Tomatoes

Recipes: Marinara tomato sauce, Polenta with cheese and tomatoes

This time of year, we're always inundated with gorgeous homegrown heirloom tomatoes.

Brandywine heirloom tomato

That's a good thing, of course. Except that they all come ripe at once and it's a race to eat them, cook them, use them all before they spoil. We have five big tomato plants and they've all produced like champs. I've been cooking sauce all week.

Last night was the fifth big pot of sauce I've made in the last four days. To say I'm tired of cooking tomatoes would be an understatement. However, I'm not yet tired of eating tomatoes and the sad thing is . . . suddenly they will be gone. And there won't be any gorgeous homegrown delicious tomatoes until this time next year. I'm not complaining.

Most of the sauce I've made I've frozen in quart freezer baggies, to use when I have no tomatoes. This year's crop is super sweet, and even though canned tomatoes beat tasteless supermarket tomatoes by a mile in winter, there is no option that will come even close to what I have in the freezer. We'll get to enjoy the bounty later, which brings me joy.

Half the sauce I made last night went into a terrific polenta dish I learned to make from an old Greens cookbook. Greens is a wonderful vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco, one of the first really gourmet vegetarian restaurants, and is still going strong. Here's the method for both the sauce, just enough for the polenta this time, and the polenta with cheese.

Marinara (Tomato) Sauce 

• 5 good-sized ripe fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped, with their juices. Best way to peel tomatoes: Cut out the stem/core at the top, slip the tomatoes into boiling water to cover for 5 seconds, pull them out with a slotted spoon. Once cooled enough to handle, the skins slip right off.
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1 clove garlic, sliced thin
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• A sprinkle of crushed red pepper
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste (optional)
• 1/4 cup dry white wine

In a large skillet, heat the olive oil. Turn off the heat and put the sliced garlic in. Stir a bit and let cool down slightly so the tomatoes don't spatter. Put the tomatoes in. Turn the heat back up to medium low. Add the herbs and seasonings and stir.

Add tomato paste if you have it. I keep a baggie of tomato paste in the freezer and use it to thicken the sauce, but it will be fine without it.

Simmer the sauce over low heat for about an hour, stirring now and then to keep it from sticking. You will see when it cooks down and starts to become thick. When it gets quite thick and the pieces of tomato have broken down, add the wine. Stir well and cook for another 15 minutes.

Polenta with Cheese and Tomatoes

You will need:

• 5 ounces Danish fontina cheese
• 1 ounce Gorgonzola cheese

For the polenta:

• 1 cup medium ground polenta
• 3 cups water
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Bring the water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add salt. Whisking all the while, slowly add the polenta. Cook over medium heat, whisking, for 15 minutes.

Pour the cooked polenta into an 8" x 8" pan and let cool. This is a good thing to do while the tomato sauce is cooking, as it takes about an hour for the polenta to cool completely.

To assemble the dish:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Lightly butter a gratin dish.

Put 1/2 cup of the tomato sauce into the prepared gratin dish.

Cut the cooled polenta into rectangles. Place a rectangle of polenta into the gratin dish, then put a matching slice of fontina cheese next to it. Place another rectangle of polenta next to the cheese and continue layering until the gratin dish is full. You can push the rectangles together a bit to get some more in.

Decoratively drizzle a few thick stripes of tomato sauce over the top of the rectangles. Crumble the gorgonzola cheese over it all and give it a good grind of fresh black pepper.

Bake in the oven for 30 to 35 minutes. When it's done, you can top it with some chopped fresh basil if you have it. I served mine with a kale salad, any salad or simple vegetable would go well with this dish. Buon appetito!