Today we have for you:
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My tomato and watermelon salad, a simple summer stunner
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A no-recipe recipe for cherry tomatoes with miso dressing
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Plus, panzanella with tomatoes and cucumbers (did we mention that we have tomato recipes?)
Good morning. It’s August now, time whistling by, a month for tomatoes and corn, melons and stone fruit. I’d like to steam 500 clams between now and Labor Day, eat plenty of raw tuna belly, smoke loads of ribs, slurp oysters and just generally partake of the season’s bounty as farmers harvest and fishermen hunt.
I want to start with tomatoes, though. This is a great month for my tomato and watermelon salad (above), dressed simply with oil and vinegar and salt, then tied together with one of those creamy feta cheeses that break down in the juices of the fruits to create a kind of ambrosia between the crisp and soft. (My colleague Yotam Ottolenghi does something similar with tomatoes and pomegranate seeds.)
Featured Recipe
Tomato and Watermelon Salad
I like, too, Hetty Lui McKinnon’s recipe for crispy gnocchi with tomato and red onion, like a panzanella, but with gnocchi standing in for the bread — and, of course, Melissa Clark’s recipe for actual panzanella, one of tomato’s closest friends.
Try David Tanis’s recipe for a tomato salad with anchovy toasts. Try Cybelle Tondu’s recipe for tomatoes vinaigrette. And absolutely, if you can find a perfect peach, try Alexa Weibel’s recipe for a tomato and peach salad with whipped goat cheese.
Except maybe the tomatoes aren’t exemplary yet, where you stay. (Certainly that’s true of the peaches, where I shop.) Maybe they’re still Pantone red orange instead of fiery red, a little fibrous still, watery, kind of unripe. It happens. The growing season follows the weather more closely than the calendar.
Genevieve Ko has some ideas for those subpar tomatoes. I have one myself. It’s what we call around here a no-recipe recipe, an improvisatory jam: cherry tomatoes with miso dressing.
Rinse and dry a pint of cherry tomatoes, the commodity varieties sold in every grocery store, then halve them and put them in a bowl. In a smaller bowl, combine a tablespoon or more of the miso you have in the back of the fridge with a healthy splash of sherry or rice vinegar, another of soy sauce, a drizzle of maple syrup and one of roasted sesame oil. Whisk that until it’s thick and creamy. If it’s too thick, add a little more vinegar or, perhaps, a whisper of neutral oil. Taste and see what you think. It needs some ground black pepper, no? Yes.
Get that dressing onto the tomatoes and toss them gently with a big spoon. Allow the salad to hang out, picking up flavor, while you grill some chicken or steam some fish to serve alongside. This is fake peak-season perfection, no less superior for that.
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Now, it’s nothing whatsoever to do with fruit crumbles or lobster summer rolls, but my colleague MJ Franklin of The New York Times Book Review is putting together a cool summer book club event that you may wish to join: a discussion of Charlotte McConaghy’s new novel, “Wild Dark Shore.” Read and take part!
In The New Yorker, Lauren Collins makes the case for lunch.
Over at Slate, Dan Kois went long on the last days of Greenpeace’s flagship vessel, Rainbow Warrior, worth reading for the spies and bombs and Nosy Parkers, and the sense that the 1980s were a very different time.
Finally, here’s Carole King, “The First Day in August.” “Nothing will come between us.” I’ll see you on Sunday.
Sam Sifton is an assistant managing editor, responsible for culture and lifestyle coverage, and the founding editor of New York Times Cooking.
The post It’s Time for My Tomato and Watermelon Salad appeared first on New York Times.
