Hello friends! Please say hi to Rachael, who’ve I’ve been mentoring in the blog-world as a Steamy Kitchen intern.

She’s a kick-ass gyoza ninja and I’ve asked her to write up her super-secret recipe for these savory pan-fried Japanese style dumplings.

Rachael lived in Japan for a number of years and here’s her story and a step by step photo tutorial on how to make Gyoza.

xoxo Jaden

How did a girl who was born in the Rocky Mountains and raised in California and who graduated with French and Law degrees end up writing a food blog called La Fuji Mama and striving to perfect her gyoza recipe?  The story starts seven and a half years ago when I married a man who had lived and studied in Japan.  Six months into our marriage, we moved to Japan, a place completely foreign to me.  Before my marriage, I had traveled all over Europe and lived in Paris, but I had never imagined that I would ever live in Asia.  But there I was, living on the outskirts of Yokohama in a tiny little 400-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood devoid of any other foreigners.

My kitchen consisted of a large sink, a gas range with two burners and a “fish fryer” beneath the burners (like a little mini broiler), a refrigerator that was considerably shorter than I was, a toaster oven, and two cupboards. I spent my free time exploring, eating, watching and listening, and loving each moment more than the last.  After almost a year, we returned to the States.  Three years later, my husband’s company asked him to transfer to Tokyo, which he happily agreed to.  I soon found myself living in Japan for the second time, this time in downtown Tokyo, in a slightly larger 950-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment, with a slightly larger kitchen, and a spectacular view of Mt. Fuji.

I quickly settled into life, feeling much more comfortable the second time around, and trying to embrace the experience.  Our ties to Japan were further strengthened by the birth of our first child in a Japanese hospital.  A piece of my heart will always be in Tokyo because of that experience.

Our move back to the US a year ago was a difficult one, but we try to keep the “homesickness” for Japan at bay with trips to Mitsuwa (our nearest Japanese grocery store) and lots of home cooked Japanese meals.

My first foray into Japanese home cooking started a few weeks after we moved to Japan the first time.  One of my neighbors, a woman named Miki, periodically knocked on my door to ask if I wanted to “cook and talk.”   I looked forward to those knocks – they meant that I got to accompany her to her apartment and spend an hour with her, helping her to both cook a meal and practice her English.  It was in her kitchen that I stuffed and pleated my first gyoza.

Miki made it look easy–her hands rhythmically pleating the top layer of the gyoza wrapper and simultaneously pinching it against the smooth bottom layer as she went–finishing each gyoza within moments of having started it.  My first gyoza took me forever to complete, looked sloppy, and didn’t hold together well when cooked.  But with a few pointers from Miki, my gyoza quickly started to look more as they should (although I still can’t stuff and pleat a gyoza as fast as she could).

Over the last seven years I’ve tweaked the gyoza recipe I learned from Miki, adjusting the amounts of ingredients here and there to suit our palates, and adding a couple of ingredients used by other wonderful Japanese cooks I’ve met along the way.  The recipe I’m going to share with you today is that recipe in its latest form (though ask me again in a few months and it will probably already be slightly different).

My most recent adjustment to the gyoza recipe is in the technique I use when mixing the filling.  In Elizabeth Andoh’s cookbook, Washoku, she describes a method that helps tenderize the meat and helps hold the filling together.  She explains that it’s “a bit like baseball practice” because you are gathering the filling into a ball and throwing it back into the bowl repeatedly. The bonus to the technique is that you get to play with your food.

How to make Gyoza

Gyoza are really easy to make.  Just mince, grate, and measure out your ingredients as called for,

and then mix the gyoza ingredients together in a bowl using your hands. 

Yep, you’ve gotta get your hands dirty to make these!  Next you’ll use Elizabeth Andoh’s “baseball practice” technique.  Scoop up the mixture into a ball with your hands and throw it back with some force into the bowl. Repeat this several times to tenderize the meat and help the mixture stick together.  Now it’s time to form your gyoza.  Put a bit of the meat mixture in the center of a wrapper, get your fingertip wet and then trace a line around half of the wrapper.

Then you fold the wrapper in half over the filling,

and pinch it in the center.

Now comes the fun part–the pleating! Holding the wrapper in that middle spot that you just pinched with your left hand, make a pleat in the top part of the wrapper, pinching it against the flat edge of the wrapper at the back.

