Tomatoes & jalapeños

I have a crazy backlog of fresh tomatoes so am making a menu featuring them. I’m thinking salad with feta and kalamata olives, panzanella, and Marcella Hazan’s pasta with a sauce of raw tomatoes and basil (hot pasta slightly cooks the tomatoes).

I also have a bunch of jalapeños that won’t keep. What can I make with tomatoes and jalapeños other than salsa?

Maybe pickle the jalapeños?

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Maybe gazpacho. Some people add chiles.

Fine dice the chiles and freeze what you can’t use, put the rest in a ziplock in the veg bin of your fridge and add to everything. I like them in scrabled eggs, avocado toast, quickie microwave quesadillas, quiche, almost any pasta dish, polenta or grits, rice, salads, as a topper for soup, chile or (wait for it) cottage cheese.

You can also juice the chiles and use the juice in smoothies, cocktails and as a flavor boost for many sauces.

Whether minced, diced, mashed/smashed, blended, pureed or juice, jalapenos freeze surprisingly well. If you’ve got the space, spread them out on quarter or half sheet pan and put them in the freezer to freeze IQF style, then store and use as needed.

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I put one in the gazpacho and the rest in a merguez and white bean ragoût.

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Where do you get your merguez from? That sounds good

Cream Co.

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You can roast and freeze the jalapenos. You can also add then to number of bread recipes, both leavened or quick. Jalapenos have this lovely grassy flavor that lends itself to so many things. And if worse comes to worse… Pickling them for sandwiches are another traditional use for an over abundance.

–Dommy!

I have insane amounts and varieties of preserved chiles. I was looking for recipes to use a lot of fresh ones.

I remembered wrong, I get the merguez from the Farmstead delivery service.

From the producer:

North African Recipe. Hard to imagine a richer flavor profile. Not spicy, but lots of spice. If you like lamb, you will love these.

These sausages come as a pack of 6 - 8. Approximately 1 lb per pack.

About Sonoma County Meat Company:

SONOMA COUNTY MEAT CO. is located at 35 Sebastopol Avenue, South of Highway 12, West of Highway 101, East of Dutton Ave. We are so thankful that you have voted for us as the Best Butcher Shop in Sonoma County for 5 years in a row: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020!

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Ingredients:

lamb, sea salt, chili, cumin, onion, garlic, coriander, fennel, and black pepper. Packed in lamb casings.

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It might be worth making sambals with the jalapenos. Obviously it’s not the traditional chili but especially in some of the cooked ones the native flavor of the chili doesn’t seem as critical as the contributing spice and texture.

That’s just my extremely limited understanding of sambals so I could be way off base. That said, I did just try this Woks of Life recipe with your typical red, jalapeno-like chilis from Ranch 99 and it seemed pretty spot on for a condiment I’ve been trying to replicate for a long time. The author mentions in the comments that it’s sort of an amalgamation of two sauces he remembers from his childhood so not super traditional but it does use up a lot of chilis and tastes amazing.

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I already have sambal in the fridge, plus a dozen other various kinds of chile condiments.

I used up all the jalapeños and almost all the tomatoes last night.

Tangential question: are you using the word “sambal” singular or plural? Asking because 1) there are so many kinds of sambal it’s hard to imagine one representing all of them and 2) I’d like to edit my reply if “sambals” isn’t grammatically correct.

Yeah, sambal is like salsa, there are countless recipes. I keep Huy Fong Sambal Oelek on hand.