Fresh Tomato Sauce

My friend Molly (not to be confused with my other friend Molly) is friends with a local farmer. She gets a veggie box every week, which allows farmers to sell their crop directly to a consumer. Molly gets a lot of tomatoes, but she won't eat them raw, and so those tomatoes get passed on to me. I love tomatoes, and the ones in the veggie box are particularly juicy and sweet. I felt I should give this wealth a proper treatment, one that Molly could appreciate. Tonight was my first time making a tomato sauce.

These are the tomatoes. I love the variety: every permutation of size and color is present.

We paired the tomatoes with crimini, shallots, a pepper, garlic, salt, black pepper, bay leaf, and wine. Everything simmered for about three hours, the latter part of which we put in Italian sausage and fresh basil.

The final result: penne with fresh tomato sauce and parmesan cheese. It was amazing. It took preparation and patience, but was not difficult. The pleasure of the fresh ingredients made the process fun. Even with an amateur effort, I felt a lot of pride in a dish that I would normally pour from a jar.

You can do a lot with low-hanging fruit if you try.

(Grilled)^2 Chicken Pizza

So I'm a little embarrassed that I haven't been here in a while. I often post things I'm eating or drinking to my Twitter, even when they deserve a few more words. Truly, thanks to my locale and some good friends, my diet is the best its ever been. Rather than an occasional treat, this blog should be a rolling amuse-bouche. But enough about my navel...

The propane grill has been an amazing success. I've done a few good steaks and tri-tips, and there may be nothing more delicious and fiercely economical than a good beercan chicken. Vegetables and especially fruits yield sweetness like never before. The journey of discovery to grill all the things has led me to last night's dinner: I grilled a pizza.

Pizza:

• Hand-pulled dough
• Barbeque sauce
• Beercan grilled chicken with mesquite-style rub
• Mozzarella
• Green onion
• Cilantro
• Local small-batch tomatoes

It's not as hard as it looks, and instructions are quickly available with a Google search. My dinner date helped me wrangle the dough onto the grill, which is a harrowing first-time experience. I'm actually rather pleased with the "rustic" aesthetic. Everything stuck to itself as one would want, and the grill marks are gorgeous. The crust came out crisp after about ten minutes on a medium heat, though I could have sliced the tomatoes thinner. I enjoyed this "garden" variety, but it would be easy to make the pizza more "meaty" by rolling the chicken in the sauce, and adding yellow onion, garlic, and bacon. Now that I know how it works, I will certainly do this again. A traditional Italian style with sausage would be lovely.

The beer is a brown ale from San Diego. I would send a runner to get more of it...

Where do I take a pizza-tossing workshop?