Holding the filled half-circle in the left hand, pleat the top of the wrapper from the middle out, pressing it to the flat edge of the wrapper at the back (only the front edge will be pleated–the back edge stays flat).  Proceed to make two or three more pleats to the right of the first pleat.

Then switch sides and pleat the other side (to the left of the pinched middle).

Set aside the stuffed dumpling with the pleated-wrapper edge up.

Repeat the process until all of your wrappers have been filled and pleated.  It’s always nice to have a partner in crime for this part because it goes a lot quicker.

Now you can either cover the gyoza with some plastic wrap and put them in the fridge for a couple of hours until you’re ready to cook them (or you could freeze them to keep them for longer) or you can cook them right away.  The gyoza are first fried on their flat side (pleats up),

until the bottom is nice and brown.

Then, water is added and the pan sealed with a lid

until the upper part of the gyoza is steamed.

Then you serve them browned side up with a dipping sauce made from soy sauce, rice vinegar, and a few drops of chili oil.

If you can’t find round gyoza wrappers, you can always use square wonton wrappers and cut them into circles using a large biscuit cutter.

Or you can really go all out and make your own wrappers.

These gyoza have a hint of heat from the addition of crushed red chili pepper.  They also contain aka miso paste (red/dark miso paste), which has a wonderful pungent salty flavor.  If you cannot find aka miso paste, you can either leave it out altogether, or subsitute shiro miso paste (white miso paste).  If you leave the miso out, increase the salt by 1/2 teaspoon.  If you substitute shiro miso paste, leave out the sugar and increase the salt by 1/4 teaspoon.

The world has gone bacon crazy, and unfortunately it has nothing to do with the food item actually made from pork belly. I’m talking about products sold in tubes, squeeze bottles, jars, cans and tablets, all flashing the word “Bacon!” as it’s only selling point and not an ounce of real pork in its ingredients. Apparently, that one word is so powerful, the products are still flying off the shelves!

I’ve seen “bakon” vodka (Twitter member @MarcSeattle said it tastes like “bac-os mixed with motor oil”), zero-calorie bacon flavor spray packaged in a hairspray-like bottle by celebrity chef David Burke, cardboard bacon air freshener that you can dangle from your rearview mirror and even bacon-flavored lip balm. When did pretending to staple two strips of fatty pig to lips become sexy?

I recently visited a friend who happens to be a vegetarian. Before I could even put my purse down and exchange pleasantries, she excitedly thrust a jar at me, “This is my newest obsession…bacon flavored mayonnaise…Baconnaise! Isn’t it genius!?” Though I have to admit, it’s not that bad in a sandwich. And I get the excitement, especially for those who are omnivores-turned-vegetarians but miss the whole meat flavor thing.

For me, I’d rather have the real deal. Spraying “bacon” flavoring on my eggs in the morning just seems so pathetic! And there’s no better way to enjoy steak than to slather it with a butter made of real bacon and real blue cheese!

Step-by-Step: Bacon and Blue Cheese Butter

First thing you’ve gotta do is cook your bacon and then mince it up in teeny tiny pieces. You should also crumble your blue cheese if it’s not crumbled already.

Soften your butter to room temperature — I use unsalted butter because the bacon and blue cheese are already salty. Smash, smush and mix with a fork.

Grab a large piece of parchment paper and plop down your bacon near the edge.

Now time to dust off your cigar-rolling/cigarette rolling or whatever rolling skills you have and roll the butter tight in the parchment paper, smoothing and evening out the butter so that it becomes a nice, tight, even log about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Though, really, size doesn’t matter in this case. If you want a bigger butter log, go for it. But make sure you’re rolling and smoothing tight because you don’t want air bubbles or lumps.

Twist the ends tight (to compact butter even more). Refrigerate until firm, an hour should do the trick …or if you run out of time, stick it in the freezer for 20 minutes.

Ladies and gent…may I present to you umami-ness….Bacon and Blue Cheese Butter. Open that baby up and slice into 1/2-inch coins. You can use this butter on vegetables, fish, baked potatoes….ooooh….baked potatoes….

….or top a hot, just-taken-off-the-grill steak with a slab of this precious Bacon and Blue Cheese Butter.

