Where I live, early fall is the season of lumpy, oddly shaped, strangely colored last-hurrah tomatoes. They aren’t as vibrantly flavored as the height-of-summer fruits, but they do ease the transition into cooler weather and darkening days. Our fall tomatoes were all yellow (or yellowish), and not quite suitable for slicing into a salad. But they did make an excellent fresh tomato sauce, with a bit of oregano, perfect for serving with seasonally appropriate mushroom ravioli. Here’s how I made it:

Crush or finely mince garlic and saute it in some olive oil in a wide, non-reactive pan. Just when it starts getting aromatic, toss in some crushed dried or minced fresh oregano. Using a food mill, grind your fresh yellow tomatoes into the pan and simmer until the flavors meld. Season with salt and, if your tomatoes lack acidity (ours did), squeeze a bit of lemon juice overall. (A friend recommends lemon zest, which I haven’t tried.) Toss with pasta and enjoy the lingering taste of summer!

Happy Can-it-Forward Day everyone! In honor of Ball’s national day of food preservation awareness (I encourage you to check out Ball’s recipes and live streaming canning demos from Seattle’s Pike Place.), Spooning is giving away a handy Home Canning Discovery Kit to the winner of our recipe competition. The prize goes to Jake Peters of Los Angeles, via Wisconsin, where he was lucky enough to harvest rhubarb and pick raspberries this summer. (The berries pictured here are his haul from Blue Vista Farm in Batfield, WI) This scrumptious jam is the results. Congratulations Jake!

For this recipe, he says “I used rhubarb I had blanched and frozen because as it turns out, rhubarb and raspberries are not ripe at the same time.  Defrosting rhubarb creates a good amount of rhubarb water/juice, which happens to make delicious cocktails (like with the rhubarb water, some mashed raspberries, a small amount of pineapple juice, lots of ice and lots of rum).”

Makes about 8 8-ounce jars of jam Read on… »

It’s true that I’ve expressed a good deal of skepticism in these pages about the gluten-free mania that has swept the nation in a tide of rice flour and potato starch. I still see it largely as carbo-phobia in sheep’s clothing, but since I’ve been on a doctor-mandated “allergy free diet” for the past few weeks, I will humbly grant that it can sometimes be an actual health issue. I will also grant that I’ve discovered a few rays of culinary sunshine in an otherwise dark world of atrocious gluten-free toast and endless tortillas. This allergy-free diet also has me off soy and dairy (no cheese is so much worse than no bread), which has required me to get creative in the kitchen, particularly at breakfast. These dairy- and gluten-free blueberry corncakes are inspired by a New York Times recipe, and go gorgeously with maple syrup and bacon. (Gotta get my kicks where I can…)

Serves 2
(Can be doubled) Read on… »

I’m sorry if you are hot and sweaty and live nowhere near the beach. I don’t mean to rub it in—truly. Most of the time, we are socked in fog. Rent is absurdly high. Tourists clog the downtown, and oceanside traffic is beyond belief on the weekends. But, on a recent sunny day, I made my way to the Santa Monica pier, wending my way along the bike path, dodging roller bladers and Segways (See! The beach can be really lame!). Inside the beautiful old carousel building, which dates to 1916, there is now an old-timey soda fountain, where cute boys in bowties serve up sherbet and egg creams, nicely complementing the air of summertime nostalgia. I was intensely thirsty, so I sidled up to the fountain and asked for something refreshing, fruity, and not made with ice cream. The “jerk” then whipped me up a perfectly slushy ice cream soda made with orange sherbet. Topped with a dab of whipped cream, it was a drinkable 50/50 bar—pure beachy bliss.

We’ve now been making sorbet sodas at home whenever the temperature rises about 70, spiking them with booze just to make things more interesting. Dreamy combos include chocolate sorbet with Bailey’s, and strawberry sorbet with limoncello. Here’s what you do: Read on… »