August and September are the Months of the tomato here where I live. It’s when the tomato-glut occurs when every seller at the Athens Farmer’s Market and every roadside stand and the Chesterhill Produce auction is pushing tomatoes of every type, size, color and flavor. They are everywhere.

It’s when I can tomatoes and make marinara sauce and salsa and can those and I eat tomatoes every day raw in salads, on sandwiches, just sliced up on a plate and just biting into them like apples. I eat them like this now because I never eat fresh tomatoes when they are not in season. So I have to gorge myself on them now while I can so I can get good and sick and tired of them so I won’t be momentarily tempted by the baseball-hard pink monstrosities in the grocery stores in the winter months.

But in addition to eating them raw, I cook with them as well.

For example–I got the idea for this tomato gratin from the folks at Integration Acres–they posted it on their Facebook page last Saturday morning and my eagle eye of course caught it on my newsfeed. It involved fresh tomatoes, basil, garlic and blue goat cheese all melted and delicious and I just had to taste it.

Their picture for it looked so darned good, I went right to the Farmer’s Market when it opened and bought the cheese, and got some tomatoes so I could run right home and make it.

(Can I say again how much I love both the fresh and ripened goat cheeses from the Integration Acres people? They really are great. I bet there’s a great cheesemaker near you–run right out and find them as soon as you can. Your taste buds will thank you later. And remember–”Blessed are the Cheesemakers…..”)

I hesitate to even dignify this by calling it a recipe, because it really is so simple. But that’s okay–it’s summer cooking at it’s finest–it’s simple, quick and absolutely allows the tomatoes, garlic, basil and cheese to shine like gustatory beacons.

It also fills the belly admirably for such a light dish.

Integration Acres Tomatoes Au Gratin
Ingredients:

Olive oil as needed
Fresh, meltingly ripe tomatoes–enough to fill a small casserole dish–two or three depending on the size you have
1 clove of very fresh garlic, peeled and minced
1 handful of fresh basil leaves, minced
2-4 ounces of your favorite blue cheese if you can get a ripened blue–all the better
salt and Aleppo pepper flakes or other hot pepper flakes to taste

Method:

Preheat your broiler and make certain that your rack is about three to four inches below the burner.

Lightly oil a small casserole dish with the olive oil.

Wash, core and cut the tomatoes in half. Then, thinly slice them into half-moon shapes. Toss them into the casserole.

Sprinkle the garlic and basil over the tomatoes and drizzle lightly with olive oil. Toss to distribute everything together nicely.

Top with crumbled or chunked bits of the blue cheese, then season with some salt and Aleppo pepper flakes, then drizzle a tiny amount of olive oil on top.

Pop it under the broiler and cook until the cheese is melted and everything is bubbly, happy and delicious with some browned bits on top.

Serve it over toasted bits of good bread. Or, just dig in with a spoon and gobble it right out of the dish. It’s great either way.

If you patronize your local farmer’s market, you may be surprised at the huge number of different types, sizes, colors and shapes of tomatoes available out there.

Tiny round red, green, yellow or orange cherry tomatoes, pear (usually yellow but sometimes red) tomatoes, long finger-like red cherry tomatoes, giant beefsteaks in myriad colors and bi-colors, red or orange plum tomatoes for making sauces, and even tomatoes that are relatively hollow inside that are perfect for stuffing.

Stuffers are available in red, yellow or a pretty striped variety that is red with orange-yellow tiger stripes. It is the latter type I found for sale by Larry and Kim Cowdery of Cowdery Farms, and of course, I had to pick some up.

The truth is, you can stuff any kind of tomato you want, even cherry tomatoes (I’ve done it–I don’t recommend it, though–it’s maddeningly finicky to stuff things that small), but these mostly hollow stuffers are simple. They have three to five chambers for their seeds and the gel that surrounds them, with evenly thick walls of flesh surrounding them. They are also kind of squat or bell-shaped so they have a nice flattish bottom to sit on.

All you have to do is cut the top off the tomato and use a scoop, spoon or just your fingers (guess which venue I chose–yep, fingers) to remove the seeds and gel. Now you have a nice hollowed out tomato ready for filling up with whatever you like.

And I mean it. ANYTHING can go into a tomato.

I personally like to use leftovers. I basically combine an already cooked leftover grain: rice, spelt berries, bulgar wheat or quinoa, with a leftover sauce, then add any vegetables I want, and voila! Stuffing.