I’ve never been a fan of scones until I met Kathy Winkler, the owner of a local cooking school that I used to teach at. One day, I walked in, arms full of ingredients to prep for a class I was teaching that evening and Kathy handed me blueberry scone that just came out of the oven. I almost didn’t try it, because the scones I knew were dry, dense, flavor-less and so hard you could use it as pumice stone.

So I stood there in the studio kitchen, wondering where I could hide this scone without Kathy seeing, and then she looked at me and said, “Try it! It’s still warm from the oven!”

Well, dang it. If I threw it out now, she’d notice. In fact, even if I was sly and just dropped it in the trash can, it would probably have clunked so loudly like a rock that she’s sure to hear. I grabbed a big glass of water as my chaser and broke into it with my hands.

Soft. Moist. Warm.

Then I took a bit. Ohhhhhh….moist, rich, delicate.

The moist, rich and delicate qualities has everything to do with mixing the scones by hand with a wooden spoon, which prevents you from over working the dough. Oh, um yeah, and maybe a little teeny tiny bit to do with the butter and sour cream in the recipe too.

One more thing, I’m going to confess that the original name for the lemon glaze is really lemon curd. But I have an unnatural phobia to the word “curd.” It just doesn’t sound appealing and if you try to feed my kids anything with the word curd in it, there’s a 99% chance that they’ll fling it back in your face.

It’s not everyday that you get an email from a reader asking to be an intern.

A free intern.

Hell yeah!

*eyes sparkling* rubbing hands together…Will she do dishes? Laundry? Scrub the floors?

Uh…yeah…prob not. She said “intern” not “housecleaner.”

Well, okay, but STILL! Someone to go through my spam, read comments, correct my spelling, ghost comment on other blogs. SCORE!

Oh sheesh! I’m just kiddin’ ya! But I know that’s what y’all were thinking!

Seriously, having an intern is a serious commitment on my part, to me it means mentoring, sharing, supporting. It means unzipping the day-to-day details of my career and REALLY analyzing why and how because *snicker* some days the why’s are simply “just cuz” and the how’s are “staggering blindly,” which really…doesn’t…sound…too…mentor-like.

But it also means creating space in my life each week to flick the switch on Skype and talk with Jess, going through photog tips, blogging advice, how to write recipes, how to do the SEO dance and just general advice. In return, Jess will be researching, writing and photographing for my Ingredients section and post a handful of delicious recipes like this one, her family recipe for Hainanese Chicken Rice.

I think this will be a great adventure for all of us!

Jess’s blog is Jess’s Many Mini Adventures in Food and Farming. She’s an amazing, passionate gal who loves food as much as I do. Please welcome Jess to Steamy Kitchen!

-Jaden

p.s. have you ever considered asking one of your favorite veteran bloggers to intern?

Hey all,

Jess here, Steamy Kitchen’s new intern. That’s me chewing on a mango in my tiny kitchen preparing for a meal at Synergy Farm (a farm on an island!) where I intern at. I’m actually in my kitchen right now on my lunch break, looking out at the barn and the carrots in the north garden, munching on a quesadilla with beet greens and feeling amazed all over again at how I ended up here, on a farm, writing to all of you wonderful readers!

I’ve been here since late March, just after my 24th birthday. Before that, I was living in Cambodia helping girls get an education; before Cambodia, I was working at Google, and waaaaaay back before then (well not so long ago, actually) I ran an afterschool program in the bay area. I love adventure, and I love to consider the small ways I can change the world for the better, and over the past few years, I’ve become convinced that my way of making my world better is through food.

Growing up in Orange County, California, I never thought much about where my In-N-Out Burger or spicy tuna roll came from. Every since I was 4 years old perched on a kitchen stool, stirring up Betty Crocker, I’ve always been in love with food: cooking it, eating it, playing with it. I love cooking with friends; chopping veggies gives me a high like no other; but it was only recently that I’ve become fascinated with how our food is grown, processed and distributed to us and also how it affects our health, our environment and our communities. I figured it made sense to get down in the dirt and learn more about these issues firsthand, so I became an apprentice on a small organic farm in the beautiful San Juan Islands.

So what’s all this got to do with blogging? The food blogging community has been a way for me to connect with other people who think and care about food as much as I do. I’m completely inspired by all the amazing folks out there sharing their recipes and opinions and lives. Jaden’s agreed to transmit some of her samurai skills in cooking and food writing to me so I can join in the fun.

