The Traveling Tomato
Two classic Spanish dishes, thoughts on The Bear, a revelatory cocktail, and more ...
We had one tomato left when we departed Westport, and it was too lovely to leave behind. We carried it with us to Providence. But we still didn’t eat it there. When we left Providence to return to NYC, I brought it with us.
And there it sat fetchingly on the kitchen table on West 12th Street. The following morning, last Sunday, Ann knew exactly what she was going to do with it.
As it was a Sunday, and a holiday weekend no less, we planned the night before to make our favorite Sunday brunch, a Spanish tortilla using Lays potato chips.
Ann said, “I know what I want to do with that tomato: Pan Con Tomat.”
Brilliant, I thought. Two Spanish classics for brunch. And what a perfect subject to write about early in September when tomatoes are still fat and plentiful. And so simple: a fresh tomato puree spread on good toast that’s been rubbed with garlic.
1 large tomato
olive oil to taste
salt to taste
1 clove garlic, peeled and halved
2 pieces sourdough toast.
Core the tomato, cut it in half, then rub the flesh side against the large holes of a box grater until all the meat is pureed and the skin stays in your hand—this is a great way to make any fresh tomato sauce—add a little olive oil, salt. Rub the toast with juicy side of the garlic when the bread is hot from the toaster (note the below slices could have been more heavily toasted—you want the toast to absorb the juices without becoming soggy). Just before serving, spread the tomato on the toast.
Magnífica!
Ann made the sauce and toast while I handled the omelet. I wrote about this dish—I just checked, my goodness more than three years ago—but it’s worth repeating. Also, I’ve made it enough by now to have gotten the hang of it. A couple points of finesse are worth noting. We now like to start by sautéing diced onion in the olive oil before adding the eggs, and to sprinkle it with smoked Spanish paprika. The tricky and most critical part is learning to not overcook the eggs.
Ingredients:
7 eggs, blended till uniform
Lays potato chips, as needed (I used two-thirds of an 8-ounce bag)
olive oil as needed
1/4 cup diced onion
Salt, pepper, and smoked Spanish paprika for finishing
Crack the eggs into a large bowl and whip the eggs until there is no visible translucent white, just a uniform pale yellow. I use a hand blender because it’s quickest and thoroughly blends the egg.
Add the chips and crush them into the eggs with a wooden spoon, breaking them up but not completely pulverizing them. Let them sit to absorb the egg while you cook the onion.
Preheat your broiler.
In a 12-inch skillet (nonstick is best) over medium heat, add olive oil to coat the bottom (be generous). Add the onion until it’s softened but still pale, a few minutes. Add the egg-chip mixture and stir so that it’s all uniform and level. Then leave it alone and let it cook. When you can see that the edges are cooked, a few minutes or so, put the pan under the broiler and finish cooking, another couple minutes.
Here’s the thing. The eggs should be slightly liquidy when you push a spoon into them. You will think it’s not done, but the eggs keep cooking. Touch the liquidy egg. It should be fluid but hot.
Allow the tortilla to rest for a few minutes to finish cooking. Finish the pan con tomat and open a bottle of bubbles.
Cut into wedges and serve.
The above quantities serves two perfectly.
And that is a fabulous brunch.
The Bear … my review …
A lot of people ask me what I think of The Bear, my having spent so much time in high-end kitchens writing about chefs. I finally finished Season 3. Part of the reason it took me so long is that Ann had no interest in watching anything beyond Season 1, so I had to catch episodes when she wasn’t around.
Ann happened to be recovering from Covid when she binged the first season. She simply couldn’t quite suspend her disbelief. She pointed to two instances that did her in. The first is when the sandwich shop starts taking online orders and there’s a mad lunchtime rush and everybody is crushed on the line. Meanwhile, one of the cooks, Marcus, has found calling as a pastry chef. So in the midst of the madness, with everyone in the shit, Marcus painstakingly decorates a fancy cake in this working class sandwich shop.
Wouldn’t happen. One, he wouldn’t be making fancy cakes in a sandwich shop. And two, he’d be called to the line to help out.
Two—spoiler alert if you intend to watch Season 1—in the final episode someone opens a big can of Italian tomatoes and finds, not tomatoes, but rolls of hundred dollar bills. There must have been 30 cans filled with money. This is both imaginative and ridiculous. Ann noted that even if you had a device to reseal previously opened tin cans, who would do such a thing and why?
