Cooking with friends on a weeknight: Fresh tomato sauce

The finished product

Cooking and eating with friends is always better than cooking and eating alone. Even better than indulging in cheese and chocolate while watching a Netflix marathon...

I'm making new friends in DC and part of that means inviting myself over to dinner at friend's houses. Or rather having friends who are welcoming and ask me over for dinner. It helps that through my residency program,  I've met wonderful, lovely, friendly open people who allow me to come over and hang out in their kitchen. Having friends like this is a refuge--fun, relaxing, delicious refuge.

Last week, I took up my friend/co-intern on her open invitation to dinner at her house during the week. Since I mostly prepare vegetarian food for myself, I have added a few vegetarian blogs to my browsing repertoire. One that I really enjoy is Cookie and Kate, as I find most of her recipes accessible in terms of both ingredients and prep time. I liked the look of this fresh tomato sauce, essentially an uncooked tomato sauce, that shines during the hot summer months when it is possible to get fresh, juicy tomatoes at the farmer's market. On Wednesday, I purchased a few golden heirloom tomatoes and fresh garlic to take to my friend's house to make this sauce. 

Spiralizer in action

My friend and her fiance live a short, uphill bike ride away in Georgetown. Biking in Georgetown has the potential to be enjoyable, gliding by the beautiful brick homes with their lush front gardens. However the hills and the aggressive drivers make for a harrowing weekday-evening bike ride through the narrow streets. The drivers in Georgetown believe that if they drive fast enough the roads will magically widen to accommodate their luxury SUVs. The cars tail me closely as I try to bike as quickly as possible up serious hills, but my legs feel like they might burn off after 15-30 seconds of pedaling on pointe. I'm out of shape and the impatience of drivers on my tail or zipping past me does not improve my oxygen capacity.

I arrived to my friend's house, a bit weary and sweaty, but ready to go for a short dog walk before preparing a simple late summer meal. My friend suggested instead of pasta we use her Spiralizer, a pretty cool contraption that quickly turns any fruit or vegetable into pasta-like strings. My co-intern's fiance took on the Spiralizer; she prepared the roast chicken legs; I made the pasta sauce, and their dog kept vigil by the counter for scraps and company.

Simple Fresh Tomato Sauce, adapted from Cookie and Kate, originally from Bon Appetit

Ingredients:
4 medium sized tomatoes, preferably fresh tomatoes, maybe from the farmer's market
1 large clove of garlic
1 handful of parsley leaves, washed and coarsely chopped with a few runs of a knife in either direction
the juice of one lemon
2 tbs of olive oil, more or less, just add for taste and sauce consistency
1 tsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste

1. Cut two and a half of the tomatoes into small cubes, retaining the seeds and liquid pulp and place in a large mixing bowl
2. Using a box grater, grate the remaining one and half tomatoes into the bowl. Use the medium sized holes to get a fairly pulverized tomato. Toss the left over skins.

Chopped and grated tomatoes

3. Mince the clove of garlic and add it to the chopped and liquefied tomatoes.
4. Squeeze the lemon into the bowl with the tomatoes, garlic and lemon.
5. Add the 1 tsp of salt and about a 1 tsp of salt (3 pinches of salt) and add a few turns of coarsely ground pepper.
6. Mix well and let this sauce sit for at least 10 minutes, more time will only make it better. Ten minutes is about the time it should take the pasta to cook. We left our sauce for longer as we took a break to watch an episode of Parks and Recreation and let the chicken roast in the oven.
7. At the last moment, before adding the sauce to pasta, add the chopped parsley to the tomato sauce and stir to combine parsley and sauce.
8. Once the pasta (or spiralized zucchini) is cooked, add in the sauce to the pan with the cooked (and drained) pasta and toss to coat. If using actual pasta, you may want to add a few tablespoons of the cooking water to the tomato sauce. My sauce was very watery and did not need any extra liquid, I actually strained away a bit of liquid as I scooped the sauce onto the zucchini.

9. Toss the pasta and sauce until the pasta appear well coated. Serve the pasta onto plates and top with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

DC come-back: Pressure Cooker Sweet Corn Soup

From 2011: A view of my old studio apartment.
I swear the new one looks just like this...

