Fig, Basil and Caramelized Onion Pizza

Basil, basil, basil--it's everywhere this time of year, and we're taking advantage of the period before tomato season starts up in earnest to try some more adventurous basil pairings. The latest entry: this sizzling and decadent pizza, which combines whole basil leaves with the luscious, oozy figs that are just starting to grace our farmer's market. We've sauced this pizza with a caramelized onion and black pepper puree, which plays very nicely with the sweet figs.

A note about pizza dough: we're not providing a recipe here because the toppings--not the crust--are what makes this dish, and we don't want to deter anyone from eating this due to dietary restrictions or fear of making crust from scratch. Use a pre-made crust if you want. Our intrepid gluten-free friend Denise makes a mean crust with Pamela's baking mix. Also, full disclosure: we used the ready-made whole wheat pizza dough from the Berkeley Bowl for this. (We know, not what you've come here to hear--but until that glorious day when we can blog full-time, we've both got day jobs that sometimes preclude making crust from scratch on a weeknight).

1 tablespoon olive oil
2 onions, thinly sliced
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 lb. pizza dough
6 figs, quartered and tossed with a little olive oil
2 cups packed grated mozzarella
1/4 cup packed fresh basil leaves
More olive oil for greasing the pan and drizzling on top

First, caramelize the onions: heat a medium-sized cast-iron skillet, add olive oil, and cook onions over low heat, stirring occasionally, until they are completely wilted and have turned brown, about half an hour to 45 minutes. Remove from heat and puree in a food processor with the black pepper.

Next, assemble the pizza. Preheat oven to 450. Roll out pizza dough on a floured surface, transfer to a greased pan, and spread with the caramelized onion mixture. Sprinkle on the cheese and top with the basil leaves and figs. Bake about 8-10 minutes, until cheese is bubbling.

Denise's Croatian Goat Cheese Spread

Our friend Denise (she of the tomato bounty and zucchini prowess) returned last summer from a Croatian bike riding adventure and brought this dip to a party, where it was promptly devoured by hungry guests unable to believe that it contained nothing but goat cheese and olive oil. Indeed, the Croatians appear to be masters at more-than-sum-of-parts cuisine: this is an unbelievably simple appetizer that involves nothing other than a quick stir. You can fancy it up with chopped fresh herbs or a little citrus zest, but it's totally addictive in its unadorned state, too. If you're the kind of person who has goat cheese lying around, you can whip it up for unexpected guests--thus guaranteeing a flood of future unexpected guests, so you'd better be consistent about stocking goat cheese!

8 ounces chevre
1/2 cup olive oil

Stir chevre and olive oil together with a fork until well combined. Break out the crackers and instantly become the most popular person on your block. (We've got a few gluten-free neighbors, hence the Mary's Gone Crackers in the photo above).

Simple Skillet Zucchini

We've said it before and now we'll say it again: well-loved zucchini is zucchini cooked on high heat until all the gross wateriness is obliterated. This is our latest breakfast dish, delicious with a side of scrambled eggs.



1 zucchini, sliced into 1/8 to 1/4-inch rounds
1 clove garlic, chopped roughly
a few sprigs of dill, minced
oil or butter
salt

Heat a cast-iron skillet with a little bit of oil or butter. When hot, add the chopped garlic and stir a few times, then add the zucchini. Shake some salt over the zucchini. Fry the zucchini on medium-high until the bottom sides are golden brown with a few darker spots. Flip the zucchini over and fry until the other side is equally brown. If you have more zucchini than will fit in the bottom of the pan at once, you'll need to do a juggling act to get all of the zucchini browned. Don't worry if some of the zucchini get very dark -- our friend Denise leaves her zucchini in the pan until it's verifiably charred and it's delicious!

Serve immediately -- the zucchini will revert to a soggy state if you leave it sitting around for too long.

What To Do With A Weekend's Worth of Early Girl Tomatoes

When Denise, our local tomato pusher, stopped by after the Thursday market with a flat of Early Girl tomatoes, we jumped at the chance to do some hard core tomato projects. The booty: sun-dried tomatoes, oven-roasted tomatoes packed in olive oil and tomato-coconut soup. Here's Denise, with that charming all-your-friends-are-doing-it grin:


Part One: Burn 'Em to a Crisp

For our first project, we wanted to sun-dry tomatoes sans sun. Triangulating from a few internet recipes designed for a gas stove, we decided to halve the tomatoes, sprinkle them generously with salt, and dry them in the oven on 200 overnight. Here's what we started with:


And here's how it ended:


So we tried again with a few more mixed methods: (1) turning the oven down to 175 and cracking the oven door open--still too hot, (2) turning off the heat and letting the tomatoes sit in a pre-heated oven--not quite hot enough, and (3) letting the tomatoes sit on top of the stove while we oven-roasted some more fortunate tomatoes--just right, but takes forever. Finally, we ended up with about 2 cups of stovetop-dried tomatoes:


The take-away: The sun may be fickle, and it may give you skin cancer, but it appears to be the only reliable method for producing sun-dried tomatoes if, like us, you have an electric stove that doesn't have a "warm" setting. But try this out on your gas stoves, and let us know how it goes.

Step Two: Dry Our Tears, Fire Up the Oven, and Bring on the Olive Oil

Since we still had seventy tomatoes left and needed to keep the oven going for stovetop-dried tomatoes, we rolled up our sleeves and tried out the Figs Olives Wine recipe for roasted tomatoes preserved in olive oil. For those of you with electric stoves, we lowered the heat to 200 degrees. The drool-inducing final product:


I'm going to keep these in the fridge until, like, February... Yeah, right.

Step Three: Quick Monday Night Tomato-Coconut Soup


Phoebe's stepmother recently sent over The Everything Indian Cookbook by Monica Bhide. And while it doesn't have any pictures for our food porn fix, it does offer this more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts soup, delicious over rice and ideal for a minimal-effort Monday evening dinner. Our slightly modified version follows; we left the skins on our tomatoes since they were so new and delicious, eliminated the added water to sharpen the flavors, increased the number of chiles and added powdered cumin at the end.

Tamatar Ka Shorba

4 large tomatoes (or 10 Early Girl tomatoes, in our case)
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, toasted in a dry skillet
salt to taste
1 14-ounce can coconut milk
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 sprigs curry leaves, stemmed
1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds
3 dried red chiles, roughly pounded
1/2 teaspoon powdered cumin

Puree tomatoes, cumin seeds and salt in a blender until tomatoes are completely pulverized. Pour into a medium-sized saucepan, bring to a boil, and simmer 15 minutes. Add coconut milk and simmer for another 5 minutes. Meanwhile, heat oil in a small skillet and add curry leaves, mustard seeds, chiles and cumin. When the mustard seeds pop, pour the oil and seasonings into the soup.


A note about curry leaves: these can be found in Indian markets, and if you don't have access to them, don't substitute curry powder--these are the leaves of the kari plant and bear no botanical or gustatory relationship to curry powder. There's no real substitute, but Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian suggests holy basil for a different flavor.