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.

Warning!

If you are a vegetarian, please don’t read this post. It involves the cooking of and devouring of amazingly delicious red meat. There is fire, smoke and meat juice involved. I doubt you’d much appreciate it. (But, for what it’s worth, I served the steak with a huge salad filled with spring veggies and grilled asparagus–look for these vegetarian recipes (and more) coming up soon!

Zak (my husband, for those joining us late) SWEARS to me that he cannot cook. He is the one student I couldn’t teach–mostly because he is afraid of my super-sharp kitchen knives and I wasn’t as patient with him as I should have been. I thought it was a good idea to teach him while we cooked dinner together. However, I didn’t take into account that trying to teach someone to cook while we were both hungry is a VERY BAD IDEA. So, we gave up on lessons long ago.

But, he did teach himself how to bake great bread, and he baked it for a while before finally wandering away from it. And his scrambled eggs are usually better than mine–he’s more patient and cooks them on a lower heat than I do.

But even so, Zak has it in his head that he can’t really cook.

BUT, he sure can throw down and grill up a dinner just as sweet as you please.

I love to cook on a grill, but Zak loves it even better than I do (I think it’s because he has to tend the fire–we use wood or hardwood charcoal here, so it’s a long process–and whilst tending, he gets to drink margaritas and play guitar out on the deck), so I let him have at it. AND, not only do I “let him” cook on the grill, I downright encourage it, by giving him grilling cookbooks (Our favorites are both written by chef and expert at setting things on fire–Steve Raichlen–The Barbeque Bible and How to Grill), special utensils, and tools like grill gloves to protect him from the intense heat he prefers to cook with.

So, last night, since the weather was supposed to remain sunny and warm, he decided we needed to grill out. I had a pair of amazingly marbled 1″ thick rib eyes that were just cut for me on Tuesday at Bluescreek Farm Meats in Columbus, and he wanted to do something different with them. Of his own volition, Zak went into the kitchen, plucked Raichlen’s How to Grill up off the shelf, and began to perusing.

It didn’t take him long before he had his heart settled on Raichlen’s version of the classic Tuscan grilled porterhouse recipe: Bistecca alla Fiorentina. Note, it is supposed to be made from a porterhouse steak, and all we had were rib eyes, but you know–after reading the recipe together, we reckoned it couldn’t taste bad with a rib eye, and if we liked it (which we knew we would, mind you), we could, at a later date, purchase a porterhouse and make it again. Because, you know, eating good beef grilled on a wood fire then rubbed with herbs and garlic and doused in fragrant extra virgin olive oil would be a horrible hardship that we knew we would have to struggle to survive.

But we were willing to do it all, in the name of culinary exploration.

Now, before I give the recipes, I have to fess up to doing all of the prep work for Zak. He still is wary around my knives, so it’s just easier if I cut for him. And mincing–oy. That’s just too close to the knife blade for his comfort, so I took on the job of mincing the garlic and fresh rosemary leaves (out of our garden!). But that doesn’t matter–Zak did the hot part of the cooking–and it turned out divine.

Our assumptions were correct–a rib eye cooked on a wood fire and doused with super-delicious olive oil is never going to bad. I mean, so long as you don’t set the piece of cow on fire and turn it into a little charcoal briquet/cremated cow corpse bit, it simply cannot taste bad. Or, unless you are a vegetarian or you don’t eat beef or don’t like it or something. Then it would be bad, but only subjectively.

Objectively speaking, it was bound to be delicious. And it was.

Now, I have to admit that Bistecca alla Fiorentina is pretty much over-the-top rich. It’s made with a rich cut of beef, which is minimally seasoned with salt and pepper before being grilled over a hot hardwood fire. Then, after it is cooked, you lay it into a casserole dish into which you have scattered minced garlic, minced fresh rosemary and six lightly bruised fresh sage leaves. While the searingly hot meat is making the acquaintance of the sundry gathered aromatics, you then pour half a cup of the best, most fragrant olive oil you possess over the meat and then turn it over and let it rest for a few minutes.

