Feed Your People: Harvest Season
Photo by Molly DeCoudreaux
Dearest Friends,
As a food lover, baker, and cook, I love the months of August and September, when farmers markets and backyard gardens explode with ripe tomatoes and zucchini, when trees are laden with peaches and plums in peak flavor. It’s a season of abundance that invites us to prepare a feast to share with family, friends, and neighbors.
If ever there was a time to FEED YOUR PEOPLE, this is the moment. To help cook for you and yours, we’ve gathered a few of our favorite recipes: from Phyllis Grant’s incredible cherry tomato tart to Nik Sharma’s rich, creamy mango, coconut, and star anise ice cream. At this time of abundant harvest, our thoughts also turn to feeding the world. We’re inspired by all incredible organizations, and are donating to Food Forward, Food Runners, and World Central Kitchen, among others. Let’s feed each other.
With so much love,
Leslie
Cherry Tomato Tart with Anchovies and Garlic Confit with Phyllis Grant
Photo by Molly DeCoudreaux
We love savoring summer’s of fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes, with Phyllis Grant’s recipe for cherry tomato tart with anchovies and garlic confit. The tart is built around fresh cherry tomatoes, simmered with thyme and salt until they’re just shy of bursting. Phyllis loves to complement the tomatoes’ sweetness with the salty crunch of anchovies and the sharpness of garlic confit, but you can easily swap in other favorite ingredients, such as roasted corn, pancetta, or prosciutto. In any case, you’re guaranteed a tart that tastes as sweet as the end of summer. Then sit down and savor Phyllis’s gorgeous memoir-with-recipes, Everything Is Under Control. It will make you laugh and cry! We LOVED this beautiful book!
Find the recipe here.
Senegalese Grilled Chicken with Lime-Onion Sauce (Yassa Ginaar) with Pierre Thiam
Photo by Molly DeCoudreaux
In chef Pierre Thiam’s native Senegal, the generous spirit of teranga is a key component of life. At mealtimes, families will leave an extra space so that anyone visiting, whether guest or stranger, can be invited to join the circle. Pierre has made teranga the centerpiece of his career, sharing Senegalese food—and recipes—with people worldwide, at his restaurants in New York City, Lagos, and Dakar, and in the pages of his cookbooks, such as Senegal: Modern Senegalese Recipes from the Source to the Bowl. Share the flavors of Senegal with your people in the form of a dish that’s perfectly well-suited to a late summer kickback: Pierre’s Senegalese grilled chicken with lime-onion sauce (yassa ginaar), a complex dish that’s especially delicious now, during peak habanero chile season.
Find the recipe here.
Ratatouille with Melissa Perello
Photo by Molly DeCoudreaux
Everyone with an edible garden knows the season well. Sometime between late July and late August, the zucchini and tomato plants start putting out more fresh produce than you could possibly know what to do with. (Incidentally, this time period spawned one of our favorite food holidays, National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day, on August 8.) One delicious way to savor the flavors of the sudden abundance? In the form of ratatouille, a Provencal dish featuring stewed eggplants and zucchini in a tomato-based sauce. Come late summer, chef Melissa Perello, who earned Michelin stars at her San Francisco eateries Frances and Octavia, loves to whip up a big batch of the dish, redolent with basil, crushed red pepper, and ground fennel. Follow her lead, then revel in the taste of late-summer produce at its peak.
Find the recipe here.
Call-It-What-You-Will Cobb Salad with Cathy Barrow
Photo by Molly DeCoudreaux
Another beautiful way to channel the seasonal abundance into a feast for a crowd? Make the salad to end all salads. Cathy Barrow, a food writer and cookbook author who, for over a decade, penned the Washington Post’s “Bring It”—a column focused on recipes for shared meals—knows a thing or two about feeding a crowd. Her Call-It-What-You-Will Cobb Salad marries her favorite parts of three classic salads, with all the components laid out on a platter for guests, in choose-your-own-adventure fashion. Toss together her salad, and savor the best of the Cobb (hard-boiled eggs, avocado, blue cheese), the fattoush (radishes, crunchy croutons), and the Nicoise (potatoes, haricot verts, white wine dressing).
Find the recipe here.
Peach and Almond Galette with Susan Spungen
Photo by Susan Spungen
If summer baking has a mascot, that mascot has to be the galette. The free-form, open-topped tart is more casual, low-maintenance than its cousin, pie, and it’s the ideal vehicle for delivering gorgeous, ripe fruit directly to your mouth. Cookbook author and food stylist Susan Spungen is something of a summer fruit specialist—Susan, who served as the founding food editor for Martha Stewart Living, literally wrote the book on strawberries—and, come stone fruit season, she loves to make peach and almond galette to perfectly showcase the sweet peaches at their peak. Make sure to bake your galette in a cast-iron skillet, as she does, to ensure you don’t lose one drop of toothsome juice.
Find the recipe here.
Mango, Coconut, and Star Anise Ice Cream with Nik Sharma
Photo by Nik Sharma
It might seem a teensy bit early to go back to school, but what if you were going back to school about...ice cream? You can do just that by turning to Nik Sharma’s recipe for mango, coconut, and star anise ice cream. Nik found his way into the kitchen through science—he originally moved from Bombay, India, to the US to study molecular genetics—and his scientific precision shines through as clearly in all the work he does, from the columns he penned for the San Francisco Chronicle to his recipes in his acclaimed new cookbook, The Flavor Equation, to, yes, this humble (yet delicious) ice cream recipe. Craft a batch of your own, and marvel at the way the spiciness of the star anise plays off the sweetness of the mango, and the way the crunch of the toasted coconut completes the creamy, dreamy ensemble. See? Going back to school has its (sweet) rewards.
Find the recipe here.
For more delicious recipe ideas to make the most of harvest season, check out Feed Your People, Susan Spungen’s Open Kitchen: Inspired Food for Casual Gatherings, and Nik Sharma’s The Flavor Equation.