
No recipe here.
Just the patience to wait a whole day as the massive tomatoes sat unclaimed on the table in our staff room.
Those babies would not go to waste. I owed it to them. I pounced.
On most cool wet Friday afternoons, I’m more than willing to camp out in the living room with fresh Italian roast and a treat [most recently, thanks to my wife, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Semolina Lemon Syrup Cakes].
But these tomatoes called for quick action.
Standard ingredients in the salsa on the right…onion, garlic, chili powder, pepper, salt, cilantro, cider vinegar, sugar. I left out jalapenos.
The salsa on the left called for experimentation. I added sumac, a favored spice in Middle Eastern/Turkish dishes, for a lemony touch, a tablespoon of sweetened black vinegar to join the usual apple cider vinegar, and some smoked salt.
I can’t deliver a fair verdict on the flavors until I’ve let the ingredients meld, but once again, when the culinary gods call, my writing takes a back seat.