I know it’s unbecoming, but I’ve been fraught with jealousy lately. It struck when my friend Pippa sent photos of her tomato plant sprouting six — no wait, eight! — young fruits as green as my envy. It tightened its grip when my pal Stephen texted a picture of thickly sliced tomatoes arranged on a wire rack, awaiting their tomato pie fate. “From my mom’s garden,” he wrote.
But it nearly consumed me when I asked my colleague Shanice Bland about her weekend as we waited for the elevator. She’d spent it tending to her garden, which is budding with cherry tomatoes and shishitos and herbs and oh, by the way, the cucumbers are about to come in! Brag.
I’d do anything for a garden of my own, for a chance to pull fruit from the vine and mint from the stem and to toss my haul into Noor Murad’s tomato and bulgur salad with herbs. (Anything but move from my fourth-floor, one-bedroom apartment, I suppose.) This could still be my salad of the summer, quick and subtly sweet-tart with a bit of maple syrup and pomegranate molasses, after a trip to the store.
Tomato and Bulgur Salad With Herbs
Here Noor uses one of my favorite techniques: grating tomatoes. Whether it’s piled on toast, bathing frizzled cubes of paneer or softening grains of bulgur, as in Noor’s recipe, a pool of simply seasoned tomato juice and pulp is the sauce of the season. (And be sure to buy fine bulgur, otherwise the grains will be too tough to eat after their soak!)
The fruits of Shanice’s labor, she tells me, are not yet at tomato-salad levels of abundance. I do think she has enough for a serving or two of David Tanis’s marinated cherry tomatoes on toast, an effortless summer snack to finish with her basil that’s flourishing. And when the cucumbers reach picking size, I hope she’ll make Melissa’s bread-and-butter pickles, to stretch her efforts for as long as she can.
But if you’re drowning in cherry tomatoes, either leave them fresh and juicy in Christian Reynoso’s five-star creamy coconut-lime rice with peanuts, or cook them down until they sweeten further in Kayla Hoang’s five-star burst cherry tomato orzotto. Sungolds look especially nice in Christian’s rice, and any tender herbs you have handy, be that dill, cilantro or mint, will complement the dressing well. “This is the best NYT recipe I’ve ever made,” wrote one reader. “This sauce made me weak in the knees,” wrote another. (The dressing, it’s worth noting, calls for sambal oelek. The popular Huy Fong Foods sambal is vegetarian, but some varieties may contain shrimp. Always check the label!)
Or if your cucumbers are thriving, Christian’s six-ingredient Tajín mango cucumber salad or Ali Slagle’s six-ingredient cucumber-avocado salad could be the way. Each is refreshing and crisp, just what we want as the days get hotter. Or let cucumbers, and only cucumbers, shine with Yewande Komolafe’s spicy cucumbers with yogurt, lemon and herbs, a perfect trifecta of creamy, fiery and tangy.
If your basil is bursting, you don’t need me to tell you to make pesto. You probably did that already. But I may need to tell you to make Ali’s instant-classic creamy cottage cheese basil pasta, published in April and already one of our most popular recipes of the year. In it, she blends lemon juice and zest, cottage cheese, Parmesan, olive oil, garlic, spinach and basil into an impossibly silky sauce. Don’t rush the food processor. Achieving that texture takes time. And I may be biased, but that’s a really nice shade of green.
And if zucchini is taking over — and isn’t it always zucchini taking over? — Yewande’s fantastic lemon-pepper zucchini pasta with dill will make great use of the summer squash, which acts as a sponge to a lip-smacking miso butter sauce. You wouldn’t know this recipe calls for only a few ingredients and 35 minutes of your time, based on the raves in the comments. And lucky for you, several readers even suggested doubling the zucchini.
You don’t need to do much to the rewards of your summer harvest. Treat them like precious jewels, letting them shine with just a bit of polishing.
Has anyone else noticed that America has gone bananas? Banana flavor has hit cafe menus, snack-aisle shelves and drink fridges with unexpected force. Is it the next pumpkin spice? I had fun editing Luke Fortney on this story, which charts the resurgence of once-polarizing banana. (Banana Laffy Taffy lovers, we’ve been vindicated.)
And while whole bananas are the most-eaten fresh fruit in America, berries are quickly catching up. “In just the last decade, berries have completed the journey from fragile, local, seasonal treat to worldwide refrigerator staple and marketing juggernaut,” Julia Moskin reported this week. You can thank Driscoll’s for that.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
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