Magic happens in those few minutes. The meat juices seep into the olive oil marinade and the heat of the steak helps release the fragrances and flavors of the aromatics, which seep into the oil and onto the surface of the meat. It’s just heavenly.

In Tuscany, traditionally bistecca is made with porterhouses cut from the famous and ancient breed–the Chianina cattle, which are beautiful giant bovines noted for their lean, tender, flavorful meat. (And when I say giant, I mean it–take a glance at some photos of them next to humans. Those suckers are enormous. And beautiful, especially the silver ones and white ones…..)

There used to be a farmer near Logan, Ohio who raised Chianina,but I don’t know if they still are. If not, David and Cheryl of Bluescreek Farm raise Belgian Blue cattle, which while they are not as gigantic as the Tuscan Chianinas, they are also produce flavorful, superb, lean cuts of delicious beef. I don’t have any trouble at all substituting Bluescreek’s beef for the traditional breed used in Tuscany.

But yeah, Chianina or not, porterhouse or rib-eye, this is one rich dish. I suggest serving it rarely, as a treat, and then, serving it with lots of vegetables. I made a roasted beet, mixed lettuce, spinach, carrot and radish salad dressed with a very light basil, honey and lemon vinaigrette as well as a big old pile of grilled asparagus. (Which Zak also cooked. He’s getting good, I tell you!) We didn’t bother with anything starchy. We just ate lots of meat and vegetables. Maybe the amount of vegetables we ate offset the amazing meat in our diet karma or something. Probably not, but I had to try!

And speaking of vegetables, meat-juice, garlic and herb infused olive oil, makes a great dip for crudite. We discovered that when Kat took to dipping her raw purple carrots in the oil and gobbling her little rooty bits even faster than normal. (Which is running-rabbit fast, by the way. My girl loves her carrots. Especially if they are purple.)

So, finally, here’s the recipe, adapted from Raichlin’s, though I will say that the only true adaptation was that we switched out porterhouse for rib eyes and used hickory wood to cook them instead of oak, simply because that’s what we had. Other than that, the techniques and all are Raichlen’s. (And may I say, if you want one or two grilling handbooks, either or both of the titles I mentioned above are perfect.

So, without further ado, here’s Chez Zak and Barb’s version of bistecca.

Ingredients:

2 1″ thick rib eye steaks (buy the best quality of meat you can afford, grass fed will taste the best)
1 small cube of beef fat (optional)
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 cloves of fresh garlic, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary leaves
6 whole fresh sage leaves, lightly bruised between your fingers
1/2 cup of cold pressed extra virgin olive oil–the best you have

Method:

Set up your charcoal grill for direct grilling using hardwood chunks. We used hickory, because that is what we had. If you do not know how to do this and want to learn, look at Raichlen’s quick and dirty explanation of how it works here. His books have lots more information and hold your hand step by step, but those few paragraphs hold the gist of how its done.

If you want to just use your charcoal grill the way you always do, go for it. If you must, use a gas grill, but in either of these cases, use some soaked hardwood chips to make smoke–the smoky flavor is part of what makes this recipe so special.

Season both sides of the steaks with salt and freshly ground pepper. When you are ready to slap the meat on the grill, brush off your grill grate and oil it. (Or, if you have the optional chunk of beef fat, grab that with tongs and use that in place of an oil soaked paper towel to oil you grates. Just rub the fat all over it until the fat melts onto the grate and the air smells divine.)

Plop the steaks down on the hot grate at a 45 degree angle to the bars on the grate. Grill until cooked to taste. (For rare, that is about seven to ten minutes per side–or to about 125 degrees F on your meat thermometer. Rotate the steaks about 3 minutes into the cooking process to make pretty grill marks in a diagonal crosshatch pattern.

While the steak is minding itself for a few minutes on the grill, sprinkle the garlic, rosemary and sage leaves all over the bottom of a shallow gratin or baking dish that is big enough to hold the meat.