In the version pictured–I heated up leftover steamed rice, and mixed it with heated up leftover sausage-enriched (Harmony Hollow Farm Italian Sausage) marinara (the last of the jars I canned last fall) that I used for lasagne. I added some sauteed onions (from Vest Berries), but I could have easily added some steamed broccoli or sauteed chard or spinach.

I made a bit more filling than I needed to to fill the tomatoes and after oiling the bottom of a small casserole dish with olive oil, I lined the bottom with the filling, then filled the tomatoes and nestled them into the rice and sauce mixture in the dish.

And then, I added cheese.

I used a ripened blue goat cheese from Integration Acres called “Percy’s Blue.” When melted under a broiler, the cheese melts into an unctuous, delicious, gooey, satisfying topping that contrasts beautifully with the still cool, fresh tasting tomatoes, and the warm, flavorful filling.

Finally, I minced up some Greek Columnar Basil from my deck garden and sprinkled it on top.

The result is an almost completely local Farmer’s Market lunch–the exceptions were the rice and the olive oil. If I had wanted to be perfectly local, I could have used Shagbark Seed & Mill’s spelt berries and Hartzler’s butter instead.

Stuffed tomatoes are very versatile. One could use cooked dried beans instead of grain, or in addition to grain. Or, you could use leftover grilled or roasted corn, cut from the cob, as the grain. Any kind of cheese could be used as the topping. Or, one could use Greek yogurt as a topping.

For sauce, one could use salsa or instead of a tomato based sauce, use a creamy one like Alfredo. Or, one could puree roasted bell peppers and use that as a sauce.

Basically, instead of a recipe, this post is going to give you a formula so you can make up your own versions of stuffed tomatoes. It’s a great, frugal way to use up leftovers and turn them into something new for a very quick lunch or dinner dish. It can have meat or be vegetarian, it can be vegan–it can be made however you like it.

Stuffed Tomato Formula
Ingredients:

8-12 stuffing tomatoes (or beefsteaks)
1 1/2 cups cooked leftover grain (corn cut from the cob, rice, spelt berries, bulgar wheat, quinoa, wild rice or cooked dried beans, or a mixture of the two) (If you have huge beefsteak tomatoes, you will need more grain or beans.)
1 1 1/2 cup leftover sauce (salsa, tomato or cream based pasta sauce, pureed roasted vegetable sauce) (If you use really large tomatoes, you will need more sauce)
1/2 cup cooked leftover vegetables (optional)
1 teaspoon olive oil
2-4 ounces of any kind of meltable cheese or Greek yogurt
Minced fresh herbs for garnish

Method:

Preheat your broiler to high and set the rack so it is within two to three inches of the burner.

Cut the very tops off of the tomatoes and scoop out the seeds and gel to leave a hollowed out cup.

Heat the grain and sauce in the microwave and mix them together. Use enough sauce to bind the grain together. Add the leftover vegetables if you want, and mix it into the filling.

Lightly oil the bottom of your casserole pan–use the smallest dish you can to fit the number of tomatoes you have.

Stuff your tomatoes, and pack the filling so it is just even with the top of the tomatoes. Do not mound it–if you mound it, the melted cheese will have a tendency to slip off the top.

Put leftover filling into the bottom of the casserole and settle the tomatoes onto it, leaving them close together in a cluster.

Add cheese or Greek yogurt to the top of the tomatoes and over the top of any exposed stuffing in the casserole dish.

Run under the broiler for 5-10 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly and lightly browned and everything is heated through.

Remove from the broiler carefully, turn off the broiler and garnish with minced herbs.

It’s a good introduction to making your own cultured dairy products, too, as it is beyond simple, since you barely have to heat the cream above room temperature and add either some commercial cultured buttermilk or a creme fraiche starter culture. You then cover it loosely and let it sit on a warm, not hot countertop out of drafts and away from the sun for about twelve hours and like magic, you come back to some rich, thickened, lightly tangy cream that is stable when it’s heated.

Yeah, let’s say it again, and more firmly this time. Creme fraiche is stable when it’s heated.

Commercially available sour cream is most emphatically NOT stable when it’s heated. In fact, it’s rather unstable after being heated and will often “break” when whisked into a simmering sauce, There is nothing more annoying than adding sour cream to a delectable sauce at the end of cooking and have it go all lumpy and curdly instead of making a nice, smooth, tangy creamy sauce. And yes, this can happen even when you are good and “temper” the sauce by whisking a small amount of the hot sauce into the sour cream before incorporating it into the rest of the sauce. (This is part of why I’ve used full fat Greek yogurt in my Beef Stroganoff for years–because it can be boiled and it will not break once it’s put into a sauce.)

