I really don’t like my refrigerator to be without a jar of this tomato jam.

That probably tells you more about the recipe than anything else I could say.

If you make Indian-inspired dishes at home—curries, roasted vegetables, rice bowls, lentils, anything filled with cumin and coriander and warm spices—I think you’re going to understand why. One spoonful can take an already delicious bowl and turn the flavor up several notches.

For me, it has become almost inseparable from curry.

I’ll finish cooking, taste the pot, adjust the salt, perhaps add a squeeze of lemon, and inevitably there is one final thought:

It needs one more thing.

And I know exactly what it is.

The tomato jam.

Not stirred into the curry. Spooned on top of it, where you get little bursts of sweet, sour, warmly spiced flavor against the creamy curry underneath.

I actually discovered the idea for this jam years ago at a restaurant here in Los Angeles. They served something on top of a bowl filled with rice, vegetables, and Indian spices, and I was convinced it was tamarind sauce.

I loved it.

It was a little too spicy for me, but apparently not spicy enough to stop me from eating it.

So I asked the waitress what it was.

“Spicy tomato jam.”

Well, that was all I needed to hear.

I knew immediately that I wanted to recreate it at home—not only because I wanted to eat it more often, but because I wanted to make a version where the flavor didn’t depend upon heat.

And that is how my Spicy (or Not-So-Spicy) Tomato Jam began.

Over time, it became its own thing. Tomatoes cook down with coconut sugar and maple syrup while apple cider vinegar and lemon bring acidity, ginger adds warmth, and toasted cumin gives everything this earthy depth underneath.

The result reminds me enormously of tamarind sauce.

In fact, I’ve tried making tamarind sauces because I thought I ought to have one in my repertoire, but I never seem to make one I like quite as much as this tomato jam.

Eventually I gave up trying.

Why replace something I already love?

And although curry may be its favorite companion, this little jar has found its way into all sorts of meals around here.

I spread it on toast, sometimes over a layer of creamy vegan ricotta or cream cheese, where the cool creaminess underneath that sweet-tangy jam is ridiculously good. A spoonful can wake up a grain bowl or a plate of roasted vegetables. You can even brush a little onto vegetables before roasting and let the sugars caramelize around the edges.

That’s one of the things I particularly love about condiments in a plant-based kitchen. A jar like this can take very simple food and give it an entirely different personality.

And unlike some tomato recipes, this one isn’t reserved only for that glorious moment when summer tomatoes are everywhere.

I’ve made it with beautiful farmers market tomatoes, garden tomatoes, Cherokee tomatoes, Pineapple tomatoes, and handfuls of little cherry tomatoes. Those are wonderful, of course. But I’ve also made it with ordinary grocery-store tomatoes in the middle of the year, and it was still delicious.

The stove does a lot of the work.

Give less-than-perfect tomatoes enough time to cook down and concentrate, then taste. If they aren’t naturally very sweet, you may find they need a little adjustment. That’s part of cooking rather than simply following a formula—taste what you have in front of you and let the food tell you what it needs.

It’s funny, but after I learned to make this jam, I found myself going back to that restaurant less often.

That happens to me more and more.

Eating out can certainly be a wonderful break from cooking, but I genuinely love being in my own kitchen. I know every ingredient going into the food, I can make things exactly the way we enjoy them, and every once in a while something I first tasted somewhere else becomes so thoroughly at home in my kitchen that I stop missing the original.

This jam is one of those things.

So these days, you might find us sitting around the table at The Nob with a big bowl of curry—summer garden vegetables when they’re abundant, potatoes and cauliflower when the seasons change—and somewhere nearby there will almost certainly be a little jar of tomato jam.

I may have discovered the idea in a restaurant, but somewhere along the way it became part of our table.

And now, when the jar starts getting low, I notice.

Because sometimes Small Beautiful Things aren’t elaborate at all.

Sometimes they’re sitting quietly in the refrigerator, waiting for one spoonful to make dinner taste complete.