Two Recipes

These are two of my favorite recipes this summer. The first—Tomato Pie—was given to me by a lovely woman at a little restaurant on Edisto Island last fall, and I’ve been playing around with it all summer. The second—Chocolate Dulce de Leche Ice Cream is pretty much my own, and it’s Darn Good.

Main’s Tomato Pie

Grease a pyrex baking dish (I use homemade lard). Slice enough tomatoes to fill it. I like my Juliet canning tomatoes best for this, as there’s not as much juice, so it all holds together better. The big heirlooms are a lot sloppier, but taste great! Now sprinkle with salt to taste, and about the same amount of sugar. Toss in a couple of glops of mayonnaise—Hellman’s is good— and a few handfuls of saltine cracker crumbs, enough to sort of start soaking up the juices. Now mix in some chopped fresh herbs of your choice—my favorite is a combination of tarragon and basil. Bake at 375°-ish until it’s somewhat set up and bubbling hot—1/2 hour? Hour?


Chocolate Dulce de Leche Ice Cream

Mix 1 1/2 cups dulce de leche* with 3 cups heavy cream. Moisten 1/2 cup of cocoa powder with cream, smoothing out any lumps, then slowly mix in the cream/dulce de leche mix. Add 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, depending on how much you like the caramel/salt flavor combo. Freeze in your favorite ice cream freezer. Makes around a quart.
* Dulce de Leche is a caramel sauce. I hear you can A) find it in Mexican grocery stores, or B) make it by boiling unopened cans of sweetened condensed milk in a boiling water bath. I haven’t tried either of these, instead opting to make my own using our own Jersey milk. My recipe is 2 gallons of milk and 8 cups of sugar (notice the 1 quart:1 cup ratio), simmered until reduced and golden brown (Takes hours). If you make it with goat’s milk, you get cajeta.

Today in the Kitchen


Today, like so many this time of year, I’ve been canning tomatoes and making cheese. I can’t help but imagine some cold evening this winter, making lasagne or spaghetti or pizza, using today’s tomatoes and cheese. It’s a pleasant fantasy here in the steamy funk of my summer kitchen!

The cheese I’m making is adapted from this site, and I love it. It’s very basic, and very usable, which is what I’m looking for. The girls love it, too. As you can see from the picture, I’ve rigged up my own cheese press, after years of using no press as an excuse not to make hard cheese. It’s a little bit of a pain, but not too bad—I just have to plan on fussing with the cheese a while right after I make it, making sure the jar of water on top doesn’t tip over and make the cheese weird and uneven. Right now I don’t have a wooden follower (DH keeps promising!) so I’m using a lovely bone china saucer with a pattern of blue roses.

Hot and Humid

It has been a lovely rainy summer, and now it’s gotten hot and humid, and that suits me just fine, too. The garden is doing well, surprisingly, the tomatoes have not gotten the deadly late blight, and today I’ll can my first batch.

We ate one of our hams from this past winter, and it was wonderful. I had been a little worried, as we don’t use nitrates, and I never got these hung up. Instead they’ve been sitting in a box of ashes on the kitchen floor, which seems to have worked well, as the one we ate was great!

The peaches are all coming ripe right now, so I need to figure out what to do with them—wine maybe? There is a limit to how much peach ice cream a person can eat!

Speaking of wine, we have two five-gallon batches of elderberry-blackberry wine going, one with honey and one with sugar. The kitchen smells a little yeasty. There’s also been a pot of dulce de leche boiling merrily away on the stove, adding to the general heat and humidity, but smelling fantastic. I’ll be done with that today. I’ve been making a two-pound hard cheese every day, and am excited to open the first of those. And today I pull the rest of the cabbages from the garden and make sauerkraut, which should really make the house fragrant!

The darn computer is down again, which is why updates have been so few and far between!