When the steaks are done, pluck it from the flames, and lay those beauties right down on top of the aromatics. Turn them over a couple of times to get both sides good and coated with the wee fragrant bits. Then, pour the oil slowly over the meat. Turn the meat again a couple of times, letting it marinate for 3 to 5 minutes or so while it’s resting.

When you are ready to serve the steaks, remove them and place them on serving plates, then using a spoon, drizzle some of the meaty-juicy-delicious oil over the tops of each one.

Dig in and enjoy. Just remember, food like this, amazingly, gracefully divine as it is, should only be eaten every now and again. To paraphrase Captain Kirk: “Too much of anything, even bistecca, is not necessarily a good thing.”

You know, I could have left this recipe for next week’s “Meatless Monday,” but I liked it so much and it tasted so good I couldn’t wait that long.

This is yet another recipe to come about because I needed something as fat-free as possible and vegetarian to eat so as to not upset my already cranky gallbladder. And this–this delicious pasta recipe fit the bill. It is absolutely satisfying–I ate at seven-thirty and it is nearly midnight and I am still comfortably full (I am being careful to eat only small amounts at a time, because I find that eating too much at a sitting torques off my gallbladder almost as much as eating anything with fat in it. Persnickety little organ isn’t it?) and have had minimal complaints from my digestive system.

And, the deal is–this tasted so damned good, I didn’t feel deprived at all, even though I knew that Zak and Kat were down the road at Kiser’s BBQ Shack having the best smoked chopped pork and handcut fries ever. (Yes, I will be writing a review of this new Athens restaurant. Oh, yes. Even if I can’t eat their amazing smoked barbecue, I want everyone else to go out and eat it.) No, this pasta tasted so good, I felt special for having actually hauled off and cooked something really tasty for me, myself and I.

Of course, the base of this dish is something that I just started doing this summer–caramelized tomatoes.
And while I am all late and wrong on the process of caramelizing tomatoes, (everyone else was hip to this trend years ago, apparently) I am making up for lost time by wanting to pop all of the last fresh tomatoes season into my oven with a tiny bit of olive oil, salt, herbs and sugar and cook them down to soft, velvety-luscious morsels of concentrated tomato deliciousness.

I decided to pair them with a lovely seasonal green-rapini. I decided that the slightly bitter flavor of this very leafy cousin of broccoli would make a lively contrast in color, flavor and texture with the sweet tomatoes. Caramelized onions, minced garlic, a bit of red wine and a dash of really good balsamic vinegar, as well as a few late-season basil leaves from my garden were all that was required to round the sauce out.

In this photograph, you get to see how I handled the cutting of the tomato halves into quarters while they are still hot and in the pan right out of the oven. I wanted the fruits to be quartered, but I declined to quarter them before cooking them, knowing as I did that they would lose too much moisture and shape, and be more inclined to burn, the more surface area I exposed to the heat of the oven. So, I determined to cut them further when they were finished with the caramelization process. And since I was too hungry to wait for the little suckers to cool, I just snipped them in half longitudinally with my kitchen shears. It worked perfectly, and it was very fast going–much faster than using a knife would have been, because I didn’t even have to bother dredging them up out of the pan, slopping them on the cutting board (all the while losing precious tangy-sweet tomato juices) then cutting them. This way, it was just a matter of snip, snip, snip, and they were all done in under a minute.

After that, I could just scrape them all into the saute pan at once, while making sure to transfer all of the sticky-sweet juices exactly where I wanted them to go. No messy dripping and dropping on my clean counters!

Once the tomatoes have been allowed to caramelize all by themselves in the oven, a process which takes about a half an hour if you use the quicker method I outline in this recipe, the sauce goes together really quickly. That means you need to use the time that the tomatoes cook to get all of your other ingredients cut up and ready. But really, that just means you need to slice an onion thinly, mince two or three cloves of really fresh garlic, and roughly chop up about two cups of rapini leaves, then pick off about a quarter cup of basil leaves from their stems.

