I want to have a fancy name for this dish, but I just can’t bring myself to call it anything other than what it is: roasted tomatoes with olive oil. I make this all the time with fresh tomatoes in the summer and it is one of the easiest and best ways to enjoy fresh tomatoes – apart from simply slicing them and eating them as they are, of course.
All you need are a bunch of fresh tomatoes, some olive oil and some salt and pepper. Toss everything together and roast the tomatoes until they’re tender. Then scrape all of those tender tomatoes into a bowl with some more olive oil and use it as a dip for bread (or anything else you might think goes well with it). Roasting really brings out the sweetness in the tomatoes.
I use a mix of tomatoes for this, depending on what I have. Large tomatoes can be cut into medium-thick slices and place on a baking sheet for roasting, while cherry tomatoes can simply be added whole. I will admit that cherry tomatoes, or other very small tomatoes, are my favorites, but all tomatoes will work well for this recipe. Use a good quality olive oil – one that you like the flavor of – because you’re going to taste it in the finished product, just as you would taste the flavor of the olive oil when you’re simply using it with vinegar as a dip for a nice piece of bread.
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There are all kinds of chocolate cookies out there. Thick cookies, thin cookies, crispy cookies and chewy cookies. I like them all, but every once in a while I come across a chocolate cookie that I like just a little bit more than the others and these Melt-in-Your Mouth Buttermilk Chocolate Cookies definitely fall into that category.
These cookies are alittle bit unassuming on their own. They’re not huge and thick, like the cookies you might see at bakeries. But they do have a very tempting dark chocolate color to them that starts to give away the fact that they are absolutely packed with chocolate flavor. These thin cookies are chewy and rich tasting, like a very fudgy brownie packed into a little cookie. The chocolate chips seem to melt in your mouth – along with the tender cookie itself!
I used Guittard Cocoa Rouge in these cookies to get that beautiful dark color. It might seem like there is a lot of sugar in the recipe, but there is also a lot of unsweetened cocoa powder, so the flavor balances out in the finished product; these cookies are not too sweet and definitely have a darker chocolate flavor to them. They keep well, but you won’t be able to stop with just one, especially when they’re still a little bit warm from the oven.
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Vanilla extract appears in so many sweet recipes that it’s almost automatic to add it in when you’re making cookies or cakes, so when you see the words “vanilla extract” replaced with “vanilla bean paste” you might have to do a double take before you realize that these are quite the same thing. Vanilla extract is made by infusing vanilla into some sort of alcohol (often bourbon), which bakes off during baking leaving the vanilla flavor behind. Vanilla bean paste is made by infusing vanilla beans into a thick, sweet syrup made with sugar, water and some sort of (usually natural) thickener. The primary difference is that the vanilla beans are scraped into the paste, so you get all of those lovely little vanilla bean specks in whatever you’re baking along with the vanilla flavor!
Vanilla bean paste can often be found at specialty stores, like Williams Sonoma, and you can find it online easily, as well. It can be used in place of vanilla extract in any recipe. I particularly like to use it in things like vanilla ice cream, white cakes, and homemade marshmallows, where you can really see the specks of vanilla contributing to the great flavor of the finished product.
Getting the pit out of a fresh peach or other stone fruit can be a pain in the butt. While they sometimes pop out when you split the fruit in half, those pits stick in there like glue more often than not – leaving you with some rather creatively shaped slices as you try to get around them. I wouldn’t have thought there was an easy way to get that pit out and leave the fruit nicely sliced, but I recently saw a demo of this great Peach Pitter. It looks like apple slicer/corers that I’ve seen but has a center hole that is oblong, shaped more or less like a peach pit. Center it over your fruit, positioning the longer ends of the center hole along the seam of the fruit and press down: neat peach slices – sans pit – in seconds. This is handy for slicing fruit for snacks and is a real time saver when you’re planning to put that fruit into a pie or tart. The pitter will handle fruit up to the size of a large peach and can also be used with plums, nectarines and other stubborn stone fruits.
