here. Just bear with me.)

This was actually far tastier than I thought it would be. I thought, you know, egg white frittata, some oven-roasted cherry tomatoes, some swiss chard, some random bits of vegetables, it would taste like egg whites with vegetables. But this was really good.

Caveat: you'll need a cast-iron skillet for this, or some other kind of skillet that can go directly from stovetop to oven.

5-6 egg whites
2 whole eggs
a handful of cherry tomatoes (either fresh or roasted)
1 shallot, sliced
3 leaves of swiss chard, chopped
1/3 cup crumbled feta cheese

Saute the shallot in a couple tablespoons of either olive oil or bacon fat (I used bacon fat) until soft. Add the swiss chard, and cook just until wilted. Mix together the egg whites, eggs, and feta cheese, and pour into the pan with the swiss chard. Mix together, and add the cherry tomatoes (I also threw in a few green beans). Bake at 425 for 15-20 minutes or until puffy and browned on top. Salt and pepper to taste.

Beet lasagna

I had all these beets in my CSA that I needed to use up, but I was tired of my usual beet options: salad, pizza, risotto. So I threw together this beet lasagna.

It's roasted sliced beets layered with goat cheese, lasagna noodles, and beet greens, with some parmesan cheese and basil on top. These were lovely golden stripey beets, so they weren't too beety and didn't turn everything red.

Caveat: don't use the no-boil lasagna noodles like I did. Be sure to use the regular kind of noodles, or fresh. The no-boil ones are too tough for this dish, since there's no liquid to soften them up like in a regular lasagna.

1 package of lasagna noodles
1 bunch of beets (4 medium size ones), roasted, peeled and sliced
the beet greens
1/2 log of goat cheese, mixed with 2 tablespoons heavy cream to make it more spreadable
parmesan

Layer the ingredients as so: goat cheese in the bottom of an 8x8 pan, noodles, goat cheese, a few beet leaves, beets, parmesan, repeat. Like this:

Add parmesan on top. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes or so.

This is a small lasagna, maybe 4 servings. On the plus side, I used up an open box of lasagna noodles I had left over.

Cherry tomato tart

It finally happened. The tomato harvest came in.

I'm now hip-deep in tomatoes.

Most of them are cherry tomatoes (granted, enormous juicy heirloom cherry tomatoes), so I don't have quite enough big tomatoes to freeze/can in mass quantities. So when I found this recipe, I thought it would be a lifesaver.

Caveat: because my cherry tomatoes are SO big and juicy, this tart ended up tasting more like stewed tomatoes on crust. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and if you're using normal-sized cherry or grape tomatoes, you won't have that problem. It's just that there wasn't a lot of shriveling happening with this tart. So when it was done, I added a handful of crumbled blue cheese, to offset the tomato flavor.

Crust:
1 1/2 cups flour
7 tablespoons cold butter, in pieces
salt
1/2 cup heavy cream

Pulse the flour and salt together with the butter in a food processor until the mixture resembles crumbs. Add the cream, and pulse until the dough just comes together.

Turn out on a floured surface, and work/knead just until it resembles a ball of dough. (You may think you need to add more cream; try to resist this urge. You will be able to incorporate all the crumbs into a dough ball, I promise.) Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Roll the chilled dough out (it will act like regular dough now), and press into a buttered tart pan.

Tart:
1-2 pints cherry tomatoes
Basil
Crumbled blue cheese (optional)

Mound the tomatoes in the crust and bake at 325 for an hour and forty minutes. Top with slivered fresh basil and blue cheese, and serve.