Let’s get things rolling again with a tasty little number I came up with after sharpening my knives up one day.

I have some great tomato plants growing in my garden. They’re yellow pear tomatoes, which have a delicate and delicious flavor and are uniquely yellow in color. For some reason these particular tomatoes thrive in my garden, while I’ve had little success with the romas I tried to grow alongside. In fact this is the second incarnation of the plant I grew last year. When winter came along and froze them out, I just buried the whole plant as compost. When the seasons rolled around again there were a bunch of tomato sprouts coming up where I’d buried the plants the winter before! I took the best looking two seedlings and planted them in the same spot as last year, and they exploded with wave after wave of juicy, sweet little yellow tomatoes all summer long and are still producing well into the warm Tucson fall.

I’ve also got a good crop of chiles, which survived the winter and are on their second season of producing serranos, jalapeños and poblanos. They don’t get a lot of light and they were really reaching for the sun, so I had to tie the stalks to stakes to keep them from falling over. But since they got up and established themselves, they have been very resilient and have given me great harvests of unusually spicy chiles. I find that the jalapeños and serranos taste really good if I leave the on the plant until they turn red. The intense spiciness mellows slightly and they become much sweeter.

I’ve spent many years working as a chef in restaurants, and while I’m glad to have moved away from that career path, I still truly enjoy making food. I grew weary of the long, hard, sweaty hours in the kitchen, running around in high stress, working longer and harder hours than anyone else in the restaurant, being held responsible for the most important component of the business (the food), yet being paid far less than everyone but the dishwashers. That part I did not care for. I did, and still do, love the art of bringing flavors, colors and textures together into dishes that are both delicious and visually beautiful. The most basic and necessary item in any good chef’s tool box is a good, sharp knife. Without this it is physically impossible to prepare food that looks really good. A dull knife will result in crude looking vegetables, and meat cuts that look like they were pulled apart by hand. A sharp knife on the other hand can turn something as simple as a green onion or a tomato into a work of art. One afternoon, when I was giving my knives a long-overdue sharpening, I tested my favorite knife, a 10-inch Henkels Four Star chef’s knife, by cutting one of my yellow pear tomaotes.

This got my mind going on a variation on salsa fresca, using the pear tomatoes, read and green chiles, and english cucumbers. I wanted to take advantage of the nice new edge on my knife to cut the tomatoes and chiles in a unusual way, a sort of fine julinenne rather that the normal dice or food processer blend that creates so many salsas.

Ingredients:

• yellow pear tomatoes
• red and green serrano chile peppers
• english cucumbers
• cilantro
• lime juice
• salt
• extra virgin olive oil