My favorite recipe
I’ve gone through a lot of kitchen phases over the last four years. There was the “are you gonna meal plan, or are you gonna die?” phase, the residual inflexibility of which I’m still trying to shake off. There was the “baking my own bread” phase, which came later for me than the memes would suggest, as I tried to keep Inside interesting while waiting out the long months of summer and fall of 2021 for my second vaccination, only for omicron to emerge six weeks later. There have been intermittent “mole verde” phases, when I sought out complicated, multi-day projects, and more frequent “chicken tinga” phases, when I fell back on the recipes I could make in my sleep (and sometimes basically did).
I’m in a tinga phase now, between juggling book deadlines and brain fog and trying to go outside once in while. But there’s been one recipe I’ve made all the way through every phase, as close to weekly as any human can reasonably sustain: Mark Bittman’s tomato jam.
We had something like this jam on our honeymoon in Portugal in 2017, and we made some halfway successful attempts at recreating it with just tomatoes and sugar when we got home. In our defense, this was before we watched Salt Fat Acid Heat. Bittman’s recipe has all the acid, salt, and spices we were missing but is still simple enough to memorize within a few batches. It’s easy, it’s hands-off, and it makes your house smell great. Think of it as fancy ketchup, and use it accordingly. For me, that’s most often with eggs and toast in the morning. I’m always delighted to eat it and almost always delighted to prepare it. Enjoy!
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p.s. Pro-tip: If you don’t have or want an NYT Cooking subscription, put the recipe link into archive.org. Works well beyond tomato jam!