In our house, the only thing worse than a wasted tomato is a refrigerated one. Now that we’re back from our summer traveling, and a wicked blast of heat has descended on us (just in time for school, of course) we’ve found that tomato season is (still) in full force at our market. There are all kinds of great varieties: red and pink Brandywine, Early Girls, traditional beefsteak, Green Zebra, Jazz, Pineapple, sweet 100s….and even some new organic varieties from the very cool people at Baia Nicolas. I buy a lot of tomatoes. They might be my favorite food and we all eat them every night. At $2-3 a pound, they’re not cheap, but they last much of the week and for the brief few months they’re around, we can’t get enough. We eat them in Caprese Salad, Bread and Tomato Salad, sliced on white bread for simple Tomato Sandwiches with olive oil, mayonnaise, and a sprinkle of good coarse salt, or sometimes just whole like an apple.
However, when you’re making a sandwich or a a few beautiful slices, there’s always the problem of the ends. What to do with them? They don’t look that nice in the presentation, but they also are still really good parts of the tomato. So, for a few years, now, I throw all the unpretty scraps into a ziplock and throw them in the refrigerator because gazpacho is the only way that a fresh tomato should meet refrigeration.
In a few days, I have a nice bag full of ends and scraps, like this:
It’s enough to make a small portion of “gazpacho” in the blender, and the best part is that the tomatoes are already cold, so very little, if any, additional chilling is necessary. The tomatoes are so good, that I generally have to add little else to them.
The “Recipe”
I throw the tomatoes in the blender and add: some olive oil, a splash of red wine vinegar, a little salt, whatever herbs I feel like (fresh basil, tarragon, chives, parsley..or often none at all), a cucumber slice or two if the spirit moves me, a garlic clove. I know this is not a proper recipe–I’m sure many of you already have more formal, careful, and time consuming recipes–but this works, it’s really fast, and it’s delicious if you have excellent tomatoes. It’s also a recession-friendly way to get all the value out of those expensive tomatoes.
Because there’s usually not a lot of gazpacho, I usually serve it in pretty little aperitif or cocktail glasses, garnished with fresh herbs and a drizzle of oil oil, and more pretty salt. It makes a great first course, or amuse bouche, or small side dish.
After the long, excellent, fancy dinner the night before, and a long, excellent, exhausting day at SeaWorld, and a the promise of a long, maybe not-so-excellent night in the hotel alone because–at least for the day–I had become a ComicCon widow, I had no inclination to take the kids out for dinner by myself. I suppose I might have mentioned Room Service, or maybe Ella had read the In-Room menu, and rather than taking the elevator down 3 floors to the restaurant, I relented. The kids had a long, warm bath and soaked off the grime of the day, and by the time they emerged, pajama clad and sweet-smelling, the food had arrived replete with silver plate covers. We made some ceremony of setting up our little table, uncovering the food, and we feasted in our pajamas. The food was really excellent, including a Grilled Shrimp Cocktail with Bloody Mary Cocktail sauce, that was good enough to drink. (I refrained and had a really great local brew instead.)
Ella and Finn had burgers (no surprise there); I had a grilled cuban
sandwich. The kids were gleeful. We were all relaxed and we dug into
our food eagerly . The meal was the Antidote to Fine Dining, and in
its own way, every bit as good.
The Moral: sometimes it’s best just to give into the children’s begging, your own fatigue, and take the easy way out.
It was a hot day. We’d been exploring the Storm King Art Center by foot and by tram; we had picnicked and sculpted and now it was time to refill our water bottles and drive home. We could see, near the water dispenser, a vending machine with ice creams. OK, we told the boys, you can each choose an ice cream.
Tragedy. The vending machine was broken.
Plan B: We’ll stop for ice cream on the way home, we promised. The boys were skeptical, hungry and tired. I wracked my brain, thinking of all the fast food joints we’d passed on the way, but couldn’t remember seeing a single decent ice cream place. We needed the Red Rooster. We got in the car and drove, fingers crossed.
And then I saw the sign: Rita’s Ice Custard Happiness. Perfect!
I have to admit, it wasn’t immediately happiness. This:
grand as it is, was a little overwhelming at first, and there were tears from one boy before there was happiness. But I made the supreme maternal sacrifice and ordered one of the two things he wanted (the lemonade ice custard, which I have to say was excellent, with chewy bits of lemon zest), and then we all felt like this:
This is not what you should do when you plan to take the kids to a fine dining establishment: Make them drive 4 1/2 hours. Not feed them lunch. Check into a hotel and unpack while they run a little wild. Drive to Said Fine Dining establishment without a reservation, nor even any clear idea about where you will be eating that night, even though all four of you are very hungry for a Real Meal and tired and already more than a little road-fatigued.
Nevertheless, after checking-in and unpacking and putting on clean and reasonably nice clothes, the family (ok, Kory and I) decided to drive to the Hotel del Coronado for dinner. It was early–around 5 pm–and the beautiful old hotel was nearby, and we knew that there would be several food options once we arrived, but we really didn’t plan ahead aside from frantically scanning menus on my new iPhone on the 20 minute drive over. For some reason, my husband and I became fixated on eating at 1500 Ocean because the menu looked so nice and we were tired and just wanted a good meal. I know this is not what most normal, sane parents think when confronting dinner at the end of a long day of traveling: gee, let’s take our kids to the fanciest place we can find, so we grown ups can have a really good meal! And we don’t, usually. But, we were so far into vacation mode, and the kids had on cute-enough, clean clothes, so we did.
