Zan Davies: Introducing the Storey Cooks Book Club (and Green Tomatoes on Toast)

Welcome to the start of something new: the Storey Cooks Book Club. There are so many cooks here in the Storey offices we decided it would be fun to spend some time with our cookbooks and our colleagues. 

Each month we’ll be featuring a cookbook from our Storey library and sharing a few recipes, tips, and photos through our blog. At the end of the month, we’ll gather together to enjoy the food we’ve made from the book and we’ll share the evening with you via social media.

Since we know we’re not alone in our love of talking about the food, we hope you, fellow cooks, will cook along with us for a chance to win a copy of the featured book. Learn more about this contest, and our featured book, after the jump.


Cook with us...and win!
Our first featured book, Tomato: A Fresh-from-the-Vine Cookbook, is filled with the delights of summer’s favorite home-grown treasure. These 150 recipes make it easy to enjoy that bumper crop or irresistible farmers’ market buy for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. We tested three recipes from the book that we’ll be sharing with you over the next week.

If you love tomatoes — admiring, cooking with, and eating them — we hope you’ll not only make these recipes with us, but that you’ll share photos of your dishes in progress, your beautiful ingredients, and the finished results on Instagram. The best part? When you share your photos on Instagram, you’re entered to win a copy of the featured book!

Here’s how to participate:

1. Take a tomato-themed photo (your best tomato glamour shots, photos of the recipes we share, or your own favorite tomato dishes) and post it to your Instagram account.
2. Include the hashtags #storeycooks and #tomato when you upload your picture. You must include both hashtags to be eligible to win. There’s no limit to the number of times you can enter, so show us your tomato love!
3. Post your photo before midnight on August 31, 2014.

We’ll choose one winner at random to win a copy of Tomato: A Fresh-from-the-Vine Cookbook and a Storey pint glass thrown in for good measure. 

See full contest details.

We can’t wait to make delicious food with you! Without further ado, here’s the first featured recipe: Green Tomatoes on Toast.

Zan’s Green Tomatoes on Toast

I don’t know where to get green tomatoes aside from homegrown. I only have one plant (a gorgeous sun gold), so I had to harvest the biggest greenies for Green Tomatoes on Toast. I admit I played with this recipe a bit. With a bigger tomato, it would be easy to skin, but I left the skins on and planned to cook them longer. What that meant, though, was that they didn’t melt and turn into a dip, but stayed firm. The flavor was unexpected, more like tomatillos than tomatoes and somehow the black pepper took on more heat. It was like biting into a little burst of salsa verde. I had some fresh-made flatbread from the farmer’s market I heated in the pan while I cooked the tomatoes. The soft warm bread was a nice vehicle for the tomatoes. If I come across some larger green tomatoes (hint, hint, to the Storey tomato-growing gang) I will try this recipe again. Those flavors in a dip would be phenomenal on toast or with tortilla chips. — Zan Davies, Director of Marketing and Publicity

Green Tomatoes on Toast

Serves 4

Ingredients:

2 pounds green (unripened) tomatoes, peeled and thickly sliced

salt

¼ cup cream or 3 tablespoons butter

freshly ground black pepper

4 slices thick bread, toasted and hot

Directions:

1. Put the tomatoes in a medium saucepan and sprinkle with salt. Cover and cook over low heat until the juices have run a little, then raise the heat slightly and cook for 7 to 8 minutes long, until the tomatoes are soft.
2. Stir in the cream. If using butter, cut it into small pieces and stir them into the hot tomatoes. Season generously with pepper and pour over the toast. Serve immediately.

Recipe excerpted from Tomato: A Fresh-from-the-Vine Cookbook © 2010, 2004 by Lawrence Davis-Hollander. All rights reserved.