Let Us Ketch-Up About Tomatoes!

Remember how I said in my last post that I already had my next title all planned?! Sometimes my mom helps me work on my jokes and fix them a little bit, but I came up with this one all by myself and she didn't even have any suggestions!! I really like it! And I thought it would be perfect, because we've been cooking with tomatoes a ton! August is tomato season and we've been getting great ones at a farm near our house. My Grammy Marcia and Papa Bill can tons of tomatoes every year and then they send them to us and cooking with them makes our food so much better! We don't grow or can any, but we definitely bought a lot this month!

Usually I prefer eating tomatoes cooked, but we made a really good Bloody Mary Tomato Salad. A Bloody Mary is a spicy tomato drink with alcohol in it, so I've never had one. But this salad has a spicy dressing that is supposed to make it taste like the drink. The salad gets served with cheese crisps on top and I really liked those. This was my mom's favorite tomato dish and Rachel really liked this one too!

I think that the cheese crisp adds a perfect finishing touch!

Other than that though, our tomato dishes have been cooked. We made a tomato gratin as a side dish with fish, and it was delicious. It is cooked with toasted bread and everyone in my family loved it.

We cut the basil to go on top in a chiffonade, which means that we rolled up the leaves and then cut them into thin ribbons.

A main course that included tomatoes was Seared Scallops with Jammy Cherry Tomatoes. This recipe actually didn't include corn, but we added it in and I'm so glad that we did. We've made a lot of recipes with tomatoes and corn together and I think that they go very well together and so I thought that corn would be a good addition and I was right!

We got a perfect sear on these scallops so that they had a great crunchy crust!

A tomato dish that we made a whole bunch of times was Roasted Tomato Tart with Ricotta and Pesto. This is good as a side dish or an appetizer. We also served it one day with a salad for lunch. Rachel loved this tart and so did my dad!

This is a quick and easy recipe, but it actually looks fancy!

My third favorite tomato recipe was Roasted Tomato and Corn Pie with Cheddar Crust. This was delicious. You could really taste the cheddar cheese in the crust.

This looked prettier before we cut it, but we forgot to take a picture!

My second favorite tomato recipe was gazpacho. My parents served gazpacho at their wedding and we make it every summer, but had kind of forgotten about it this year until my Papa Bill reminded us. I'm glad he did. This Gazpacho recipe is delicious. It is cold and refreshing and great for lunch. The recipe suggests a cubanelle pepper, but those have been hard for us to find. Usually we use a red pepper instead, but sometimes we use a jalepeno, which adds a bit of spice. My mom serves it in glasses at dinner parties for people to drink as an appetizer, because it's so much easier to serve and eat that way! I'm just noticing now as I'm writing this blog post that a lot of our tomato recipes come from the New York Times. We use their recipes a lot, but it does seem as if they're especially good with tomatoes!

Usually we garnish our gazpacho with dill, but this time we used cucumbers. I thought that they looked like a pretty flower on top.

My sister always drinks her gazpacho, because eating soup with a spoon can be tricky. This is a great soup for kids to drink because it's smooth!

But my very favorite tomato recipe was Grilled Gnocchi with Summer Squash and Burst Tomatoes. To make this you thread gnocchi, tomatoes, and zucchini ribbons separately on skewers. I wish that we'd taken pictures of the skewers because they looked so pretty! I'm sure we'll make this recipe again and I'll remember the skewer pictures next time. Then you grill everything and toss it together. Everybody whom we have served this to loves it! Our friend Molly came to visit and she really liked how the gnocchi took on a smokey flavor from the grill. She said that this was the perfect summer meal!

If I were naming this recipe, I would call it Summer In A Bowl!

There are actually lots more tomato recipes that we made, but we kept forgetting to take pictures. Hopefully we can make a few of them again and remember the second time!

Another thing that we have cooked a lot this month besides tomatoes is PANCAKES!!!! We didn't make tomato pancakes (maybe we should have!), but we did make Corn Pancakes and zucchini pancakes! These corn pancakes were my second favorite ones. I loved the sweetness of the corn and how it added crunch. My sister said that she really liked the sweetness and the texture.

It's hard to see in this picture, but if you look very carefully, you can see some corn kernels.

The Zucchini Bread Pancakes were also very good. They sound and look a little weird, but we all really liked them. My brother was especially surprised by how good they were.

You can tell me in the comments if you think these look weird or yummy!

