No, this car has nothing to do with San Francisco.

I’m signing off early this week in order to take a very long weekend in one of my very favorite places on earth: San Francisco. Dan and I are heading out bright and early Thursday morning in the hopes of being in the Mission and consuming a giant burrito by noon. We’ll visit friends — including two who are getting married — see new babies and, of course, eat lots of food. (We have reservations as the esteemed Frances for Thursday evening and I am very excited.)

If you have San Francisco food recommendations, I’d love to hear them!

Oven-roasted plum tomatoes with thyme and garlic.

I don’t know what else to call it.

It’s hard to explain why, a mere 48 hours before I’m due to leave on a long-weekend trip, I’d wander into the fields at my CSA farm and haul out another twenty-five pound bag of plum tomatoes. (You might remember the first twenty-five pounds—they’re resting nicely in one of my kitchen cabinets now.)

I only meant to pick a few. Really! But then the farm apprentice gestured to the five-gallon buckets they keep on hand for picking, and suggested I take one. “But I’ve already picked a full bucketful,” I protested weakly. He explained that there were enough plum tomatoes for people to have second bucketfuls, and who was I to decline? Indeed, in the field, the vines were overladen with ripe tomatoes and the picking took me all of about fifteen minutes.

And then several hours later, my sink looked something like this:

Right. This is about a third of the full load.

Since I’d already canned and frozen the first twenty-five pounds, I figured I’d roast these. I highly encourage you to do the same—roasting intensifies the tomatoes’ sweetness and gives them a bit of depth. And it makes your house smell deliriously good. For recipes, I’d like to direct your attention to my western Mass neighbors Eating from the Ground Up (a slow, low roast) and Happy Valley Locavore (a hot, fast roast and sauce). I split my batch in half, roughly, used one recipe for each portion, and stuck everything in the freezer. Time-consuming, but easy.

Here’s a wicked little suggestion: instead of olive oil on a tray or two, dot each tomato half with a little bit of butter. Amazing.

Now, to scrub the pans…

It’s a little bit tomato-centric around here. Specifically, cherry-tomato-centric. I don’t know how it happened, but I returned home from the farm last week with what seemed like a truckload of sweet Sungold cherry tomatoes, and it was important that I figure out a way to get them preserved, stat. Because as much as I might want to, it just wouldn’t be a good idea for me to sit down and simply eat them all.

I’d been eyeing the oven dried tomatoes recipe in Put ‘Em Up, and this seemed like a good place to put it to the test. That the recipe called for plum tomatoes didn’t bother me. Instead of pruney little tomato nuggets, I’d end up with raisin-sized, snackable little tomato chips. What I plan to do with them is another story entirely, because I have no clue—really.

I tossed half of them into the freezer, and the other half  I packed into a jar with some extra-virgin olive oil. I figured that after a few days of steeping, the oil would become tomato-infused, and might be nice to drizzle over…well, anything. (I’m keeping it in the fridge in the meantime.)

Those of you who have made dried tomatoes, what did you do with them? How did you incorporate them into winter recipes? Could I soak them a bit and toss them with pasta? What about in a hearty farro or barley salad with herbs? Soups?

Ideas, please, before I eat them all out of hand like tiny sweet potato chips. Oh, and by the way: this recipe will make your entire house smell divine.

1/4 cup dill and 12 ounces halved red grape tomatoes

Just wanted to pop in here to point out that it was still technically summer, despite the cloudy mood Ms. Nature seems to be in, and despite the fact that for three nights in a row I was required to haul out the down comforter before bed. (But is there anything better than sleeping under a thick comforter while a cool breeze blows in through the window? Not much. Not in my book.)

See them floating innocently there? Little do they know what I will do with them.

If the tomato vines in your garden look anything like the ones at my CSA, you might be concerned that tomato season is coming to an end. In the spirit of saving the summer and converting some ho-hum grape tomatoes into something a little more fun, I present to you this recipe for quick-pickled tomatoes. I should say, though, that it wasn’t exactly my idea, but was instead spurred on by a fantastic tasting pickled tomato I sampled at a friend’s house before heading out to pick up my farm share. My friend mentioned that she’d been using the pickled tomatoes in martinis, and I imagined her and her husband lounging on their front porch, feet up, sun streaming in, cool mountain breezes blowing by, chilled martini glasses dangling effortlessly in their hands.

Let me tell you, it sounded appealing.