That’s it. Then, you just need to caramelize the onions in a nice big saute pan, add some Aleppo pepper flakes (or another chili flake of your choice), the garlic, and then the rapini. As soon as the rapini begins to wilt, you scrape in the tomatoes, add a dash of red wine and cook until the tomatoes wilt and release their juice. At that point, you toss in a dash of good balsamic vinegar, and if you are so inclined and don’t care if you don’t make a totally vegan dish, about a teaspoon and a half of anchovy paste.

Then you add the basil leaves, stir it up and cook it all down for about another minute, then take it off the heat and add in your cooked pasta and toss it all together.

About the pasta: I used Rossi Pasta’s plain traditional soft-wheat flour handmade fettuccine, and I am very glad I did. When I make this again, I may exert myself and make homemade pasta, but for a quick dinner, Rossi’s is the next best thing to fresh, homemade pasta. It cooks in about four minutes and has the most silken, yet still firm, al dente texture. It is truly divine stuff, and it is made not too far from Athens over in Marietta, Ohio.

You could use regular semolina fettuccini if you wanted too, but if you can get handmade soft wheat pasta or can make it yourself. please do. You will be glad of it, I promise you. The soft wheat pasta really sends this dish into the upper stratosphere of flavor and texture. (Rossi does mail order, btw. Just so you know. And no, I am not connected in any way with the company–I just love their pasta.

Finally, before we get to the recipe, I just have to tell you this: Zak, the man who really doesn’t like tomatoes, and who will only deign to eat them in chunks if they are in salsa, really, really liked this sauce. Now, he didn’t like it enough for him to say that he regretted eating pork barbecue for dinner, but I can’t blame him for that. But he did say it was really, really good–like something you would get in a restaurant.

Which, of course, made me happy, and I am still grinning about it–and the taste of the sauce–hours later.

Fettuccini With Caramelized Tomato and Rapini Sauce
Ingredients:

2 1/2 pounds fresh roma tomatoes, cored and cut in half longitudinally
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt to taste (I used about a half teaspoon)
1/4 teaspoon ground fennel seed
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1-1/2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil–start with the smaller amount, and add more if needed
1 cup thinly sliced onions
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon to 1 teaspoon Aleppo pepper flakes or other chili flakes to taste
2-3 fresh garlic cloves, peeled and minced
2 cups roughly chopped rapini leaves and flowers–I only used the thin stalks for this dish and left the thicker ones for another day
1 1/2 teaspoons to 2 teaspoons anchovy paste (optional)
1/3 cup soft red wine
1-1 1/2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1/3 cup fresh basil leaves, roughly chopped if they are very large
salt to taste

Method:

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. (You can read my earlier post on caramelizing tomatoes here, but please note that I am doing it a bit differently in this recipe. There is a reason for this choice. I cooked the tomatoes for a shorter period of time at a higher temperature because I wanted them to retain some of their juice. I wanted them to not dry out, nor did I want the juice to concentrate on the baking sheet–I did this because I am going to cook the tomatoes further in the saute pan. It is in -that- pan that I want the juices to concentrate into a syrupy consistency.)

Place the tomato halves on a Silpat lined baking sheet (or use a nonstick sheet lightly oiled with olive oil), cut side up. Brush each tomato half with some of the first tablespoon of olive oil. Then, sprinkle the tomatoes with salt and the ground fennel seeds.

Put them in the middle rack of your oven and let them cook for about a half an hour. At that time, take them out of the oven, sprinkle each tomato with some of the sugar, then put them back in the oven for between eight to eleven minutes. They should look slightly shrunken, juicy, shiny and slightly sticky with a few browned edges here and there, as in the photograph above where I am cutting them with scissors.

Cut each half longitudinally in half again, using kitchen shears if you have them, right in the pan.

