One-Pot Braised Chicken Piccata + A Make-Ahead Chickpea Salad | Our Best Home Cooking Bites

Food Friends: Home Cooking Made Easy

Hosts Sonia and Keri share their favorite recent culinary discoveries, focusing on flavorful, low-effort recipes. They discuss a highly-rate

Key takeaways

• Ali Slagle's puttanesca chickpea tomato salad features over 3,500 five-star reviews in the New York Times.
• Dry farming is a method of growing crops without external irrigation, producing tomatoes that can be stored for months.

Main topics

• Chickpea Tomato Salad
• Dry Farming Tomatoes

Notable quotes

It's one of those salads that just gets better with time.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a practical guide for home cooks looking to tran

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Welcome to Food Friends, a podcast inspiring home cooks to try new dishes in the kitchen by sharing trusted recipes, tips, and friendship. Hi, Speaker 2 (0:12) I'm Sonia. And I'm Keri. We met in Los Angeles over 15 years ago as personal chefs and haven't stopped talking about food since. We're so glad you're here. Speaker 1 (0:24) Hi, Sonia. Hi, Keri. Sonia, what was your best bite this week? My best bite this week was a salad. Speaker 2 (0:32) Oh, do tell, do tell. I love it when you discover a new salad or repeat an old salad that we've forgotten about. I'm dying to know what was in your salad this week. Speaker 1 (0:42) Well, it's kind of a new old salad. So I would make this kind of chickpea tomato salad. forever, just a pretty simple one. And then I was looking for recipes that were similar to mine online because I want to share it. I wanted to take it up a notch. And I actually found this puttanesca chickpea tomato salad from Ali Slagle in the New York Times. I think she makes excellent salads. This is one that has 3000 five star reviews. So again, you know, it's good when it's that many votes of confidence, right? And It's as easy as easy can be. And I think also tomatoes, you know, we're at the tail end of the season here, but they're still pretty good. Like September tomatoes are always the best. And so even into October, there's still some pretty good tomatoes around. And certainly cherry tomatoes are still good. And if you can get your hands on dry farm tomatoes, they last even longer. And I even saw dry farm tomatoes at Trader Joe's the other week. Speaker 2 (1:38) I gotta tell you, I don't know what a dry farmed tomato is. What is that? Speaker 1 (1:43) I Speaker 2 (1:44) think that's exactly what Speaker 1 (1:45) it sounds like. I'm a little Speaker 2 (1:46) skeptical about this. I gotta say, I'm skeptical about this recipe because I'm like, tomatoes, chickpeas, I don't know. So tell me what a dry farm tomato is and then sell me this recipe. Speaker 1 (1:55) So dry farming is when you're growing crops during dry seasons without external irrigation. And so there are certain plants that are bred because they can withstand less water usage. And there's also this whole category of dry farm tomatoes that are storage tomatoes. is something that's new to me, but there's varieties of tomatoes that you literally can like hang in a bunch until the dead of winter. They last for months on end hanging at room temperature. There's a really amazing organization out of Portland called the Culinary Breeding Network. And actually they host this tomato festival every year, which is where I first learned about it. And I actually bought some dry farmed storage tomatoes this year that are just hanging out in my kitchen. And I'm going to use them in December when I'm missing fresh tomatoes. and I'm really looking forward to that. Speaker 2 (2:44) Wow, I have never heard of this, but it's really interesting. And I think it's really cool to consider that the way that you think about a tomato can actually be different. I think about garlic as something that you can stick in your kitchen and let it hang for several months or storage crops like potatoes and hard winter squash. But I've never thought of a tomato that way. Speaker 1 (3:05) I'll link