A nice gin to use for your martini would be Berkshire Mountain Distillers’ Ethereal—it’s good, and I’m not a gin person.

These easy pickled tomatoes, then, are my last plea to summer. This weekend’s weather will be warm, and I’ll sit in the yard and soak it up, martini glass in hand, pickled tomato infusing its dilly goodness into the drink. Care to join me?

Scallions I’d just cleaned during my shift last week at Caretaker Farm CSA in Williamstown, MA.

The title of this post is taken directly from Jennifer Maiser’s response to Stephen Budiansky’s New York Times op-ed of last Friday, titillatingly entitled “Do Locavores Need Math Lessons?” Ms. Maiser is the founder of the Eat Local Challenge, whose 2007 One Local Summer really spurred me into this locavore thing more determinedly. As she says so well, “Food miles are a very small part of the reasons to eat locally.” This is nearly exactly what I said myself upon reading the op-ed.

Her response, along with many others, is part of a virtual roundtable over at Grist. It’s worth reading all the responses to get a good view of the the varied perspectives coming out of this movement (if you can call it that), but here are some of my favorite bits.

Local food is a worthwhile endeavor without an environmental story, and doesn’t need one to thrive.

— Blake Hurst, Missouri farmer

What does the desire to be a locavore say about our disjointed food system, and is there room for improvement by developing regional food systems?

— Dave Love, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future

The local foods movement is not so much about choosing between what’s grown here and what’s grown elsewhere. It’s about having any sort of choice at all.

— Elanor Starmer, Food & Water Watch

It’s totally thrilling to be a part of the Berkshires “locavore boom” that Mark Vanhoenacker so wonderfully describes in Sunday’s New York Times travel section. When Mark emailed way back when to ask about the farm-to-table scene, I happily obliged with my two cents — and more. And now I’ve found myself quoted in the nation’s most widely-read newspaper.

The introduction to the wonderful photo slideshow sums it up nicely:

There is a deep enthusiasm for eating farm-to-table in the Berkshires, where longstanding activism is supplemented by increasingly food-savvy tourists.

Those of you who are new to the site, welcome! I am delighted to have you here. You can read the most recent posts on the homepage, or explore recipes, or, if you’re curious, learn more about me and the inspiration behind Plate to Plate. I’ve compiled a list of locavorish sources over there in the sidebar, but I’m always looking for more. Email me if you have suggestions, or just to say hi. I’d love to hear from you.

What a wonderful little write-up. Thanks to Mark and the New York Times!

Coring and peeling twenty pounds of tomatoes — a fun job for Dano.

We’d only been talking about doing it for, I don’t know, five or so years. Canning tomatoes. Preserving that bright, acidic summertime flavor for purely homemade sauce all winter long. Canned tomatoes are one of the few processed items we buy anymore — our utter dependence on Friday night pizzas requires some decent tomatoes, even in February.

One down, many to go.

When I got the email last week from our CSA that canning tomatoes were starting to ripen, I jumped. Now was our chance. Last Friday, out in the field, I picked about twenty pounds of beautiful red plum tomatoes. My parents, who had come to visit and to spend an evening at Tanglewood, were put into service. We scrubbed the kitchen. We ran the quart jars through the diswasher. We boiled up water in the biggest pot we could find.

We finally canned tomatoes.

And though we weren’t around to hear the delightful little ping of the jar lids making their final seal, when we checked them in the morning, they looked great and seemed sealed. It was all I could do to keep from cracking them open then and there.

Canned tomatoes! I can’t believe we did it.

Almost ready for the hot water bath.

Now I wonder why we waited so long. It was easy, and even fun. We used the recipe from Storey’s Put ‘Em Up for canned whole tomatoes. You can also download a PDF of the USDA’s entire canning guide at foodsaving.com — or just download the tomatoes section.

Go on, try it.

In the years I’ve spent together with Dan, one thing has been certain: I’m the photographer. I’m the one behind the lens, happily snapping away, producing piles (well, digital piles) of photos of my accommodating husband’s wide grin, our many shared dinners, and structures near and far in various states of crumbling decay. This truth held for a long time. Actually, it held until last weekend, when, while I was otherwise occupied, Dan snuck off to the Pioneer Valley armed with my camera and a list of farmers’ markets.

