Tomato

Baked Feta With Tomatoes

/ Shane / Leave a comment

The first Friday of the month is reserved for recipes. You can see additional First Friday Food posts here.

The Reason:

I haven’t talked about our garden much this year, but gardens mean tomatoes. It’s a little early yet, but I want to get this one out there so you have everything ready to go as soon as tomato season starts to pick up. (Shhh, this is so good, we even sometimes make it with tasteless store-bought tomatoes!)

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The Journey:

The ingredients seem too simple, somehow. I mean, it’s mostly feta, tomatoes, and a red onion. So what, you know? This is absolutely one of those where the sum is greater than its parts. Trust me on this! As good as those things sound, baked all together, they are better.

The feta doesn’t really melt, just gets soft and warm, and delicious…

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The thing I like about this is that you can absolutely impress your guests with it as a fancy appetizer, or else just eat it as meal. Or eat it by yourself. A whole 8-ounces of feta, aaaaall to yourself.

Mmmmmm lovely, salty feta.

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The Verdict:

It’s really simple to make, only takes one dish, and you don’t even need silverware to eat it. The crackers *are* your silverware. Edible silverware!

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The Recipe:

Recipe from Smitten Kitchen (minus the olives!):

  • 1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1/4 cup thinly sliced red onion
  • 2 tablespoons finely-chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley, divided
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 1 teaspoon olive oil
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 8- to 10-ounce block feta
  1. In a bowl, mix the tomatoes, olives, onion, garlic, 1 tablespoon of the parsley, oregano, olive oil and a few grinds of pepper.
  2. Heat oven to 400°F. Place the block of feta in the middle of your dish. Pile the tomato mixture on top of the feta. Bake for 15 minutes.
  3. The feta will not melt, just warm and soften. Garnish with parsley and serve with crackers; eat immediately. As it cools, the feta will firm up again. We found that the dish could be returned to the oven to soften it again. We did this with leftovers, too.

Missing: One Garden Worth of Produce

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Remember how I bragged back in July about how our garden was growing like crazy, and we were harvesting a ton of lettuce and strawberries? Well, not a lot has happened since then.

Our tomato plants and beans grew and grew and grew like crazy, consuming our entire garden to the point where we have to hack our way in every time we go to water it. The bean plants in particular are constantly grabbing onto our tomatoes and the tomatoes in the garden next door, like some kind of hungry tentacled monster.

This seemed like a good sign, but where’s all the produce?

I believe 2 of our 12 tomato plants (8 planted tomato plants and another 4 or so naturally occurring) have actually made tomatoes. And even those are hardly producing. The beans have just offered up a handful of beans, but I’m hoping that’s because we started them late.

Why aren’t our tomatoes producing? We currently have 2 theories. The first is that it was just too hot at the wrong time. My sister said that the plants won’t produce flowers when the temperature is over 100. This could explain it, since we had a heat wave right at the time that the plants should have been blowing up. The other theory is that we seem to have some aphids this year. We also have ladybugs, so the situation seems to be controlling itself, but one gardener posited that perhaps the tomatoes were worried about growing defenses rather than fruit.

Luckily we got 13 pounds of tomatoes from my dad, so we spent 3 1/2 hours on Sara’s birthday canning 7 quarts of tomatoes.

The only things that seem to be going well in the garden right now are the peppers (and the eggplant). Specifically, our jalapeno plant is going like gangbusters. I picked 15 large jalapenos the other day, and there were still more coming. This was after we had already frozen about all that we would probably use (I have to admit, we don’t use a ton of jalapenos in a year, especially since we haven’t canned any salsa so far this year).

I’m still holding out a little hope that the tomatoes are just delayed, and we still may get some kind of tomato explosion. Then we can all look back on this post and have a good laugh together, as we try to give them away to anyone who will take them.

Please?