Joshua Napoli

1. Plum tomatoes, each cut in half and placed face down on a plate. Make a puddle of balsamic vinegar, and put them in the oven at 300 degrees for 12 minutes. Or use grape tomatoes cooked for 8 minutes. We used more than a quart of tomatoes for the two of us as the main course.
2. Use a box of baby spinach placed on two very large plates. It’s better if you break off all of the stems on the leaves. Definitely take off the stems if you use traditional (mature) spinach. Put the warmed tomatoes on top of the spinach, and then drip the warm balsamic vinegar all over the plates. Put the spinach plates in the oven for another 5 minutes.
3. Once the spinach is warmed up, take it out of the oven and pour olive oil all over it.
4. Slice up some soft goat cheese, and put it on top of the warm spinach and tomatoes. Return the plates to the oven for another 4 minutes to warm up the cheese.
5. Serve while the plates are still dangerously hot!

Here in Boston, we had really wonderful weather this weekend (and it also seemed to be nice weather through my sampling of the Midwest on Friday.) To take advantage of it, we made our warm tomato dinner on Sunday night, and took it outside to eat. We used a mix of plum tomatoes and home-grown grape tomatoes. The grape tomatoes were quite sweet and intensely flavored. We drank our sparkling Northern Spy cider (from Bellweather Hard Cider on Seneca Lake in New York.) I think it might have been better if we browned some almonds in the olive oil, but Julie would have liked less oil. The cider tasted nice and sweet with the salad, but it wasn’t especially flavorful.

After dinner we went downstairs and made a fire in our outdoor fireplace. The Restoration Hardware fireplace was obviously designed for form, not function. Despite a nice breeze, Julie had to continuously blow air into the fire to keep it going.

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