All this food love had to come from somewhere, and I tend to attribute a lot of it to good genes. My mum’s side of the family is Singaporean and I grew up in a whirlwind of popiah, freshly baked curry puffs, and beef rendang. Though I’m open to all kinds of cuisines, I hold a special place in my heart for a good plate of chili crab or chicken satay.

When I was small my family made many trips to my grandparents’ house back in Singapore. Early in the mornings, before it got unbearably hot, my grandpa would head down to the local hawker center (a food court with lots of different stalls) to pick up breakfast. He would come back to the house with a bag full of packets wrapped in banana leaves, still hot, shiny with oil, and intensely fragrant. We’d each carefully unwrap our packet, uncover the pieces of tender, perfectly steamed chicken on top of savory rice. We’d tuck in to the fragrant ginger-garlic-chickeny heaven, topped in our favorite combinations of magical sauces and eat till we were ready to face the sticky tropical day.

These days you can still find Hainanese chicken rice in hawker centers across the island for a couple of dollars a plate, and also in high-end restaurants serving up authentic cuisine. This is what a hawker center looks like — like a mall food court, only with mee goreng and peanut soup instead of Sbarro!

It’s often called Singapore’s national dish. When I was a kid and my family would go back to visit Singapore, I had three loves: fried bananas, paratha, and chicken rice. When I was visiting family last November, it was one of the first things they took me to eat — the carcasses in the stall beckoned to me with the promise of super-fresh tender chicken — some things just don’t change.

Though it gets its name from its origins in Hainan, China, it was really when overseas Chinese brought the dish to Singapore that it got a new personality and became famous.

According to my mom, this recipe is really only authentic when made with a “kampong” chicken, which means basically, a chicken from the village: the kind that roam around in the sun and eat whatever grubs and grass and scraps of rice are available. These kinds of chickens look pretty skinny by our standards, but they have an amazing flavor that I can only describe as “extremely chickeny.”

Here on the farm, we raise the closest equivalent to a “kampong” chicken that you’ll likely find in the US — not as scrawny, but pretty much as delicious. Our chickens are organically fed and pasture-raised, which means they get to spend their days outside, hanging out in the sun, roam in the grass, pecking at greens and grubs. We raise about 120 in each batch and they take about 8 weeks to go from chick to chicken rice. As my mentor, Farmer Susan likes to say, these chickens live a really really good life and then have one really bad day. They are ridiculously good just boiled plain in a pot of water and salted slightly.

All that good care makes these chickens more pricey than your average bird and on a farmer’s salary, it’s tough to afford them, but thankfully in our chicken processing just a couple weeks ago, I was able to snag a couple of tiny 2-pounders that we wouldn’t be able to sell, that were just perfect for chicken rice.

Hello guys and gals, it’s Jaden back again – Jess gave me her recipe for Hainanese Chicken Rice and I made it to show you step by step instructions! It’s a multi-step recipe, with 4 components:

1) Chicken
2) Rice
3) Chili Dipping Sauce

oh yes, the soup too, but you don’t really have to do much other ladle into the bowls.

So, let’s start with the CHICKEN.

Hainanese Chicken

This is an organic supermarket chicken (I wish we were all as lucky as Jess to be able to have fresh chicken!) Here’s the deal about the chicken. You gotta buy the best. Because this Hainanese Chicken Rice dish is all about the pure taste of the chicken, you really want to go with organic. It’s worth the money for your health, the environment and taste buds.

When you buy a whole chicken and are cooking it skin-on, and ESPECIALLY if you’re steaming or poaching the thing, you want to make sure you get the “nasties” off.

I’m sure by looking at this photo you know what I mean. What I’m after is smooth, unblemished skin.

So I give my guy a facial.

Yes, I’m totally serious!

I exfoliate my chicken.

Wow, I can’t believe I just confessed to you that I give my chickens a spa treatment. Please don’t think I’m strange! Please tell me that you do this too!??????

Start with a small handful of kosher salt. Regular table salt is too fine to use to exfoliate. Sea salt too expensive. Just use kosher salt. Oh and even if you don’t have that loose skin on your chicken, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to exfoliate — there’s still hidden guck and yuck that is trapped in that chicken skin. TRUST ME. Your chicken will look and taste better this way.

