WRINKLED TOMATOES
If a wrinkled tomato is healthy on the inside - bright red and firm – there’s not only great flavor there, but plenty of anti-oxidant Lypocen waiting in the pulp. Lypocen helps guard against macular degeneration, heart disease … and men, you’ll appreciate this, prostrate cancer. In fact, doctors say that cooking tomatoes in oil increases concentrations of Lycopen almost three-fold, along with nice percentages of vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium and potassium. Definitely too tasty a pill to squander.
Level 1
Tomato Pesto
from Generoso Bahena of Chilpancingo, Chicago
Generoso prefers mashing soft tomatoes into a pesto. After roasting the tomatoes in a 600 degree oven until almost charcoaled, the skins peel off the fruit easily. He discards the peels and keeping the roasted pulp, Generoso adds ground cloves, salt, marjoram, and thyme to taste. Next, he rolls the pulp mixture into little balls for freezing. When ready for condensed, ready-to-go tomato stock, all he needs to do is remove a few pesto balls from the freezer, re-mash them and add a few cups of chicken stock for an intensely flavored tomato bouillon. His tomato pesto also is a really slick way to jazz up canned beef consommé.
Cooking tip: The fastest way to chop up everything together and also gets the various flavors blended is to place all the ingredients in the bowl of a mini-chopper and pulse for a few seconds – something much harder to achieve by hand.
