8.27.2006
gazpacho and salsa and stir fry - oh my!
We have a LOT of tomatoes. We have so many tomatoes, that we have vowed, solemnly, to plant (at most!) half as many next year. We know now: we got a little carried away. While we are raking in the tomato bounty, though, we're looking for interesting ways to cook them. I ran across this recipe for red and green tomato stir fry in the excellent book "Hot Sour Salty Sweet." It's a beautiful book, worth buying for sure. The authors have a new one, too, about Indian cooking called "Mangoes and Curry Leaves" which I'm sure is just as delicious, but this amazon reviewer has got it all wrong: "The book's value as a cookbook is largely lost due to it's unwieldy size and the fear of getting spots of curry paste or yogurt on these expensively glossy pages." You can check out my scan below to see that the value is certainly not lost for me! The spots mark the good recipes, obviously.
I scanned in a few recipes from the book for a stir fry that uses sweet, red tomatos and tart, unripe green ones. It originally had pork in it, but we made a veggie version for tom7 and cortney that came out beautifully. This pdf contains all the recipes you need, and more!
Tips!
- If you don't have green tomatoes, ask us for some. :) Or use tomatillos, or leave them out.
- If you are leaving out the pork, you want something oily to replace the pork fat, so add a bit of extra peanut oil, and a bit more sesame oil at the end. (I already adjusted the recipe for you.)
- The other thing you need to replace the pork is something crispy and brown. For this, we recommend making one recipe of the veggie dipping sauce (below) and marinating some tofu in it for 30 min or an hour or whatever. Then, fry up the tofu with some oil in a non-stick pan or wok until it is crispy and brown in places. This takes a little while, so make spoons do it.
- Then, add the tofu into the tomato stir fry where it's indicated on the recipe, and add all the leftover marinade for extra tastiness.
- We served the tomato stir fry, yunnan greens, rice, and a bit of the carrot/radish slaw together. The bean sprout/scallion slaw is great, too. You don't have to be such an overachiever, though. You can just make the stir fry and rice. :)
- The marked up version makes dinner for four, with rice and a side dish veggie.
All these recipes.