Now RUB RUB RUB!!

Be gone wrinkles!

Be gone trapped guck!

Be gone dead skin! <- yes, I know that sounded ridiculous on so many levels.

Work those pores!

Rinse, pat dry and ta-da!!!

Glistening.

Glowing.

Soft.

Smooth.

Taut.

Chicken.

Check those lovely pores.

Season the inside and outside the chicken with salt and stuff the bird with ginger and green onions. Remember, you are not only seasoning the chicken, but also the poaching water too, so be generous with the salt. I generally double the amount of salt that I would normally use on a chicken. I’ll show you how much water we’re adding in a sec.

Put it in a big pot and fill with water to just cover by 1 inch. Note that some of the stuffing might fall out. Which is totally okay. Don’t worry.

Bring that baby to a boil and then immediately turn the heat to low to keep a simmer. You’ll begin to see some of that scum. Now hey, if we didn’t exfoliate our chicken, I bet that scum would be a lot browner. I have a handy dandy scum skimmer. If you don’t have a scum skimmer, buy one, it’s only $2!

After simmering on the lowest heat (just enough for little tiny bubbles to break surface) and your chicken reaches the correct temp (take the chicken temperature at the thickest part of the thigh that’s not touching bone, it should read 170F). This is is done!

Prepare an ice bath and immediately lift the chicken out of the pot with 2 big slotted spoons or 2 big fat spatulas.

Here’s a tip. Don’t try to grab the chicken legs to pull the chicken out. You’ll end up tearing the skin and heh, maybe even tearing the drumsticks outta the chicken which results in you standing there holding two drumsticks and the rest of the chicken plopping back into the boiling hot broth which then splashes back on your arms and face. Speaking from experience, of course.

Oh, and don’t even THINK about pouring that clean, delicious broth down the sink! We’ll be using that to cook the rice, prepare the sauce and to drink as soup! So, remember, gently lift the chicken out from under and try not to disturb its delicate (and exfoliated!) skin.

My pot of ice water wasn’t big enough, but it worked, I just turned the chicken over a few times to make sure both sides were cooled. Why are we doing this, you ask!? Ha! I thought you’d never ask. Well let me tell ya. Plunging in an ice bath stops the cooking process immediately AND tightens the skin, making it springy and firm. The quality of the chicken skin is important in this dish! It’s all about the skin texture.

See here? That’s your soup! Season with salt if necessary.

Hainanese Rice

I use Jasmine rice, or long grained rice. Of course, feel free to sub with whatever rice you want, but I prefer Jasmine white rice. I’m using 2 cups of rice. Rinse the rice grains several times in water to get rid of excess starch and other rice cling-ons. Then let the rice soak in water for 10 minutes.

Drain the rice completely, as much as possible.

Grab a pot and saute the garlic and the ginger. Mmmm…can you smell that??

Add the drained rice to the pot.

Fry the rice grains for a couple of minutes…this gives the rice SO much flavor! I like to add a bit of salt to the rice if the broth isn’t already salted.

Remember that broth? Well, pour 2 cups of this into the pot. Normally when cooking rice, I’d go with a ratio of 1 cup rice : 1.25 cups water/broth. But since we’ve already soaked the rice and the rice has absorbed some of the water, I’m going with 1:1. Bring the rice to a boil, then immediately turn the heat to low, cover tightly and cook for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let rest (still covered! no peeking!) for 5-10 more minutes. Done.

Oh, if you have a rice cooker, even better! After sauteing the garlic, ginger, rice – just add that into your rice cooker with the broth.

Perfect rice.

Chili Sauce for Hainanese Chicken Rice

If you’re a fan of sriracha chili sauce, this will knock your socks off. Jess puts sriracha, lime, sugar, salt, couple tablespoons of that lovely chicken broth, garlic and ginger into a blender and wheeeeeee:

Voila….Jess’s Hainanese Chicken Rice

It’s the LAST WEEK of Summer Fest! Where did all the time go? We’re onto our final round of celebrating the garden and onto Tomatoes. If you haven’t yet heard about Summer Fest, it’s a four-week celebration of fresh-from-the-garden food: recipes, growing tips, even tricks for storing and preserving summer’s best with my co-hosts White on Rice, Away to Garden, Simmer Till Done, Paige of The Sister Project and Matt Bites. Of course, It’s not a party without your participation! And I’ll tell you how in just a bit.