While the tomatoes are cooking in the oven, heat the remaining measure of olive oil–starting with the one and a half tablespoons at first, over medium heat in a heavy-bottomed saute pan. When the oil is hot, add the onions, sprinkle with the half teaspoon of salt and cook, stirring, until they turn a deep golden brown color. Sprinkle the Aleppo pepper flakes or other chili flakes into the pan, and toss the onions a few times to combine. If you think you will need more oil to cook the rest of the dish, add it now, but be conservative. You don’t want your sauce to feel greasy.

At this time, sprinkle in the minced garlic and toss together with the caramelized onions. Cook for a couple of minutes, stirring or tossing the whole time to keep the garlic bits from burning. Add in the rapini, and cook, stirring or tossing, until the leaves just start to wilt. (If you are using anchovy paste, add it after the leaves have just started to wilt.

After the leaves wilt, scrape the tomatoes and all of their collected juices from the baking sheet into the saute pan. Cook, stirring, until the tomatoes wilt and turn velvety and release their accumulated juices. Add wine, and cook off the alcohol.

If the sauce looks too dry to you, you can add about a half ladle’s worth of the pasta cooking water to it. The starch in the water that is leached from the pasta will help thicken your sauce a bit. Stir in the balsamic vinegar and take the sauce off the heat. Toss in the basil leaves and stir well. Taste sauce and season as needed with salt.

Toss with two generous servings worth of freshly cooked, drained and still hot fettuccini, then twirl into pre-warmed serving bowls.

I couldn’t do this, because my gallbladder would object, but I bet that freshly toasted, roughly chopped walnuts would add a delicious contrasting crunchy texture and a lovely browned flavor to this dish. If you make it and do it with the walnuts, let me know how it turns out! I would use about 1/3 cup roughly chopped, just-toasted walnuts.

So, when I describe the process of this dish: Rabbit Braised in Marsala with Wild Mushrooms, I am going to have to rely simply on my words alone to get the point across. We shall see how it goes, shall we?

The first part of this post is a description of how you would go about braising a rabbit so that you may end up with a tender, flavorful, juicy creature whose flesh is easily pierced with a fork and flaked. You can leave the meat on the bone after it is done, or you can easily pick and shred it as I do for the recipe that will follow this instructional essay.

Braising is a very simple cooking method whereby meats and/or vegetables are cooked in a liquid until they are fork tender. Fork-tender does not only mean that you can easily pierce the meat with the tines of a fork; it also means that it easily slides off of the fork. That means that with minimal effort, such as by shaking your hand, the meat will slide right off of the fork. Often, you will find that meat is easily enough pierced with a fork, but it still has enough toughness in the muscle fibers that it clings tightly to the fork. This means that it is not done–it is, instead, almost done. Keep cooking until the meat will let the fork slide out of it just as easily as it let it slide in.

Braising is similar to stewing, but in general, braised dishes are made with larger cuts of meat or whole vegetables, while stews are made with meats and vegetables cut into roughly bite-sized pieces. Braises also tend to use less liquid than stews; usually the meat is barely covered with liquid, and in fact, some bits of the meat may stick up out of the liquid. Both braising and stewing involve simmering the foods to be cooked in liquid slowly over low, even heat. This slow cooking process gives tougher cuts of meat a long time to become tender, and it allows the flavors of all of the ingredients to combine in the cooking liquid to make a truly delicious sauce.

Braising a rabbit is a little more involved than braising beef or lamb or even chicken, and it has a great deal to do with the fact that the meat of a rabbit has very little fat–it is the lowest in fat of any terrestrial domestic farm animal, and it is very high in protein. Because of this lack of fat, the meat can very easily become tough, and that is the last thing you want. The solution to this problem is quite simple, when it comes to braising rabbit meat–you must make certain that it never boils. It should instead, cook on a very low, constant simmer until it is truly fork tender.

