FROM THE ARCHIVES: Last Gasp of Summer Salad
It's prime time for peaches and tomatoes. Celebrate with this dish from our archives, which has no paywall and is built for sharing. Show your squad why Spilled Milk is worth subscribing to!
Today’s newsletter includes:
an ode to end-of-summer cooking
a blueprint for a delicious, flavor-packed salad you can customize to your taste
links to some of my favorite sauces, since you’ll need to find something to do with all those tomatoes
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Around where I live, summer is coming to a fast close. September is quiet. Kids are back in school. And while the month includes plenty of opportunities to boat on the lake and get outside during our beautiful warm days, the fireplace will see its first use in a few weeks, and the thick blankets will go out on the chairs by the fire pit and on the three-season porch.
The biggest sign of the season’s change is happening NOW at farm stands and farm markets. Tomatoes are at peak, and 20-pound buckets of bruised and “ugly” ones bursting with flavor are available for making sauce and paste.
My sauce recipes are superb. (Try them: simple tomato sauce, charred tomato sauce and more.) I also make paste from oven roasting tomatoes for six to eight hours, cooling and mashing them. That’s what I use all year long, and the flavors of summer come roaring back in the dead of winter.
So as I was doing my bulk work last week, I had some peaches from Colorado, which are at peak right now, too, and I oven roasted those with some tomatoes, taking them out after five-ish hours and plating them as the centerpiece of a salad. My son ate a plate of it and said, “… it tastes like the last gasp of summer …” and he’s right.
You can do this with so many fruits and vegetables, from plums to nectarines, pineapple, kiwi, grapes, fennel, onions, tomatillos and peppers. Make this salad just about any time of year … but for some reason, it’s most special right now.
I emptied the vegetable drawer on this one, even using the last of some pickled onions I had sitting in a jar for the past few months.
Recipe: Last Gasp of Summer Salad
There really isn’t a recipe for the salad, per se, but here is what I did:
I spooned a few tablespoons of caramelized onions onto two plates. I always caramelize my last few onions in the bag before they sprout. They are great to have on hand for sandwiches, sauces, salads — you name it.
I added the oven-roasted peaches and tomatoes (quartered) that I seasoned with salt, olive oil and herbes de Provence and roasted at 225 degrees for 4 to 5 hours, then cooled.
Then I added:
crumbled feta
extra virgin olive oil
Calabrian chili oil (You can use minced Calabrian peppers or any hot pepper.)
sliced olives
sliced jalapeños
mint leaves and flowers (Hey, they only flower for a week, so if you grow mint you should use them!)
little cubes of bread cooked/toasted in olive oil and grated Reggiano parmesan (I use these ALL the time for soups and salads; you need to try them.)
some herbs, salt and pepper
real aged balsamic vinegar (Use a good one here. It marries so well with the peaches but just a whisper of the stuff. Here is a good example of three versions. I used a different brand, 25 years old. But the 12-year-old would be fine, or the more basic version; just make sure it’s real balsamic vinegar of Modena, DOP.)
What would also work great:
pickled grapes
anchovies, really good Spanish ones from the Cantabrian Sea
fresh basil
grilled eggplant
julienne roasted red peppers
grilled scallions
That’s it. A perfect lunch or dinner salad, and it’s even better when you make a big platter of it paired with a roast chicken as an easy weeknight dinner.
