Sun Gold Tomato Pesto Pizza

A vegan, nut-, and gluten free Sun Gold cherry tomato pesto sauce that is great as an appetizer or dip, a pizza sauce, or pasta sauce.  It freezes well, too.

One of the near-guarantees, if you're in a summer Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) or farm share subscription, is a lot of tomatoes.  Quite possibly more than you can cope with in a week.  This week, for example, I got four quarts of tomatoes.  Four!  I had a quart of cherry tomatoes, 2 quarts of slicing tomatoes, and a quart of heirloom tomatoes.  (And I'm the only human around who likes to eat raw tomatoes.)

However, I'm not the only household member who's thrilled that Sun Gold season is upon us.

Some people like to gobble up cherry tomatoes like candy.  Others like their tomatoes cooked, never raw.  Still others grow into almost liking tomatoes.  I recall I first tried a summer tomato sandwich, as a non-raw-tomato-eating adult, thanks to a food writer at The Washington Post--her description of the flavors sounded so good that, even though I wasn't a fan of raw tomatoes, I toasted some bread, grabbed the mayo, salt and pepper, sliced a tomato from the garden and discovered a wonderful taste sensation.  That still remains my favorite way to enjoy tomatoes in the summertime.

What choice do I have other than to Deal With All these quarts of tomatoes?  Next week will bring a new box, and sooner or later my own tomatoes will ripen.  I've got to get these tomatoes put up.  

If you're curious, I slow-roasted most of the slicing tomatoes overnight, following Alanna's excellent tutorial, and I put up 4 half pints of heirloom tomato & cashew pesto in the freezer, then I gave a couple of slicers to my neighbor, and the pigs and I snacked on the rest of the cherry tomatoes.  I'm all set.  This week.  I'm lucky they'll just keep coming until frost.

Since I used primarily slicing tomatoes when I made and put up Heather's Fresh Tomato Pesto, I decided to use the Sun Gold cherry tomatoes and my kitchen scale to provide a metric weight-based recipe for this delicious sauce.  I noticed that I needed less oil for these juicy summer tomatoes than I needed for the late season tomatoes.  I threw the sauce on a pizza, so I could get this ever-so-seasonal post up for Friday Night Pizza Night. For real--the dishes are still in the sink, this recipe is that fresh!  You'll be reading it while I'm still cleaning up the mess and the kids are fighting over the leftovers.

Baked Swai with Pesto and Ricotta

A simple sauce of prepared pesto and ricotta cheese makes a moist and  flavorful coating for fish, pasta, or roasted vegetables

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have seen the photos of my first cheese-making efforts.  I got a gallon of milk marked down and made 2 balls of mozzarella with a cheese making kit I bought from Standing Stone Farms.  With the leftover whey (boy howdy there's a lot of whey) I made a bonus batch of ricotta cheese.

There was still a lot of whey leftover after making the ricotta and mozzarella, and I've been experimenting with it.  So far whey-soaked oven oatcake is a hit, and pizza crust using whey instead of water is also a winner.  Details to come.

Here's the thing, though--normally I'll use ricotta in something hearty, like my Quadruple Roasted Mock Lasagna.  This summer has been gloriously--and unusually--cool, but not cool enough for that.  I decided to use up the very last cubes of last fall's pestopalooza with the ricotta cheese, and play around.

All of the recipes I'm sharing today involve the oven or stovetop, but when it's really hot I think it'd be great to toss freshly grilled items (chicken thighs, fish fillets, eggplant or zucchini) with this ricotta-pesto mixture and keep your kitchen cool.  It would be delicious as the dressing in a pasta salad, with cherry tomatoes, onion, cucumber, and squash.  It's probably good on a cracker.  Since I thawed my put-up pesto to make these dishes, I'm positive this idea will work with winter fare (peeled, sliced, roasted sweet potatoes or delicata squash?).

Fresh Peaches and Cream Muffins (Monday Muffins!)

When my daughter was 9 years old, she wanted a peach tree for Christmas.  The logistics of finding and wrapping a peach tree in December in Virginia aside, we were renting our townhouse and knew we'd be moving in another year-ish (given the standard "military future uncertainty" spin on things).

No peach tree that Christmas.  However, after we moved here and became homeowners,  we set about making our back yard a more edible landscape.  Thanks to my spouse's hard work, part of the patio became a strawberry patch and raspberry canes went into a back corner with blueberry bushes and recycled raised beds along the fences.  My daughter got her peach tree--two of them, in fact, one dwarf variety and one not-so-dwarf variety.  In the spring the trees have beautiful blossoms, in the summer their thick foliage provides a dense patch of shade.

My daughter carefully tends the trees--removing diseased leaves, thinning the branches and then the fruit, so that each peach has plenty of room and air circulation.  But her dream of harvesting her own peaches has not borne fruit, so to speak.  Apparently the fauna of our backyard can read the Certified Wildlife Habitat sign and think that the peaches, and blueberries for that matter, are for them.  It's OK, they are eating unripe peaches, and we can get fresh ripe peaches nearby to make these lovely muffins.

If you've been making ice cream lately, you may have half a cup of heavy cream left over.  (If not, go out and buy a pint of heavy cream and use 1 1/2 cups for a batch of ice cream so you'll have a leftover.)  Use it in these muffins!  They taste so rich "almost like peach poundcake" my daughter said while polishing off the leftovers on the second day.  I used more sugar than I usually use in a muffin (1/3 cup vs my usual 1/4 cup, when I remember to add the sugar) and only 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour, but this muffin recipe remains one that I'm happy to offer my kids as a snack or breakfast, not just reserved for dessert.