Or, what I discovered when making a recipe from 1997…
“I can’t find our photos from 1997!!!” ~Me to Peter as I got ready to write this blog post
“All sorrows are less with bread.” ~Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
I am not sure if Don Quixote would have agreed, but I definitely agree with his creator. Bread does indeed make everything better.
I was very happy to see that one of my favorite Spanish foods made the Cook the 40 list! I love bread, I love garlic and I love tomatoes.
I also love Spain, but more on that later.
Cook the 40
Why take on Food & Wine’s best-ever recipes from their forty years in publication? Because if you’ve been paying attention, you know that’s what I’m doing this year!
Besides, I’m hoping that taking on these 40 recipes will also add some fun and new favorite foods to my life. If even half of them end up being tasty, this will be a worthwhile endeavor.
40 Years of Food & Wine
According to the September 2018 anniversary issue of Food & Wine, and editor Hunter Lewis, https://twitter.com/notesfromacook?lang=en, what makes a good recipe is it being delicious, of course, and (I think even more important sometimes) the best recipes “tell a story worth repeating.” Well said, Hunter.
I am not sure what kind of stories these 40 best-ever recipes will tell from my kitchen’s point of view, but I am excited to find out.
Even if those stories have no photos to go along with them… (I’m trying not to cry here!)
The Fourth Recipe
Before I truly do start crying, let me tell you that this next recipe was a no-brainer. I love Spanish tomato bread, and while it was not the first time I made it, I didn’t mind at all, because it’s oh, so delicious!
Also, its main ingredient is bread. Always a winner in my cookbook and well, an excuse to eat good bread is one of my favorite things about living life.
Let’s Get Cooking
This is a very easy recipe. As long as you start with good bread.
To make cookbook author Steven Raichlen’s Catalan Tomato Bread from one of the magazines 1997 editions, you need: country-style bread, garlic cloves (cut in half), very ripe tomatoes (cut in half), Spanish olive oil, coarse sea salt and freshly ground pepper.
Prep is pretty easy as you only need to heat up a grill pan or your oven (to toast the bread), and have your garlic cloves and ripe tomato halves at the ready.
Once you’ve sliced thick pieces of the bread and grilled each slice to a golden brown, you’ll want to rub the cut side of the garlic clove, and then the cut side of the tomato, on one side of each toasted slice. If it gets messy, you’re doing it right.
Then drizzle each slice of bread with the olive oil and top off with the salt and pepper. Simple. Delicious. Perfect.
Note: The first time I made this I thought that just rubbing the cut garlic clove on the toasted bread wouldn’t add enough garlic flavor, but it does. Trust it and go with it. It’s so worth the effort.
Where Was I When This Recipe Was Published?
Believe it or not, I had not had much, if any, Spanish food before 1997. Not on purpose anyway. It was in fact, probably that year or maybe the next year, that I did have Spanish tapas for the first time. Or at least I had them at an official Spanish restaurant in Chicago. Pan con tomate was one of the things I tried, and loved.
If you’re following me along this “Cook the 40” journey, you’ll know that besides cooking each recipe, I am also including where I was the year each recipe was published in the magazine. After all, I have been alive for the last 40 years, so why not include something about me when writing about each recipe and the year it was published: How old was I? Where did I live? What was I cooking? Where did I go that year? After all, this is a blog about me, what I eat and where I go to eat it.
1997: The Year My Life Changed
As Food & Wine was publishing Steven Raichlen’s deliciosa receta de Catalan Tomato Bread, I started the year in Chicago, and ended the year just north of the city in Evanston.
Why Evanston? That’s where Peter lived, and well, 1997 is the year he and I became us. Pretty romantic, huh.
I turned twenty-seven that year, and was, for the first time in my life, in love. Everything about my life as I had known it changed. And pretty quickly, too.
We officially became a couple in early January, spent those first few months really getting to know each other, and it probably won’t come as a surprise that food did play a role in that.
Before me, Peter had mostly been surviving on protein shakes, whole milk, mustard and wheat germ. Actually, those are the only things he had in his refrigerator the first time I visited his condo. It’s an inside joke now. He did eat real food, he just didn’t cook much of it at home.
We ate out a lot in those early days as there were so many cool and good restaurants in his Evanston neighborhood. But, after buying some necessary kitchen utensils for his kitchen, we started cooking more. I made lots of my favorite meals in that small kitchen—which, by the way, had a very powerful oven—and introduced Peter to many a Tex-Mex supper, breakfast tacos, barbacoa, my amazing lasagna and pasta sauce, and eventually BBQ brisket. He had never had beef barbecue before! Crazy yankees.
Those were fun days. Days that sometimes seem like yesterday, but then also seem like many, many years ago. Twenty-two years ago, in fact.
Now, For the Crying…
Sadly, I can’t find any of our photos from 1997. I know I took plenty of photos because—besides being a new couple—we took two road trips together that year. We went to Boston to see my Bruins beat the Montreal Canadiens in March; and in November, we took a road trip from Chicago to Niagara Falls, up to Toronto, through Canada, down to Detroit and then back home to Chicago.
Or back to Evanston. Because by that time, I was living with Peter and that was home.
¡Viva España!
As I mentioned above, I love Spain. I first visited in January 2001, on my first overseas vacation. It was an amazing trip, where I experienced delicious food and wine, with the love of my life. A love that started in 1997, a great year for recipes and romance.
Elda XO
For more information on this receta deliciosa, click here to be taken to the Food & Wine link: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/catalan-tomato-bread
Buen provecho!
P.S. More on Spain? You bet! Because when the time comes to make that recipe from 2001, I have tons of photos from our first trip to Spain that I’ll be able to share. Thank God I haven’t lost those…