I tried to argue that the writers wanted a good narrative device to reveal the hidden cash, but honestly, there are a dozen ways for it realistically to have happened, such as stashing the cash in big sacks of flour. That was it for Ann.
Season 2, which shows Chef Carmy turning the sandwich shop into a high end restaurant, is all well and good I suppose, if you don’t count the over-the-top feast of the seven fishes episode. It redeemed itself for me with the “Forks” episode, in which cousin Richie learns about service by polishing forks for days on end at another high-end restaurant, the actual restaurant Ever, I believe. That was for real.
But Season 3 really tried my patience. The entire tempo of the show went from frenetic to static. Scene after scene lingering on Chef Carmy staring at the food. We got to watch a lot of thinking in this season. More to the point, though, the way dishes are created in restaurants doesn’t happen the way the show portrays it, tweezing garnish onto a dish, staring at it in a silent kitchen, then throwing the whole plate of food into a busser’s tub to be discarded. (See lead image on trailer above.)
I watched dozens of dishes being created at The French Laundry, and new dishes happened this way. End of the night, 1 a.m., everyone beat, sitting on kitchen stools planning the new menu. Thomas Keller would say to Grant Achatz, at the time on fish station, “We need a new scallop dish.” Grant nods. “Why don’t you use asparagus.” Grant nods. “What else do we have?” Grant replies, “We’ve got some asparagus coulis.” Thomas nods and says, “Use asparagus and truffles.” Grant nods.
And that would be that. Grant would figure it out the next day, and come service, he would send out a stunning plate, a disc of speckled truffle coulis ringed by asparagus puree, one enormous Maine scallop, sautéed, set in the center on some diced potato, a thick slice of fresh truffle on top, and on this, a bundle of aspargus tips tied with a blanched chive.
I was delighted though to see Keller open the final episode, teaching Carmy in the actual French Laundry kitchen how to truss a chicken, while talking about his real life mentor, Roland Henin. That was genuine and true. Well done, Thomas.
Will I watch season 4? How can I not? It may devolve into hate watching, but I’m too invested in the characters not to. And what was that review of Carmy’s restaurant, ending the season with a big tease?
What we’re drinking …
David Wondrich is the country’s leading authority on cocktails and spirits, having been Esquire’s cocktail columnist for more than a decade, edited the massive Oxford Companion of Spirits and Cocktails, and written the thoroughly engaging Beard-award-winning Imbibe, an informal history of cocktails and the bartenders who made them. If you find yourself at his Brooklyn home in his vinyl bar (he owns hundreds and hundreds of albums), as we did the other night, and he asks what cocktail you’d like, hem and haw until he suggests something. You’re bound to be pleased.
“How about a Bee’s Knees? I have some great Leatherwood honey from Tasmania.”
Now, I’ve never really loved a Bee’s Knees—a gin sour sweetened with honey—when I’ve made them. But this was David’s bar and he mixed a batch of four, using his 2:1 honey syrup, strained it into the glasses, and floated a little Peychaud’s bitters on top (brilliant move, actually).
Ann took a sip. Her eyes bugged out. “Oh … … … my god.”
It was indeed that good. Revelatory for the extraordinary impact of the Leatherwood honey and the perfect balance of all the ingredients, finished with pink, piquant bitter accent. “I could have drunk ten of those,” Ann said.
The Bee’s Knees
2.25 ounces Plymouth gin
.5 ounce lemon juice
.25+ ounces Leatherwood honey syrup (2 parts honey mixed with 1 part water; use the best most floral honey available; if your honey comes in a bottle shaped like a bear, probably best to make some other sour. David bought his honey at Netcost in Brooklyn.)
Peychaud’s Bitters
Combine the gin, lemon juice, honey syrup in a shaker. Add ice. shake until you can feel the drink is chilled. Strain into a coup and float a few drops bitters on top.
What we’re reading …
Ann turned me on to White Cat, Black Dog, a collection of stories by Kelly Link. Bizarre and imaginative retelling of fables and myths. And Bill Roorbach’s Beep is on deck.