I cannot emphasize enough how delicious and juicy the meat of a rabbit will be when cooked in this way. Cooked at a bare simmer–almost poached, really–rabbit retains all of its flavor and is so moist and tender that you cannot imagine a better meat. You want to make certain that you do not overcook the meat–that means you do not want it to cook until it falls off of the bone–at that point it is more cooked than you want, and the meat will lose some of its delectable texture and moist nature. Only cook it until a fork easily pierces it and then slides right back out of it; you test the rabbit by poking your fork into the thickest meat of the thigh. When it is done, you can remove it from the cooking juice if you like, so that you can reduce the liquid and turn it into a sauce, or you can serve the rabbit without a sauce.

As I mentioned before, you can leave braised rabbit meat on the bone, or, if you are going to make a sauce for pasta, which the following recipe is based upon, then you can pick it from the bones. The best way to remove the meat from teh bones is by hand–just let it cool until you can touch it and go at it, keeping in mind that rabbit bones are fine and thin and can easily hide themselves in the shreds of meat. That is why I use my fingers only when working with rabbit meat–that way I can feel for the bones as I go.

So, now, let me give you the procedure for braising a rabbit.

First, take your rabbit, which can be cut up into serving pieces or whole, and wash it well in cold running water. Take note of how well bled the carcass was–if there is a lot of blood in evidence on the rabbit carcass, you are going to have to do as the Chinese do when making stocks and blanch the meat. This is done quite simply. Put the rabbit into a pot with cold water just covering it. Bring to a gentle simmer and let it cook for about fifteen minutes. During this time, you will see all sorts of scummy bits and stringy matter coming out of the rabbit. This is the blood as well as some marrow coming from the bones and body tissues.

After fifteen minutes, pull the rabbit bits out with tongs and set them in a colander in your sink. Rinse them off well with cold water, scrubbing them gently with your fingers to get all of the scummy icky bits of old blood off of them. Set them aside, then pour the water out of the cooking pot and wash the pot well. Rinse it well, too, dry it, and -then- you are ready to start your braising process. (And when that rabbit is done braising, well, then Cinderella, you may go to the ball.)

Cut up your aromatic vegetables–carrots, celery and onion are usual, as is garlic–and saute them lightly in butter or olive oil. When they are cut as well as you like, you can, if you wish, brown the rabbit, although I tend not to. If you don’t wish to brown the rabbit, just put it in the pot over the vegetables, and immediately pour in the liquid you wish to cook it in. This can be wine, beer, fruit juice, tomatoes in their juice, stock, water or any combination thereof. What is important is that you just barely cover the rabbit with liquid. Season gently with salt and pepper, and add a bay leaf and whatever herbs you like.

Then, bring to a bare simmer, and once there are shimmery bubbles coming to the surface and breaking only now and again, turn the heat down carefully to maintain this heat.

Then, cook for only how long it takes for your rabbit to become fork tender. Generally, it takes around 1 1/2 to 2 hours until it is properly fork tender.

Now that you know how to braise rabbit, let me tell you how to make the dish I presented at the Toyota Farm to Table event on Saturday. It is based very much on one of my favorite Italian pasta dishes of all time: Pappardelle with Rabbit and Porcini Ragu. I had it once in a small restaurant in Boston’s Italian neighborhood and once up on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, and both times, I was smitten with the rich mushroomy fragrance of the sauce and the succulent rabbit meat, all wound around the wide ribbons of hand-made pasta.

My recipe is a very Frenchified version of that very traditional Italian dish. Because of the logistics of holding pasta which are complex and subject to failure, I chose to serve the braised, shredded rabbit over garlic mashed potatoes instead of noodles. The combination was fantastic, I must say, though my finished dish resembled the original only in the fact that both contained rabbit meat, wine and mushrooms.

I know that there are many steps in making the sauce–and for that, I refuse to apologize. The flavor of the finished dish is worth all of the work that goes into making the sauce. Besides, while you make this with one or two rabbits, imagine what I did, making this dish out of over twenty pounds of rabbit, eight pounds of mushrooms and around five pounds of vegetables with three bottles of Marsala wine. That might make you feel a bit better while you watch the rabbit stock reduce for what seems like hours, and simultaneously saute mushrooms and caramelize onions and make roux to finish the sauce.