The Coranado is reputedly haunted, which story the kids loved, so we explored the gorgeous old lobby a bit while Kory got us a reservation, and then we descended in a magnificently ornate elevator to the restaurant. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a table outside, but we had a really lovely, cozy booth, replete with comfortable and chic back cushions, which Finn and Ella found very fancy.
One of the things which sold us on 1500 Ocean was the excellent kids menu, printed separately on a beautiful card, which made for a really nice souvenir (I’ve been collecting menus for years, but this is Ella’s first one):
There was beautiful bread :
with homemade butter sprinkled with (I think ) black maldon sea salt:
So the kids knew right away that this was someplace Special and Different and Fancy. They’re both at that great age where aesthetics are surprising and gratifying: they happily recognize and appreciate when things are “So beautiful!”
But one of the great things about this elegant place is that they do welcome well-behaved children who are ready to eat. The kids received their drinks in plastic cups with lids, which was funny and anomalous, but also nice.
Things picked up with the amuse bouche of smoked eel with heirloom tomato. While Finn wouldn’t touch it, Ella gobbled down hers, and his, and would have eaten ours, too, if given the chance.
and a shrimp cocktail that doesn’t seem to be on the menu anymore. It was very good, but had heat, so we kept it for ourselves.
During all this, the special occasion Shirley Temples and Ocean Cava cocktails of brut champagne, blood orange bitters, and rock salt kept us all very, very happy.
The kids both asked for mac-n-cheese, but we convinced them to get one mac-n-cheese and one steak with asparagus and mashed potatoes, which turned out to be a good thing. The server very kindly split the entrees onto 2 plates, so both got some of each.
Finn devoured the macaroni, which was more like a very rich, creamy deliciously fragrant pasta, and Ella, the carnivore, turned her nose up at pasta, but couldn’t get enough of the filet, which was delicious and perfectly cooked, even though the low light and the iPhone picture makes it look like a lump of charcoal. In real life, it was very pink and very tender.
and Kory had Kurabota Pork Tenderloin, which was more defined and pretty than this picture allows, and also delicious:
We splurged on dessert, too, including the Almond Brown Butter Cake, Cookies and cream, and Chocolate Chipotle cake, which had a lot of residual heat (but was really fun and excellent) and Ella bravely tried.
Through it all, the kids were completely terrific, in spite of their exhaustion. (That pillow was very tempting for Finn once the macaroni-fontina coma began to set in.) I’m certain they wouldn’t have lasted through the tasting menu (which Kory wanted and I vetoed immediately), but their manners, if not impeccable, were certainly very, very good, and they understood exactly what was expected of them in a restaurant. They tried new foods, and (Ella at least) liked almost all of it. They saw food in shapes and patterns they had never thought possible, which is always a fun aesthetic lesson. I think the fact that they understand basic restaurant etiquette, combined with the general Fanciness of the place was the formula that worked for us in spite of everything that could have conspired to make the meal a disaster. We did have to walk Finn outside during one break in courses, but to some extent that defeated the purpose because at a fine dining establishment, they won’t serve your next course until you are seated and ready. But again, both Finn and Ella sort of liked learning that fact, and were pretty amused by the ceremony of it all.
After, we wandered the hotel and its courtyard:
Made sand angels:
and watched the Navy Seals practice night landings on the beach until it got dark:
But the real icing on the cake was that in our wandering, on our way back into the hotel, we saw Hayao Miyazaki, sitting right there, in 1500 Ocean, just as we had (ok, maybe not just as we had) with half a dozen others, around an elegant firepit eating dinner in an elegant all white suit. Reader, it was like seeing Walt Disney. Only better. We told Ella exactly who he was, and her eyes opened wide because she knows and loves several of the Studio Ghibli films. We gawked as much as we politely could, then we spirited the kids away, back to our hotel, and put them safely, well-sated, to bed.
by Caroline
Thirty-seven years ago my family moved back from Japan to the States, to a town eighty miles away from my maternal grandparents, and a tradition was born. Because halfway between my grandparents’ house and the one in which I grew up, in Brewster, New York, stands The Red Rooster, a hamburger and ice cream spot where we have been stopping regularly since 1972.
The Red Rooster is a small white place with a red and white striped façade, its steep roof topped by a giant sculpture of a soft serve vanilla ice cream cone. These days it has acquired some retro appeal; Jane and Michael Stern have reviewed it, and hip New Yorkers make pilgrimages for the Rooster’s fresh burgers and real milk shakes. But when I was a kid, before Route 22 was dotted with MacDonalds and Burger Kings, the Rooster was just a typical burger shack, the only place to stop for miles. There are two or three small tables inside, but they’re always taken up with people perched waiting for their orders; everyone eats at the picnic tables outside, or, in rougher weather, their cars. Friday afternoons would find my dad (my mom would join us later, after work) driving my brother Larry and me from our house in Westchester to my grandparents for the weekend. The Rooster was the halfway point, so we would stop to stretch our legs, use the bathroom and then, if the timing was right, buy hamburgers and root beer floats.
Now, the Rooster marks the halfway point between JFK Airport and the house my parents built for their retirement, a little north of where my grandparents lived. And so just as when I was little, a trip to Grandma and Granddad’s house involves, for my kids, a stop for ice cream. We have to leave home early to make our flight, so Tony and I scoop the kids up out of bed while they’re sleeping, and somehow the chance to eat ice cream in pj’s after 11 hours of travel makes it all the sweeter. They should be eating a proper meal, but sometimes nostalgia and sentiment are stronger than nutritional values.
Made sand angels:
