Recipe: (Tomato and) Lemon Sauce

I picked up a copy of: A Year of Slow Food (David and Gerda Foster) from the library recently. My brain at the moment only likes food related books.

It was quite an interesting read, stories of life "on the land" to the south of Sydney, interspersed with recipes. The Stuffed Summer Squash with Tomato and Lemon sauce grabbed me, because L had decided that my plain boiled zucchini were too plain for him, and he wanted a Mediterranean style dish. I don't recall having seen a recipe like this before.

Original Recipe
Tomato Sauce
2kg tomatoes
3/4 cup olive oil
1 cup water

Lemon Sauce
Juice of 2 lemons
1 cup miso stock
2 eggs

That quantity was a bit too much for two people, and I had already parboiled the zucchini. So I started with Parboiled zucchini, add 1 tin (400g) of peeled roma tomatoes to simmer in the pan. I had just been watching back episodes of The Cook and the Chef, and Maggie had given the hint: that if you're trying to make tinned tomatoes taste like fresh tomatoes in a sauce, add a splash of verjuice. So I did.

Separately, I had the juice of one lemon, half a cup of warm miso stock, and one lonely egg.

The egg got whisked together with the lemon juice, and then I added the miso stock over a low heat. You're supposed to whisk this together until thick. I'm not sure if I went far enough - I only whisked it until my accompanying fish was ready. However, it appears that you make the bubbles whilst whisking, and then there is enough egginess to set the bubbles into a kind of light foam.

This was really quite tasty when spooned over the zucchini in tomato sauce, and it also cut nicely through the richness of some grilled salmon fillets without the faux-saltiness that using plain lemon juice seems to do.

Use the sauce immediately - it doesn't keep for the next night!

I later searched for a similar sauce on the interwebs, but the closest I could find used cream to make the sauce rather than egg.