Braised Rabbit With Marsala Wine and Wild Mushrooms
Ingredients:

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup diced onions
1 cup sliced celery
1 cup peeled and sliced carrots
1/3 cup peeled and sliced parsnips (optional, but it adds a lot of flavor to the stock)
3 cloves garlic peeled
2 rabbits, either whole or cut into serving pieces, blanched as described above if needed
2 cups Marsala wine
6 large dried shiitake mushrooms, also known as Chinese black mushrooms
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
1 teaspoon salt
freshly ground black pepper to taste
4 tablespoons butter divided
8 ounces fresh shiitake mushrooms, stems removed and caps sliced thinly
2 tablespoons butter
2 cups thinly sliced onions
3 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 cups Marsala wine, divided
1 1/2 tablespoon tomato paste
Kitchen Bouquet or thick soy sauce as needed
roux brun made with 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup flour
2 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary leaves, finely chopped
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Method:

Heat olive oil in the bottom of your stockpot or large dutch oven on medium heat. When it is hot, add the onions, celery, carrots, parsnips and garlic cloves, and cook, stirring until the onion is translucent and everything is fragrant.

Lay the rabbit down on top of the vegetables, and pour the first two cups of Marsala wine over everything. Add enough water to just barely cover the rabbits. Add the dried shiitake mushrooms, bay leaf, the first measure of thyme, the teaspoon of salt and the freshly ground pepper. Bring to a nice slow simmer. Do not allow to boil. Turn the heat down and allow to cook uncovered for 1 1/2 hours at the same slow simmer. Test the rabbit meat–if it is properly fork tender as described above, remove it from the pot, drizzling a bit of the cooking liquid over it to keep it moist as it cools.

Turn the heat up on the liquid in the pot and bring to a boil. Cook the stock down until it is reduced by half.

While the stock is reducing, melt the 1 tablespoon of the first measure of butter in a saute pan over medium high heat and allow to become foamy. Then, add 1/4 of the fresh shiitake mushrooms, and cook, stirring until they are lightly browned and tender and very fragrant and delicious. Set aside in a bowl. Repeat for the remaining mushrooms, using one tablespoon of butter and 1/4 of the mushrooms for each pan.

Take the second measure of butter and melt it in the same pan you cooked the mushrooms in. Add the onions, salt lightly and cook until they are a deep golden color. Add the garlic and keep cooking and stirring until the onions are a medium brown color and the garlic is golden and fragrant. Deglaze the pan with 1/2 cup of the second measure of Marsala wine. Add the onions and garlic to the mushrooms which are set aside.

The remaining 1 1/2 cups of Marsala wine goes into a small saucepan. Over medium heat, simmer until it reduces by half. Turn off heat and set aside.

When the stock has reduced by half, set a colander over a large bowl, and scoop all of the vegetables out of the stock. Squeeze out the dried mushrooms into the bowl, and then squish the cooked vegetables in the colander so that all of their juices run into the bowl. Discard the dried mushrooms and vegetables, rinse out the colander and line it with cheesecloth. Pour the remaining stock into the bowl, straining it into the cheesecloth lined colander. Wash out your pot and put it back on low heat. Add the strained stock, the reduced Marsala wine and bring to a boil.

Heat your roux up in a small saute pan until it is bubbling. Scrape the roux into the boiling stock and whisk like mad until it thickens nicely. Whisk in the tomato paste until it is completely combined. Stir in the sauteed mushrooms and caramelized onions. If the sauce is too pale, add a teaspoon or so of Kitchen Bouquet or thick soy sauce.

Remove the rabbit meat from the bones and add to the sauce, making certain to not accidentally slip any bones into the pot.

Stir the thyme and rosemary into the sauced rabbit, and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve over wide noodles or mashed potatoes–I prefer garlic mashed potatoes. (And yes, I will post a recipe for those next week. I promise.)

This should feed up to six or eight hungry adults.

