Blog Posts by Zester Daily

A bumper crop of garden tomatoes calls for inventive recipes to preserve the bounty.By Zester Daily Staff

Most home gardeners have hit that sweet spot on the calendar where it's become hard to keep up with all the produce ripening on the vines.

If you're kitchen counter and bushel baskets are overflowing with too many tomatoes, you may be wondering what you were thinking back in the cold days when you were happily flipping through seed catalogs.

RELATED: Consider who picks the tomatoes you find in the grocery store.

And if you're already tired of salads and tomato sauce, we have a couple easy recipes to help you use up all those juicy tomatoes.

RELATED: The search for the perfect tomato.

Tomato chutney is great when it's fresh and the hot-sweet flavors complement most light summer meals, but you can also can your chutney to enjoy throughout the year.

TOMATO CHUTNEY

Makes about 4 cups

Ingredients
12 large ripe tomatoes
1 (1½-inch) piece fresh ginger
2 jalapeno chiles, or to taste
2 large onions, quartered

Juicy gooseberries ready to go into a summer dessert.By Terra Brockman

The gooseberry has an illustrious history, in literature and in the kitchen. The Normans ate green gooseberry sauce with mackerel, and pigeons were stuffed with gooseberries. For dessert, there were gooseberry pies, tarts, pastries, puddings, jellies, jams and even a gooseberry wine celebrated by the English writer Charles Lamb.

Finding the goose in the gooseberry

There has been a lot of speculation about just where the "goose" in gooseberry comes from. Some sources say they are called gooseberries because they were used in a sauce for roast goose. Others say it is a corruption of the Dutch word Kruisbes or the German Krausbeere - or Crossberry. The species name grossularia means "curl" or "crisped," which probably refers to the leaves, and that may have been corrupted into "gooseberry."

The Oxford English Dictionary, however, says plants so often have names associating them with animals that the inappropriateness or illogic of the pairing does not

Exotic and versatile, coconut is good for countless dishes.By Kathy Hunt

For years I had dismissed coconut as merely the main ingredient in macaroons, cream pies and piña coladas, and what I added to curries to reduce their heat. That it held more cultural importance and culinary pizazz didn't dawn on me until I traveled through Southeast Asia. There I witnessed how essential and versatile this fruit is. It performs so many functions people there refer to it as "the tree of life."

In Vietnam, folks use the hollowed-out shells for bowls, husks for fuel, leaves for thatching and wood for timber. To this day, my stepfather-in-law's sister, who lives in rural South Vietnam, cooks her meals on a stove fired by coconut husks. She cools off on hot days with water tapped from young, green coconuts.

Cooks also use coconut water to tenderize and braise meats. It's especially important in the Indonesian fried chicken specialty Ayam Mbok Berek. Here hunks of chicken marinate and then boil in a mixture of

Lillet Rouge sangria.By Virginie Boone

Craving something a little new in a summer cocktail? Looking for something cool, spicy, sweet? We've got a trio of fun hot weather mixed drinks for you to explore this summer.

If you adore the fragrantly spicy foods of Southeast Asia, you might want to try ginger-infused drinks.

Only able to grow in tropical and subtropical climes, the gnarled ginger root is peppery and mildly sweet and an integral part of Asian cuisines. The French discovered it during their colonization of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and -- much like the British in India with their Pimm's No. 1 Cup (traditionally a blend of gin and ginger ale or lemonade) -- concocted a refreshing combination of ginger and brandy to get through the unfamiliar heat.

That makes a perfect drink for high summer, and there are several brands of ginger liqueur available. One of the most popular is Domaine de Canton, which re-creates the French colonial combination of ginger and brandy in the following

Ripe, juicy currants

By Terra Brockman

I had never eaten a real currant until my sister started growing them. Like nearly every other American of the past 100 years, I thought currants were those mini-raisins in the Sun-Maid box -- the ones called for in recipes for muffins and scones.

But no, those mini-raisiny things are not currants, they're raisins, dried small black grapes grown in Greece, near Corinth. When they began to be imported to the United States in the 1920s, someone saw "Corinth" on the boxes, transcribed it as "currant," and the rest is history. The name stuck, perhaps, because the growing of real currants had been outlawed in the U.S. since 1911, so no one said, "Hey, those aren't currants!" as they surely would have done in Europe.

Our European and Russian customers at the farmers market in Evanston, Ill., tell us that in their towns nearly every house is surrounded by currant bushes. The same was true of the homes of most European colonists, many of whom brought

Sweet panzanella with nectarines and crème fraîche. By Lauren Chattman

Here are two facts: I am a big purchaser of artisanal bread, and artisanal bread is expensive. I am entirely willing to pay $10 for a handcrafted, certified organic loaf that delivers honest flavor, outstanding texture and, preferably, maximum nutrition. But when half of it sits uneaten on the counter for several days, I become anxious. I am entirely too thrifty to throw several dollars' worth of bread in the garbage. So I incorporate stale bread into my cooking until there is nothing left but crumbs.

RELATED: A frugal family tradition -- soda bread.

Sure, I have toasted leftover bread for breakfast, made grilled sandwiches with it for lunch, and made croutons galore for salads and soups. But as a former pastry chef and incurable sugar fiend, I tend to look at bread and think, "How can I turn it into a dessert?"

The obvious answer is bread pudding. But there are quicker and easier ways to turn a wedge of sourdough into something sweet at the end of

Homemade shortcake with strawberries straight from the garden.By David Latt

Fresh fruit and vegetables reign supreme in summer. If you have a home garden and a green thumb, you are harvesting tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini and yellow squash.

We have a small garden limited by the amount of sun that reaches a back yard shaded by overhanging trees. Perfect for us human beings who want relief from summer's oppressive heat, that shade stunts the growth of sun-loving fruits and vegetables.

RELATED: Dig into summer cherries.

Luckily, our next-door neighbors converted the ornamental garden in the front of their house into a full-fledged vegetable garden with rows of tomatoes, squash, herbs, eggplant and corn. At the back of their property, they dug up another area and planted a large strawberry bed.

Last week we were beneficiaries of their largess when they presented us with a basket of produce and, much to our delight, a large bowl of freshly picked strawberries.

RELATED: Combine plums, nectarines and blackberries in one great

Save the shells from your lobster dinner for a great seafood broth.By Clifford A. Wright

Lobsters, crabs and shrimp are crustaceans and are not, strictly speaking, shellfish. They do not have shells, even though we call them that. Their "shells" are properly called carapaces. These hard carapaces have joints for movement and grow with the animal and can be sloughed off. When cooked, crustaceans will turn color -- shrimp from translucent white-bluish-gray to pink or orange and white, and lobsters from blue-black-scarlet to bright orange-red.

Home cooks too often throw away shells -- I'm going to call them shells because carapaces is too cumbersome. It's important not throw them away because they're a resource for the extraction of even more flavor. They're cheap because you've already bought them for their meat, and they make a good foundation for broth.

RELATED: Tips for getting the freshest shellfish.

These shells that we so casually chuck when eating a steamed lobster or shrimp cocktail are rich in flavor. When you make your first