But creme fraiche–well, it doesn’t break. You can boil it. It’s fine. You can temper it into a sauce, but you don’t have to. For all it’s velvety, lightly tangy delicate flavor, it’s tough, like a streetwise flower child who wears love beads and a set of brass knuckles.

And it tastes really, really good, too.

Very rich and satisfying.

Oh, and did I mention how easy it is to make?

Well, I’ll say it again. It’s easy to make. Easier to make than yogurt, because you don’t have to hold it at 110 degrees Fahrenheit for eight to twelve hours.

If you use commercially cultured buttermilk, just heat up a pint of heavy cream to 80 degrees F. (I used our local Snowville Creamery Heavy Cream, which is from grass-fed antibiotic free, growth hormone free cows just one county over from where I am typing) to room temperature and stir in two tablespoons of buttermilk. Pour into a clean glass jar (I use the locking ones with the gaskets like the one pictured above) and cover with the lid, but don’t lock it. Leave it in a warm, draft-free area out of the sun for 12 hours. Yes, I said twelve hours. Twelve. Please don’t get all worried about spoiling your cream or food poisoning. In this process, you are making friends with good bacteria, and they are keeping the bad bacteria at bay and are making your fresh cream into something sublime. Trust me.

After twelve hours, the cream should have thickened without solidifying, and should have the texture of commercially available yogurt. It isn’t as thick as the sour cream you’re used to buying from the store, but if you want to thicken it, you can put together several layers of cheesecloth and spoon the creme fraiche into it and tie the ends together and hang it up to let some of the whey drain out for an hour or so.

I used a starter from the company Cultures for Health. They sell yogurt starters, kefir starter, various dairy cultures and starters for vegetable ferments and soy ferments, and so far, all of their products I’ve tried have worked well. (Yes, you’ll have more posts on culturing milk coming up in the future.)

Their instructions are a bit more complicated, but not by much. They instruct you to heat one quart of heavy cream to exactly 86 degrees Fahrenheit, then stir in the contents of one packet of starter (they are sold in a box of four packets which can only be used once for $4.99–which is more expensive than the buttermilk, but in order to not use milk from a confinement dairy, I decided to go with the culture instead) into the cream, cover it and let it sit in a nice warm, non-sunlit place for 12 hours. I used my jar as noted above–I covered the jar with the lid, but didn’t seal it up.

How did it turn out?

Well, let me just say that everyone who tasted it buckled at the knees and rolled their eyes up in their heads. I ended up giving lots of my first batch away, so I never got to use much of it. That’s okay. I love my friends.

What can do you with Creme Fraiche.

Use it in any way you’d use sour cream, except be prepared to have your socks knocked off by the result. You can use it to top a cheesecake. You can use it in your Beef Stroganoff sauce. You can use it on a taco, on a baked potato, in mashed potatoes or swirled on top of a bowl of cream of tomato soup. It can go on top of fresh berries.

You can also just dig a spoon in and have at it plain and straight up.

Just use your imagination.

It’s good stuff.

Trust me.

I credit the intense emotional connection to the excellent soundtrack provided by Zak, the very talented musician who also happens to be my husband. His fingerpicked acoustic guitar song, “So Pretty” and slide resonator guitar version of “Simple Gifts”, as well as a short electric guitar bit called, “Big Ag Blues” were all stupendous, but everyone’s favorite seemed to be a song called “Circle of Life.”

“Circle of Life” is a round, and was written decades ago by one of our oldest friends, Sonja Coble. It was originally sung a capella, but Zak worked out an arrangement with multiple acoustic and electric guitars playing all of the vocal pieces, building the music to a lovely emotional crescendo.

The music combined with the powerful words of our interviewees– farmers, food producers, non-profit directors and businesspeople– and the beautiful footage shot and edited by Dan, into a heady brew which moved our audience in ways I don’t think any of us involved in the project expected.

I’m thrilled now to finish up our interviews–we have about six of them left to do, and start writing a script so we can start the hard work of editing, composing and recording music and doing all of the other post-production stuff that makes a film magical. Having seen the effect it has on other people has energized all of us, propelling us forward toward our goal of seeing this project through to the finish.