But I’ll hand this over to our promiscuous reader, Ann:
As you know, I’ve spent much of the summer reading for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Prize so I thought I’d share the shortlist here:
Absolution by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Be Mine by Richard Ford (Ecco)
Emergency by Kathleen Alcott (W.W. Norton & Company)
Night Watch by Jayne Ann Phillips (Knopf)
North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House)
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead Books)
This Other Eden by Paul Harding (W.W. Norton & Company)
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Harper)
Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link (Random House)
As you also know, I sneak in my own reading too. This time it’s Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp, given to me by the lovely people at Island Books in Middletown RI after I read there this summer. It opens in Elmira, NY, in 1951, with a chance meeting of 13-year-old Myra and a young Mickey Mantle when the neighborhood is shocked by a triple homicide. Richard Ford (one of the shortlisted authors!) says:
The Corrections meets We Need to Talk About Kevin in this harrowing multigenerational saga about a family harboring a serial killer in their midst in this “masterful novel” that “peers into the dark heart of America.”
What we’re watching …
Also from Ann for those of you who love whodunnits and thrillers:
Happiness is finding a new (to me) British detective show that has FIVE seasons. Oh joy! Afternoon knitting and watching The Bay (Brit Box).
But other than that we haven’t had good luck with other new series. We were eager to see Bad Monkey (Apple+), with Vince Vaughn playing a detective in the Florida keys. It was fine, absolutely weightless and not enough meat on its bones to make us want to see episode two.
We also gave Presumed Innocent a go, new on Netflix. This began as a great book and it was made into an excellent movie. But all we could keep thinking was, why? Why is this story getting a modern update. Just generally not likable. We intend to return to the original film and watch that again.
If anyone has suggestions for good new series, we’d love to hear them!
Recent movies have been another story. Close Your Eyes is a new film by Spanish director Victor Erice, who made his last movie more than 30 years ago. This is the story of an actor who goes missing in the middle of shooting a film, and what happens when he turns up decades later. It’s slow and methodical, it’s in Spanish, and it’s nearly 3 hours long. We couldn’t have been more riveted. It is almost a story of the director himself, and the themes that play out through the movie do so with the complexity of a great novel. One of the best movies we’ve seen this year. Now we need to figure out how to stream his 1973 masterpiece, The Spirit of the Beehive, on Criterion.
I’m a huge fan of the British actor Tom Hardy, who was masterful in Peaky Blinders as Alfie Solomons. Now he stars in The Bikeriders as the leader of a motorcycle gang in the 1950s in a story that carries us all the way through to the more sinister late 60s. A gorgeous film to look at and a fascinating exploration of the subculture, based on the work of a photographer who embedded with the group. Ann didn’t love all the violence (there are some pretty graphic fights), but I loved just looking at these actors, including the impossibly handsome Austin Butler and the excellent Jodie Comer, who more or less narrates the story from her vantage. Available to stream on Amazon and elsewhere but costs $20. Well worth it in my opinion.
As we are fascinated by WWI, we were eager to find Joyeaux Noël (2005), a story about the first Christmas during the War, 1914, when French and Scottish troops called a cease fire with their German adversaries on Christmas Eve. The soldiers sang, prayed, and even played soccer with each other. A true story. I’ve always wondered how this could have happened. Now I know.
Links we’ve loved …
You can imagine how the above went over with my Italian-America wife…
A fascinating days long trek to reach Britain’s most remote pub. (BBC)
Ann and I find the crass, but increasingly common request on the part of couples getting married to ask for friends and family to fund their honeymoon or simply request cash gifts only. Now brides and grooms have begun to charge their friends and family money to attend their wedding, to buy tickets to it. Where will this end?
Also from The Times, this excellent photographic essay on 120 years of the New York City subway as literary muse.
Eskimos and snow, meet Hawaiians and rain, with more than 200 words to describe it. (Orion)
And we thought our 411-sq-ft apartment was tiny. Have a look at what you can do with 74 square feet.
And finally …
A dispatch from our dysfunctional food system. What is that stuff in your California roll?
And that’s all for this week, folks. Thanks for reading. Please feel free to heart this, share this free post, and of course, leave comments!
Thanks for the suggestion on the movie close your eyes, really well done, lighting, closeups, story but the ending kinda left me hanging, whats your view? I also like the series the bear, in which i get a non professional's view of the restaurant business. One dish i accidently made the other day in which i thought i invented the wheel, i make minced garlic and sea salt in a jar with oil for the week, then to save all the remaining bits, i process a slice or two of sourdough bread, along with fresh basil, and added a bit of arugula, since i had slices of fresh garden tomatoes on the table, decided to sprinkle some of the crumb mix on top, wow was it good, like a low carb version of panzanella or bruschetta. Is there any short story books you or anne recommend, thanks.
I have one perfect heirloom tomato that has been wondering what I was going to do with her. And some sourdough toast. Perfect timing for the recipe idea and this great post. Thank you for sharing!