Caramelized tomatoes are a way to take perfectly ripe, absolutely perfect tomatoes and make them even more amazingly delicious. Caramelizing them concentrates the natural flavors of the tomatoes, and the salt, olive oil, seasonings and the sugar you add at the very end just gently enhance their fragrance and taste. Texturally, caramelized tomatoes are soft and lightly chewy, with slightly wrinkled skins–sort of like sun-dried tomatoes but not so leathery and chewy.

And they are also amazingly versatile: you can use them to make a tangy-sweet pasta sauce, you can use them to top bruschetta, you can toss them in a salad, top a pizza with them, or you can just scarf them down as they are.

However, I must warn you that if you take the last approach and just gobble them down from the baking sheet–they are addictive. I have heard them described as being “like crack, only legal.”

Just be certain to make extra of these caramelized tomatoes if you are planning on using them for a certain dish, because once you taste one, you know, to make sure you got them right, you will find yourself dipping into them again and again. No really–they are that tasty.

They are also simplicity itself to make.

You can use any kind of tomato you want for these: lots of people use cherry or grape tomatoes for caramelization, but I prefer to use roma tomatoes. You could use any other kind you like, but if you use any large sized tomatoes like the beefsteak varieties, or even just average sized round ones, you will have to cut them into thick slices rather than just in longitudinal halves, as I do here.

In addition, you can leave out the crushed fennel seed I used as a seasoning, or you could add any other spice you liked. (I plan on making an Indian version of these with ground up panch phoron. I cannot help but think that would just kick this recipe up about ten notches and take the flavors over the moon.) You can also add fresh or dried herbs at the time you sprinkle the sugar on the tomatoes.

You don’t really need a recipe for this–you just need to learn the method.

So, here goes:

Caramelized Tomatoes

First, you need a quantity of tomatoes: I prefer roma, as I mentioned. (I don’t need to tell you to use ripe, homegrown, farmer’s market, local tomatoes, do I? You know that by now, don’t you? I thought so.)

Take your tomatoes, wash them and dry them thoroughly.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.

Core your tomatoes–I use a little gadget that is called a tomato shark to gouge the core and stem end out of the tomato quickly and cleanly. Then, slice them in half longitudinally. (Or, if you are using larger, round tomatoes, cut them into longitudinal slices, about 1/4-1/2 inch thick.)

After they are cored and cut in half, if you are not using cherry or grape tomatoes, seed them. Just reach your fingers in there and scrape the seeds and gel out.

Lay all of your tomato halves or slices cut side up on the rimmed baking sheets. I used non-stick sheets lightly rubbed in olive oil. You could also line your pans with silpats or parchment sheets that you have rubbed with some olive oil.

Sprinkle the tomatoes lightly with salt–as much salt as you would use to season your tomatoes if you were going to eat them out of hand. Season them with pepper, if you like, and if you like my idea of using a bit of ground fennel seed, sprinkle a little bit of that, too. Then, drizzle with olive oil–about a tablespoon or so. Don’t drown them in oil, but you don’t want them to dry out, either.

Put them in the oven.

Leave them in the oven for thirty minutes–check them. If they are a bit shrunken and drying a bit with some toasty dark bits on the edges, they are ready for you to sprinkle on the sugar. If they still seem a bit too juicy and there is no darkening, give them another ten minutes in the oven.

But, if they are ready, then take them out of the oven. Take a couple of teaspoons of sugar–up to a tablespoon or so–and sprinkle it evenly over the tomatoes. At this time, if you want to add herbs, either fresh or dried, this is the time.

Put the tomatoes back into the oven and let them cook for another five to ten minutes or so.

Remove from the oven, and allow to cool until you can handle them–they should still be warm, but not blisteringly hot–and remove them from the baking sheets and set them on a tray or in a bowl, depending on how you want to use them.

Any syrupy juice that you have on the baking sheets, scrape out and drizzle over the tomatoes. (That is the good stuff–if it gets on your fingers, lick it off, for the love of God!)

There you are. Caramelized tomatoes. Easier than pie. Tastier than crack–and legal, to boot.