I hope this post is my transition back to food blogging. Ironically, the desire to blog comes from being back in DC, the place where it all began. There is something energizing about being back in the city. This evening was so lovely-- high 60's, the sun was soft, no breeze. It was an evening that felt like swimming in water of the perfect temperature.  I decided to walk up to Shaw near R and First street, just wandering up and down streets, looking at colored town houses and smiling at everyone else who decided  the evening deserved to be spent outside either on a patio, their stoop or walking. I walked past so many new restaurants that I wanted to try, so when I arrived home, I just couldn't spend another night eating a kimchi quesadilla (definitely a post on my new  go to dinner at a later date)

 I moved to back to DC for residency, and I have these constant flashes of my previous life here. It's like deja vu in which I am actively walking through old memories of events that occurred in this city. I spend 12 hours a day in GW hospital and often from the windows of patient rooms, I can see the brick facades of my freshman and sophomore dormitories, Fullbright and JBKO. It's a bit like living with one foot in the past. Things are certainly different now. For one, I'm way cooler now that I'm a bonafide doctor. I make more money. I'm more confident. Yet today I shopped for fresh ingredients to make this soup at the same Wednesday Farmer's market where I shopped in college. My living situation in DC didn't really improve. I am living in a different building, but my current studio feels just like the studio apartment where most of the posts on this food blog were made. I'm back to cooking in the smallest possible kitchen with crappy fluorescent lighting. I have 3 cabinets, so all of my dishes and implements are stored in an industrial shelf outside of the kitchen. My counter space is non-existent so yet again, I have to lay a cutting board over my sink to actually cook in my kitchen. In summary, four years later, back in DC: I'm a doctor with a closet for a kitchen. On a positive note, I have upgraded my location to Logan Circle, so my tiny kitchen is located in the coolest neighborhood within a reasonable walk to GWU.  

SO enough complaining. Life is great considering I am working 80 hours a week and still find time to walk around and try to blog.  I can't help but laugh at how far I've come and how nothing has changed. 

As evidence that many things don't change, I still browse food blogs when I have downtime at work.  On a particularly slow day at work yesterday, I  was randomly clicking through Serious Eats and found this simple recipe for sweet corn soup made in a pressure cooker. I was given a pressure cooker by a friend in Galveston, and I have been trying to master the art of making different beans and curries. It's an old fashioned, stove top pressure cooker that whistles to relieve pressure. I love my pressure cooker; it really does speed up cooking. 

It's still sweet corn season, and I knew my Wednesday farmer's market would have plenty corn and fresh ingredients to make this soup. So after my hour long wander through Shaw, I came back to my sweet, tiny studio  and its kitchen and whipped up this soup to take to lunch for the next few days. 

Here's the quick and easy recipe that I hope will rekindle my blogging fire: 

Pressure Cooker Sweet Corn Soup (adapted from this recipe on seriouseats.com)

Note the old fashioned pressure cooker cover in the top right corner

Ingredients: 

1/2 white onion, coarsely chopped

sweet red pepper

2 cloves garlic

4 ears of corn

4 cups of broth, either prepackaged box broth or reconstituted from bullion

bay leaves

olive oil

salt and pepper

1. Coarsely chop the garlic, onion and red pepper. Heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil in the pressure cooker. Over medium heat, saute the vegetables until softened and slightly browned, about 5-10 minutes. 

2. While the vegetables cook, shuck the corn and remove the corn from the cobs. Reserve the cobs and cut them in half to fit into the pressure cooker

3. Add 4 cups of broth to the pressure cooker. (I didn't have any broth in a box or frozen broth, so I dissolved 2 bullion cubes in 4 cups of water) Then add in the corn kernels and the 4 cobs cut in half. I think the cobs help contribute to a sweet corn taste, especially as the soup is not cooked for very long.  

4. Stir to combine the corn components and other vegetables, add the bay leaves.

5. Close the lid to the pressure cooker and turn up the stove heat to medium to high, so you hear the cooker top rattling for a good 10 minutes. Keep on the stove until the pressure cooker has whistled 2 times,then turn down the heat and cook for another 15 minutes on lower heat, with the top still rattling. 

I realize the directions above sound like nonsense to someone without this style of pressure cooker.The original recipe on seriouseats.com simply instructs to cook the soup at the high pressure setting for 15 minutes. 

6. After 15 minutes, relieve the pressure by lifting the top and releasing all the steam and then run water over the pressure cooker for one minute. Remove the top and let the soup cool. I let it sit on the stove for 30 minutes while engaged in my other favorite activity, a short yogaglo.com yoga class. 

7. Once the soup is cool, puree the soup with an immersion blender or you can add it to batches into a blender or food processor.  

My immersion blender is now my new favorite tool as neither my blender nor my food processor made the move to DC. Both were old, decrepit and unworthy of precious storage space. I would love to buy a fancy new cuisine art food processor, but every pay check is already allocated for a different luxury good like new boots, a cool fall blazer, concert tickets, and all of those fun city living activities that make my tiny kitchen bearable. 

8. Once the soup is smooth, season to taste with salt, pepper, and an extra tablespoon of olive oil to round out the taste. 

9. Ladle into your preferred serving container and garnish with either more corn, scallions, tomatoes, and eat cold or hot. 

Mason jar lunch for Thursday

These days I eat a lot of my breakfasts and lunches out of mason jars. First of all it's easy to transport,even with a bumpy bike ride to work. For some reason eating out of jars makes lunch more enjoyable, like a makeshift bento box.