So, let me publicly thank the folks working on the film with me: Daniel Trout, Heather Irwin and Zak Kramer, as well as all of the amazingly generous people of Athens who have cheerfully opened their farms, homes, businesses and lives to our cameras and microphones so we can capture their stories.

Together, all of us are making something that I hope can carry the story of how a thriving, continually expanding local food economy evolved in Athens to other communities so that the model can be made anew in other small towns and cities across our country.

We have a great harvest here in our small corner of Appalachian Ohio–now it’s time to plant some seeds elsewhere and watch them grow.

As we all know around here, I love beans. (They are the magical fruit, right?)

When I met Zak, he told me he didn’t like beans. I was like, “What?” But then, I quickly understood–he had never had them except out of a can, and if there is something that might well make someone dislike beans, it’s those mushy, flavorless critters that come out of cans masquerading as beans. It doesn’t matter what kind of bean they say they are, or what color they are, most of them taste the same–blah. Kinda mealy, kinda mushy, very yucky.

So, I proceeded to cook him a pot of proper pinto beans, made the old hillbilly way with a ham hock (I can feel the vegetarians wincing, but well, beans taste mighty good that way and I wanted to make sure to hook him before I went all vegetarian on him) a bay leaf, an onion and a garlic clove and lots of water which turns into a delicious bean broth that was always my favorite part of beans when I was a kid. Mother thought I was weird, but I liked to drink a cup of it right out of the pot, I liked it so well. (I did the same with the liquid kale is simmered in, too–she told my doctor about it and he said, “Let her do it! That’s where most of the vitamins have escaped to!)

Well, needless to say, Zak was converted, and we’ve had lots of beans in our pantry ever since.

Recently, I’ve been keeping Athens very own Shagbark Seed & Mill Company’s black turtle beans in my pantry and have been using them for all sorts of purposes–as a plain old pot of beans, drained and used to top nachos, in salsas, in tacos and in enchiladas. And they are mighty good, no, not just good, but delicious, with a nice chew to the skins with creamy, sweet interiors. And they make fine broth.

And I’ve heard tell that Michelle and Brandon are offering pinto beans this fall after they get harvested–glory hallelujah, and praise be! I’m waiting impatiently to taste those, because when I was growing up, pinto beans and cornbread were a big favorite, especially in the late fall or winter. I never tired of them, even when we ate them a whole lot when Dad was laid off for a year and we went from “somewhat impoverished” to “downright poor.” Even eating them several times a week didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for them. Pintos are just that good, and I cannot wait to taste ones fresh from the field, because I know they’ll be better than the ones from the store which could have been hanging around for who knows how long.

BUT, you know, a reader named Laughingrat commented when I wrote about Shagbark’s black beans and clued me into a company that grows and sells heirloom varieties of dried beans out in California, called Rancho Gordo.

And you know how I am. I looked at their website, and saw all the beautiful beans in all their glorious colors: yellow, red, purple, black, piebald black and white or brown and white, streaked, spotted and speckled, pink, and celedon green–and of course, I was smitten. I’m a sucker for colors, and even though I knew darned good and well that when you cook dried beans most of those luscious pigments melt away and you end up with beans in some shade of creamy beige or brown, I couldn’t help it–I had to know if these beans were indeed any more special than the ones that came from the grocery store.

Steve Sando, the owner of Rancho Gordo and the Guru of Legumes, writes eloquent descriptions of the flavors and textures of the different legumes he offers in his online catalog and at his retail outlet in Napa, as well as in San Francisco, and his words haunted me. Because, I just had to know if his beans were just as good as the beans grown here in Athens.

So, I ordered a couple of pound packages for myself and a full dozen packages as a Father’s Day gift for Zak’s dad, Karl. (Karl is a bean aficionado, just like me.)

And, I finally got around to testing out three of the varieties from Rancho Gordo: “Pebbles,” which is a fascinating bean in that from the same plant come beans of all different shades of brown, pinkish beige, black and yellow, “Yellow Indian Woman,” which is widely grown among the Native American tribes in the northern plains (though it was originally brought to Montana by a Swedish family) and “Eye of the Goat,” which looks like a very fat, rounded, glossy pinto bean.