Our Lemon Poppy Seed Yogurt Pancakes were Rachel's favorite. She said that they reminded her of her favorite lemon ricotta pancakes that she used to eat when she went to college in Philadelphia. Molly really liked these too. She thought that they had the perfect amount of lemon in them and was surprised by how well they went with maple syrup. Sometimes my mom puts pancakes in our lunch boxes, and my brother doesn't always like them. But he really liked these at room temperature the next day, so I'm hoping that we'll get some in our lunch boxes in the future!

Blueberry Yogurt Multigrain Pancakes were part of a tie for Rachel's second favorite. She said that these were the perfect blueberry pancakes in every way. I liked the flavor of these a lot and they were very fluffy. But whenever I cut a blueberry bite, the blueberry would just fall out. Sometimes my mom makes blueberry pancakes where she purees the blueberries into the batter. The pancakes look purple. When my sister was learning about the letter P, my mom made purple pancakes with pureed blueberries. Everyone might not like purple pancakes, but at least that way the blueberries don't fall out!

These pancakes definitely look prettier than the purple ones!

I thought that my mom's purple p pancake was pretty cool though. And it's GREAT alliteration!

My second favorite pancakes were Whole Grain Pancakes that we made with farro. They were supposed to have blackberries on them. We didn't have any so we skipped that part, but we all agreed that they would have been a good addition. I thought that this was an interesting recipe, because most multigrain pancakes are made with different kinds of flour. This is the only recipe we've done that uses actual cooked grains.

This is what it looked like when we mixed the farro in.

And these were the pancakes cooked.

We also did a new version of our old friend dutch baby! This kind is a Giant Dutch Baby With Fruit. I really liked this dutch baby. The versions that we usually do don't have fruit, and I probably like our basic one better, but this kind is very good too. Our friend Alec had some and he liked that it wasn't too sweet.

I liked how the edges got crispy.

But I realized while writing this post that we never took a picture of my very favorite pancakes that we made! They were my mom's favorite too and tied with the blueberry for Rachel's second favorite. My mom said that we can make them again and then we'll post about them. But if you can guess exactly what kind of pancakes they were first, I'll bake you something special and mail it! P.S. If you ate those pancakes with us or I already told you about them, then you are NOT eligible for this Mini Michelinista contest!!

An ingredient that we've been using a lot lately is everything bagel seasoning. At first my mom bought it to use to make everything bagels. We tried a new bagel recipe this time, and it worked much better than our last one. First you make a dough and let it rise and then you shape your bagels.

Then you boil them in water with a little bit of honey.

Then you brush them with an egg wash.

And you sprinkle on your seasoning.

This is what they looked like finished.

My dad LOVED these bagels. He thinks they're as good as the ones from Bagelsaurus, which is his favorite bagel bakery. He and my mom argue about it because she thinks that Ess-a-Bagel in New York is better (I think so too!). I think he likes these so much because they're very chewy. Surprisingly though, we preferred the everything seasoning that we made ourselves last time just by mixing seeds. The packaged seasoning is very salty.

However, we did find other uses for the seasoning that we really liked. We made a Whole Grain Seed Bread and were supposed to use sunflower seeds. When we realized that we didn't have them, we just used the everything bagel seasoning instead and the bread turned out awesome.

We also used regular whole wheat flour because we didn't have whole wheat pastry flour, and that seemed to work just fine!

But our favorite use for the everything bagel seasoning is a recipe that my mom made up. She scrambles eggs with cream cheese and mixes in the everything seasoning and they taste amazing. Sometimes she adds in smoked salmon too. I highly recommend them.

The cream cheese makes the eggs very creamy and the everything seasoning adds flavor.

We had a very exciting event last month, which was Rachel's second anniversary as part of our family. We called it her nanny-versary! She really likes chocolate and peanut butter so we made her a Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup Cake. My Grandma Linda made this for my brother's birthday one year and it is amazing!

We made a chocolate cake and frosted it with peanut butter buttercream.

I think it's funny how my sister's feet are in all of our pictures because she's always sitting on the counter!

We sprinkled peanut butter cups between the layers.

We had a little bit of trouble with the chocolate ganache that goes on top. It was supposed to be shiny and pourable, but ours ended up more chunky. We realized afterwards that it was because I stirred it too much (sometimes I get a little bit overly enthusiastic about doing stuff when we're baking!). What we should have done is gently warm it over water while whisking, but we didn't have time for that, and it tasted good anyway. This cake is very moist and the frosting has great peanut butter flavor. Overall, it is delicious!

You can see how the ganache doesn't look smooth.

It was really fun putting in a candle and we sang Happy Nanny-versary To You!!!!

We did lots more end-of-summer baking, so get ready for another post hopefully soon. I'll give you a hint, an ingredient that we used a lot of rhymes with yum!