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Saturday, November 15

increase your quality of living through blanching!

I haven't yet come up with an awesome almond cake recipe - and I have this sense that I already have one lurking around somewhere - for those of you who have requested such a thing (Becky), mainly because I've been spending all of my time not looking up almond cake recipes.

I have, if you want to know the truth, been spending my time blanching tomatoes. Blanching tomatoes is a thing that, several weeks ago, would have caused me to discard a recipe even before the completion of the very first read-through. Pre-heat oven to 250 degrees. Mince garlic. Blanch...tomatoes? What the hell does that mean? Isn't that a woman's name? Well, I'm not blanching any tomatoes, that's for damn sure.

But people! It turns out that the blanching of tomatoes is, in fact, a glorious thing with only two components: tomatoes and blanching. Just like it says.

The important thing about blanching tomatoes, I have discovered, is that it causes the skins (of the tomatoes) to literally peel off. Just like that. And then you have skinless tomatoes to do with what you will. Who invented this amazing technique, I'd like to know?!? They are a genius!

And the learning curve! So not curvy it is! I have in fact just successfully completed (for only the second time ever) the blanching process for several tomatoes and am currently basking in the lovely scent of blanched and subsequently peeled tomatoes bathed liberally in olive oil, garlic, and thyme and then stuck into the oven to dry.

We're making some olive and oven-dried tomato tapenade around here, that's why.

(But really it's just an excuse to blanch more tomatoes.)

2 comments:

Wingal said...

I had cereal and peanut butter on toast today. You shame me, Jenny. SHAME me.

Idiotgurl said...

And I thought I was being amazingly creative when I fixed dinner for the kid tonight - I took some chicken, splashed on a little teriyaki, then covered it in warm peach mango sauce. It sounds impressive until you realize that the chicken strips were in the Tyson's bag in the freezer, and the peach mango sauce is actually some flavored applesauce that I bought. I didn't even mix peach flavored sauce with mango flavored sauce. It came as "Peach Mango Medley."
And of course, everything was heated in the microwave.
Blanching anything is way beyond me.