The Pioneer Valley is a swath of western Massachusetts around the Connecticut river, a big hunk of the state just to the east of the Berkshires, and probably much larger and more demographically varied than our little western corner. When I think of the Pioneer Valley, I think of Amherst and Northampton, but I think the region also includes the wonderful Hilltowns — Ashfield, Plainfield, Cummington, and the like — and the tiny towns to the north, like Turner’s Falls. Parts of this region of western Mass are spectacularly beautiful. And parts of it fill me with a little bit of that exciting, big-city energy that I so miss.

Those two elements combine at some of the region’s farmers’ markets, which Dan visited last Saturday in search of some shots for a humdinger of a book he’s working on. He visited the Ashfield farmers’ market, and the Northampton and Amherst markets. (There are many, many more.)

I wanted to share these photos with you, because they’re lovely, and so celebratory of the zenith of the season — a complete riot of veggie goodness. Plus, the photos illustrate the somewhat incongruous way that the more developed, urban parts of the state — at least this side of the state — seem to have a lockdown on the most fantastic produce grown in the region. One particularly thrilling discovery was a grower with long beans and Thai basil, two Asian staples we’d otherwise have to get from decidely un-local sources at a supermarket in Albany.

We’re lucky, really, to live near so much good food.

This salad is ridiculously easy to make, strikes a just-right summery and savory balance, and keeps you from having to actually cook anything in the kitchen in the blistering heat of August. Serve it up with big, crusty hunks of bread for sopping in the dressing that remains at the bottom of the salad bowl. The original recipe, from Mark Bittman’s classic How to Cook Everything, calls for regular ol’ large ripe tomatoes, but I used a mixture of heirloom tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, since that’s what I had on hand. It’s essential, though, that you use super-ripe, fresh-from-the-farm tomatoes, and a decent, fruity olive oil.

Nestled next to the chives and basil at the farmers’ market in Bennington, all billowy white and cloud-like, was a gorgeous head of cauliflower. Weirdly, I never think of cauliflower as something to eat in the summer, or to get at a farmers’ market, for that matter. But it’s worth seeking out a farm-fresh cauliflower — like many other overlooked supermarket vegetables (I’m looking at you, cabbage), it’s just so much better straight off the farm.

Cauliflower is great in summer, too, because it can be lightly steamed and served hot or cold. This recipe makes that transition particularly well, going from warm dinner dish to straight-from-the-fridge lunch leftovers without much fuss. I used some steamed green beans in the recipe, too, for color and texture, but it would be just fine without them.

I used a custom curry spice mixture here, but you could use store-bought curry powder — sub in about 2 – 3 teaspoons, depending on the intensity of heat and flavor.

Curried Cauliflower and Cashews

• One head cauliflower, trimmed of green parts
• Handful cashews
• Spice mixture
  • 2 tsp. ground cumin
  • 1 tsp. ground coriander
  • 1/2 tsp. ground turmeric
  • 1/8 tsp. cayenne
  • 1 tsp. fennel seeds, coarsely ground
• 4 tbs. butter or olive oil
• Fresh lime juice
• A few tablespoons each of snipped chives and chopped cilantro
• 1 tsp. salt

1. Steam the cauliflower. Leaving it whole, place the cauliflower above an inch or two of salted water and steam for about 12 minutes, or until just tender (it will continue to cook after you take it off the heat). Set aside. When cool, chop the cauliflower into bite-sized pieces.
2. Toast the nuts. Lately I’ve been doing this in the toaster oven for 5 minutes, but you can also toast nuts in a 350 degree oven (keep an eye on them) or in a pan on the stovetop over low heat. Set aside.
3. Combine the spices and fennel seeds in a small bowl. Set aside.
4. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a saucepan over high heat. Add the curry mixture and fennel seeds and cook for a minute or two, until fragrant. Add the herbs, lime juice, and cauliflower and toss to coat. Season with salt, sprinkling the cashews on top. Serve warm or at room temperature, over basmati rice.

PS: How do you pronounce “cauliflower”? I’ve heard it these ways: COLLIE-flower and COLL-ih-flour. Which is correct? I’ll admit to the former — I realize it sounds sort of bumpkin-y, but that’s how I heard it pronounced growing up. (This is a special little interest of mine, obsessing about how people pronounce things, and it’s so fun to do here in Western MA, where the accent is bizarrely, twangily midwestern to my raised-in-Long-Island-and-subdued-by-too-many-Californians-in-college ears.) How about you?