Life in Cowtown

On a last SECOND vacation to Cuba for a week. I got talked into it by my mother since the current prices were something in the realm of incredible.  We’re talking LAST SECOND, it’s midnight and I’m packing my bags, and thanking my understanding employer.

Visiting Cuba is always bittersweet for me, as I lived there for three years as a child, and have visited often since. Their tough political situation is always in contrast with the sweet, friendly, educated people that live there. I dearly hope they see real change soon, but am afraid that it will come in the form of McDonald’s arches.

So I’ll be back shortly with photos and stories.  Have fun y’all!

This weekend I braved the heat of the oven that added its special ambience to our south facing overheated house, because I had some tomatoes to cook. Some people sit by the fireplace, I sit by my oven, to each their own I say.  

Heat notwithstanding, summer is a great time to make the recipe below, and it happened to coincide with a huge bag of gorgeous, fragrant ripe tomatoes that had to get eaten, as well as Serious Eats’ Weekend Cook and Tell theme of tomatoes.

I’ve wanted to make this recipe ever since I read this article by Molly W. of Orangette fame, because it sounded delicious, and the reviews were adoring. We eat a great deal of tomatoes year round, typically in a pasta sauce with a hundred variations, and this recipe read like the elegant version of plain simmered tomatoes. Requiring literally five minutes of prep, it took no time to get rolling.

Wash, slice in half, and seed some tomatoes:

Pour a generous quantity of olive oil into a baking dish, line in tomatoes, pour more olive oil, sprinkle oregano and salt. I totally skipped sugar as the tomatoes were at their peak of freshness and were quite sweet themselves.

Bake, flip and bake some more.

About four hours later (I forgot about them), layer in a bowl with minced garlic and parsley. Drool for two hours.

At this point the fragrance was incomparable. It reminded me of grilled tomatoes at my favorite Persian eatery that I adore. Inspired by said Persian memories I made some rice to serve them on, since that’s how I eat them at the restaurant. Baguette and goat cheese would be awesome too, but I was hungry at that point, and needed more substance than toast. I served them over rice, cutting up the tomatoes and mixing in the juices. It was the greatest lunch of all time, and the tomatoes are everything they say and then some. Perfectly chewy, sweet and smoky, pungent with garlic and parsley they were a feast for all senses.

For the record, my SO is not enamored of the softness of baked tomatoes, and said these would make an incredible tomato sauce if they were quickly pureed. Weirdo. But he loved the flavor and ate every bite anyhow, so that tells you something.

Go forth and make Pomodori al Forno while the tomatoes are at their peak!

One major advantage to living in Calgary is the proximity to some of the best skiing in the world. Since I just started skiing a year ago, I’m still discovering the hills here and in BC, and that’s about as fun as winter can get. Yesterday I took a day off work and hit the slopes at Lake Louise.

Louise is a beautiful mountain, huge – with four peaks and an obscene amount of terrain to cover. Their gondola and many chairs move skiers quickly around the mountain and the lines are never long, even at the peak of busy weekends. The scenery is spectacular. One of my favorite things to do is to take the top of the world chair and ski down the back side of the mountain. It’s very quiet there like in a splendid cathedral, and the majestic mountains on all sides swooping down into a large bowl that is so pure and white that it hardly looks possible. It’s hard not to feel awe at the forces that created it, and not to feel insanely lucky at being able to see it with a ride in a chairlift.

Sometimes the skies are overcast, and the bottom of the valley is covered by clouds. The surreal feeling of watching quiet majestic peaks around you rise out of the swirling gray clouds is intoxicating. I literally feel like pinching myself to make sure I’m not dreaming this phenomenal landscape. And when the winters feel too long, and the summer oh so far away – obscured by another foot of snow – I can think back on Louise and feel glad there’s still a few weeks of skiing left.