When we first threw the idea of Summer Fest around, I was just ending my early Summer season of tomatoes. It’s just way too hot here where I live in Florida to grow much of anything in the thick of summer. I SHOULD be starting my tomatoes for our Fall/Winter-ish season (there’s no such thing as Winter here, it’s still like 80F in December) but I haven’t started, because this is what happens to my tomato garden when I travel too much:

Um yeah. So my Earthboxes are still empty.

Wait…you don’t believe me that I can harvest tomatoes in the winter? Oh let me show you what I picked on Christmas Eve in 2007:

Okay, so it was only 1 itty bitty leeeetle tomato. But still! Christmas Eve harvest!

But there are SOME things that are growing:

So I’ve got basil…LOTS of basil and had to cheat with the tomato and get that at a farmer’s market to make Caprese Salad with Basil Vinaigrette.

When tomato is THIS good, I hate to do anything other than enjoy it fresh in a salad. My Basil Vinaigrette is simple to make, takes 5 minutes in a blender. You’ll love it. I promise.

First, the Basil Vinaigrette ingredients: fresh basil leaves, shallots, sea salt, a couple slices of fresh chili pepper, good olive oil and a white vinegar (I’m in love with Dehydr8).

First you gotta chop up the shallots and the pepper in the blender.

Next goes in the torn basil leaves, salt, vinegar and 2 tablespoons of water. You need that liquid to get things moving in the blender.

Let that baby whirl while you slowly drizzle in the olive oil. Look at that gorgeous mossy green!

Once it calms down a bit, the color turns bright vivid green.

The makings of a Caprese Salad.

Wait. Another beauty shot of the tomato.

Since I’m stacking this Caprese Salad up, I want to make sure that the bottom layer (which uses the bottom of the tomato) is flat — so that the whole stack doesn’t fall over. So lop off the round butt of the tomato so that it has a flat ass to sit on.

Start stacking and layering your Caprese Salad!

Lastly…drizzle the Basil Vinaigrette over your Caprese Salad.

Love that drizzle action!

How you can join Summer Fest

Summer Fest 2009 is a four-week, cross-blog celebration co-created (alphabetically listed) by A Way to Garden, Matt Armendariz of Mattbites, Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen, and Todd and Diane of White on Rice Couple, with guest appearances from Shauna and Daniel Ahern of Gluten-Free Girl, Simmer Till Done’s Marilyn Pollack Naron, and Paige Smith Orloff of The Sister Project.’ And from you that’s critical. Your contributions are desired, and needed.

Will you play along? Have a recipe or tip that fits any of our weekly themes? Starting today, with the subject of herbs, you can contribute in various ways, big or small. Contribute a whole post, or a comment, whatever you wish. It’s meant to be fun, viral, fluid. No pressure, just delicious. The possibilities:

Simply leave your tip or recipe or favorite links in the comments below a Summer Fest post on my blog, and then go visit my collaborators and do the same.

The cross-blog event idea works best when you leave your recipe or favorite links (whether to your own blog or someone else’s) at all the host blogs. That way, they are likely to be seen by the widest audience. Everyone benefits, and some pretty great dialog starts simmering.

Or think bigger: Publish entire entire posts of your own, if you wish, and grab the juicy Summer Fest 2009 tomato badge (illustrated by Matt of Mattbites).

Summer Fest 2009 Schedule:

• Tuesday, July 28: HERBS. Any and all.

• Tuesday, August 4: FRUITS FROM TREES (also known as stone fruits, but we won’t scream if you toss in a berry or another fruit, promise).

• Tuesday, August 11: BEANS-AND-GREENS WEEK (either or both, your choice).

• Tuesday, August 18: TOMATO WEEK. How do you like them love apples? (this week!)

What did my co-hosts make for the Summer Fest Party?

Simmer Till Done Made a Savory Upside Down Tomato Basil Bread

Matt Bites does Tomatoes 10 Ways

Away to Garden shows us her Quick Tomato Sauce Ever So Slowly

White on Rice tells us about their kiddie tomato thieves and makes Tomato Jam!

What a cute little girl! Paige from The Sister Project makes Curried Carrot and Tomato Soup

Gluten Free Girl makes Smoked Tomato Salsa