And here’s what I found out–Sando’s beans from Rancho Gordo have the same qualities of freshness that I found in Shagbark’s beans. They cook slightly faster than grocery store dried beans, probably because they’ve not been sitting in a warehouse for years on end. They also have more flavor–a LOT more flavor–and each type has a different character. And, finally–their textures are more varied than most grocery store beans–each type of bean has a distinctive texture–just as the black beans from Shagbark had tougher skins, but very creamy interiors, which led to them being paradoxically both slightly chewy and yet melting in the mouth.

I cooked all three types the same–in a pot with a bay leaf, a small amount of smoked pork (a small hunk of ham hock), a small whole onion and a whole clove of garlic. Then, I used each one in several ways to see how versatile they were in the context of different recipes.

The first one I cooked was “Pebbles.” You know I had to see what they were like, because they really do look like a bunch of river-polished stones. If you drilled holes in these beans and strung them up, they’d look like a necklace of agate beads–they really are that pretty, as you can see from the photo. (Maybe I should attempt to string some of them into a bracelet, if not a necklace.)

I used the cooked, drained beans to top nachos made with Shagbark’s amazing corn tortilla chips and some really lovely aged cheddar, and Kat and Zak and I loved them. Kat proclaimed them the “bestest bean nachos ever,” and Zak said that the beans had a slightly sweet flavor that was interesting.

Also, I noticed that while the differences between the colors of the cooked beans was not as startling as with the raw beans, they still showed subtle variations that made them look pretty neat on the plate.

I also ended up using these in a taco filling and as the filling to some vegetarian enchiladas that included grilled corn cut from the cobs and summer squash, and even in those contexts, the beans retained their sweet flavor and textural character.

The next beans I cooked were the “Yellow Indian Woman” beans, but I neglected to take photographs of them, either before or after they were cooked. They start out as ovoid brownish yellow beans and cook up to a pale pinkish brown. Their skins are somewhat tough so they retain their shape very well, even when cooked in a pressure cooker. Their flavor is distinctly earthy and sweet, and when I made them into refried beans, they had a silky, creamy texture that Kat and I adored.

Zak liked them, too, but he prefers the beans I cooked today to use in a refried bean dip to go with my salsa for a potluck at Kat’s preschool.

These beauties are known as “Ojo de Cabra,” or, “Eye of the Goat,” and at first glance they don’t look all that special. I mean, yeah, they’re pretty, but really they look like really pinto beans that went on an eating binge and are about to burst their skins, they’ve gained so much weight from all their gobbling.

But they don’t taste like pintos. They have a very fresh, sweet flavor with a hint of mushroomy depth. Steve Sando says likes to cook them simply and then serve them with some grated raw onion and a squeeze of lime juice and a bit of salt. You can see my version pictured in the blue bowl near the top of this post–I diced the onions finely instead of grating them, added minced cilantro along with the salt and a sprinkle of Aleppo pepper flakes just before the lime juice squeeze.

And you know what–that makes a fine bowl of beans. And it showcases the very meaty texture of the Goat Beans as I’ve come to call them. That’s what I ate for lunch today.

But for the potluck tonight, I mashed the beans and fried them with fresh onion and garlic in a bit of bacon fat melted with olive oil, and Zak said he absolutely loved the fuller, deeper texture of these beans to the creaminess of the “Yellow Indian Woman” beans. He said that the texture was firmer and a bit drier, but it made the beans taste somehow nutty in addition to just plain good.

So now we have a new favorite refried bean bean.

That is, until Shagbark’s pintos come in.

Then, we’ll see whose beans come out on top.

Until then, let it be known that I highly approve of the heirloom beans Sando is offering through Rancho Gordo–and while I’m at it–his two books, The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Grower’s Guide: Steve Sando’s 50 Favorite Varieties and Heirloom Beans: Great Recipes for Dips and Spreads, Soups and Stews, Salads and Salsas, and Much More from Rancho Gordo are downright awesome, too.

Both are filled, cover to cover, with bean lore, cultivation information, recipes, and description of the individual characteristics and flavors of a whole array of heirloom beans, and are equally filled to the brim with Sando’s very infectious leguminous enthusiasm. Both books are well worth checking out, though the second book is more a cookbook that is geared toward foodies, while the first has essential bean cultivation information, as well as descriptions of the beans, their histories and a few recipes featuring them that aren’t included in the first second book.

So there we are–check out Rancho Gordo and see what you think of their heirloom beans–because they really are just that good.

Now, I’m going to stop writing and wait impatiently for Shagbark’s pinto beans to be ready to harvest…..