shrub season

on beverages and bounty

As if the winds were blowing the phrase tomato month……TOMATO MONTH!…… Brette hosted a tomato sandwich party at her apartment the other week. Each of us ate a few pounds of tomatoes over thick slices of toasted bread, smeared with mayo or the shockingly delicious gotham greens pesto that screamed green from a little bowl, adorned with mozzarella or bacon or lettuce, sprinkled with salt, washed down with salad and wine. I was so happy, I was going insane, each little bite I assembled for myself was better than the last, I love sitting at Brette’s table. It’s important, I’ve learned, to have a friend who is an excellent host who also lives in close proximity to the Union Square Greenmarket.

not to brag but i made the big blue bowl AND the tomato platter

We’re deep in the season of abundance, whether or not we feel ready to handle it. My friend Ariél recently called this summer feral, and I can’t stop thinking how right she was. Strange and exciting social energies are simmering, parties appear out of the woodwork, there’s a new club in maspeth that serves natural wine and has wall to wall carpeting on the dance floor? I can’t stop taking the train to the beach. And every two weeks I pick up a huge bag of vegetables, carted downstate by my wonderful CSA, and wash and decant and shove it, leaf by leaf, scape by scape, into the fridge.

It’s the time of year when I cede control of my kitchen to the whims of these deliveries, letting go of the stranglehold I often have on meal planning. As I’ve written before, I’ll often blanch and freeze half my greens, a gift to a future hungry self. I’m making a lot of salad dressing, toting little jars of it to the studio with paper towel-lined ziplocs full of salad greens. I recently realized that a tablespoon or two of thinly sliced garlic scapes and another heap of chopped capers are an excellent addition to your run-of-the-mill mustard vinaigrette. Anyways, we can only handle so much garlic scape pesto; on the fourth of July, Cale used his to great effect in potato salad, an idea I have since stored in the walk-in fridge of my brain. I’ve been using mine as a hidden layer in avocado toast, and just today, used the last of a fresh batch as the base for a salad dressing.

I’ve been taking great joy in the half-hour of processing I have to do when I bring home all this green stuff. Carrots get rinsed and tossed in the crisper drawer, salad greens get rinsed a few times and salad-spun, then stored in the spinner because it’s the best way to keep them from wilting. Radishes and beets get guillotined off of their leafy tops. The other week I blanched radish greens, then beet greens in the same pot, then boiled beets in the same pot, then used that heart-purple liquid to cook some lentils, this is what we learn from Tamar Adler, an everlasting pot of water bubbling with efficiency. Beet greens went in the freezer, radish greens sat atop a smear of pesto and below a boiled egg for lunch. And a quart of cherries, blushing pink, got smashed and pitted and turned to shrub.

Shrub—a drinking vinegar, basically—has been on my mind for months. It is an ideal little jar of stuff to have on hand in the summer, when you want something refreshing to drink that’s more exciting than, like, a packet of liquid IV dumped into ice water. It’s tart and sweet and usually fruity, with enough body to build a cocktail or mocktail around. And it absolves you of keeping too many fancy mixers on-hand.

I discovered the potential of a shrub last summer, when a few of us were in Miami for a wedding, killing time at our friend Emily’s apartment in South Beach. Emily always has a cute little bottle of mixer in her fridge—last year it was a bottle of Yucatan Honey Shrub, and we made it into cocktails with tequila and seltzer and little else, and it felt just as full of flavor and fruity body as a $12 cocktail at the bar.

What I’m saying is this: if you, like me, enjoy cocktails but hate having to buy like three $40 bottles of something to make one, a shrub is your solution. And it’s also an excellent way to put up summer fruit.

That shrub was finally ready this week—I made it off of this recipe and have been guzzling it sloshed into seltzer and highballs, but dreamed of a stronger cherry fruity punch in the face. Estelle has recently made Christina Chaey’s berry shrub and Christina Chaey’s rhubarb shrub and raved about both, so I’ll be making the former next week. I should have known that Chaey was the woman to trust.

I’ve also been dreaming of a tomato shrub, since we are after all calling this “Tomato Month”, and made a very satisfying riff on this Emily Vikre recipe. I brought it to Cale and Kyle’s Fourth of July party to play around with it, and we learned that 1) it’s VERY good mixed with equal parts beer and a splash of lime and hot sauce for a michelada, and 2) it’s VERY good mixed with soda water and vodka. As Emily suggests, I’m sure a splash of Worcestershire sauce would be a welcome addition as well.

tomato shrub before straining <3

Tomato Shrub

lightly adapted from Emily Vikre via Food52

Makes 2 cups, easily doubles

1 pound fresh tomatoes, chopped
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon whole coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon whole fennel seeds
1 1/2 tablespoons whole peppercorns
1/2 tablespoon aleppo pepper (or 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes)
A shake of celery salt (optional)
1 pinch salt (plus more to taste)
1/2 cup white wine vinegar
Worcestershire or hot sauce, to taste (optional)

Combine the tomatoes, sugar, spices, and salt in a heavy bottomed pot. Cover and bring to a simmer. Remove from the heat and stir in the vinegar, then cover and allow to sit in the fridge overnight. Strain the pulp and spices out and reserve the liquid. (If you fish out the spices, you can use the pulp as a kind of tomato jam, if you don't mind tomato peels and seeds). Adjust the seasoning to your tastes: You can add Worcestershire to make it more savory or even stir in more sugar to take it in a sweeter direction for non-Bloody Mary type cocktails.

The shrub will keep sealed in the refrigerator for a month or more, and will mellow over time. Shake an ounce or two of shrub with vodka, aquavit, or tequila strain over ice and garnish with Bloody Mary garnishes for a tangy take on a Bloody Mary. Or top some of the syrup with a pilsner-style beer for a variation on a Michelada. You can even mix it with twice as much olive oil for a tomato-y vinaigrette.