Weekend cooking project: all about green tomatoes

Use green tomatoes to make a galette, a pesto, and fry them to make a frittata.

Sep 10, 2021

∙ Paid

As every year, these last days of summer are bittersweet. If, on one side, I can’t wait for Autumn to come, especially for the cooler temperatures and the colours that will tinge the countryside of the most beautiful flaming orange, red, and burnt maroon, on the other side I’m already starting to miss Summer, its fruit and vegetables, and that sense of freedom given by its long days.

I can totally relate to what I wrote two years ago in this post.

With my feet soaked in a cold, end of season clear water, my fingers tucked in the sand, I decided that I would have enjoyed these last days that remain of summer. I began to wonder if I had eaten enough watermelon, if I had spent enough hours outdoors, dining out with my family under the olive trees. Had I paid enough attention to the singing of crickets in the evening, or of the cicadas in the afternoon?
Have I filled my eyes with enough gold and sunflowers before the countryside changes its outfit in the autumn colour? Is all this fresh basil enough? Will I miss the gesture of inhaling deeply its balsamic aroma every time I pick a few leaves? Will the figs I stole from the tree in the garden be sufficient until next summer? How many ripe tomatoes did I harvest?
Here they come, those mixed feelings of nostalgia and expectation, the same that I felt when I would go back to school. To silence them, I went to the vegetable garden and picked up those green tomatoes that at the end of the season are struggling to ripen on the fragile branches.

So today’s newsletter is all about green tomatoes.

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Pasta with green tomato pesto

You make it while the pasta is cooking, using those green tomatoes from your garden that just don’t want to get ripe. If you don’t have a vegetable garden, go to the market: among the ripe ones, now you can spot the green tomatoes, and it is often the farmers themselves who will tell you the best recipes to use them. Listen to them, that’s how I add new recipes to my repertoire!

Find the recipe for the green tomato pesto on the blog.

Fried green tomato frittata

We do not cook this frittata often in my family, but it used to be a staple when my grandma was a child. You start with firm, tart green tomatoes, you fry them to bring out their hidden sweetness, then bind everything together with a couple of eggs.

Find the recipe for the fried green tomato frittata on the blog.

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What you missed: Sweet Swiss chard tart, Mozzarella in carrozza, Biancomangiare alle pesche, Salento and Matera, our foodie guide, and Sicilian swordfish.

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3 years ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · Giulia Scarpaleggia

Yes, I want to join you!

Green tomato galette

This is a quick pastry dough, my favourite for savoury pies. You can make it in five minutes, and it has only four very common ingredients, which are usually in all the pantries. Moreover, it puffs up while baking almost by magic.

I made a galette, a pie that does not need a mould, simple and satisfying, and I filled it with fresh goat cheese, green tomatoes, basil leaves and pine nuts.