Panzanella Salad

Panzanella Salad - Ready to be tossed!

This panzanella salad was ALWAYS a big hit at our neighborhood barbecues when I used to live in Cleveland. I do not know why it has taken me so many years to actually write about this recipe! Now is the perfect time of year to take advantage of all the local produce that is coming in to season and make this delicious salad.

A panzanella salad is a salad with its origins in Tuscany - it is basically made with chunks of bread soaked in dressing (presumably to bring some stale bread back to life), tomatoes, onions, olives, even anchovies (but not in this recipe). As salads go, this one is just a tiny bit more labor intensive than others, but I promise you that the little bit of extra work will be worth it in the end.

Ingredients for the salad: 

Focaccia bread, or something that can be sliced and grilled (I bought mine from the fabulous Nova's Bakery)

North Carolina red onions from the Davidson Farmers Market

Olive oil
Tomatoes (handful of cherry tomatoes or 1 large ripe tomatoes)
Cucumber
Green Pepper (or red or yellow - or all three!)
1 small red onion
A few basil leaves
Kalamata olives
Capers

Ingredients for the dressing: 

About 1/4 to 1/3 cup olive oil
About 1 clove garlic, minced
2 to 3 Tablespoons white wine vinegar or champagne vinegar
1 teaspoon brown mustard
Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper

Directions: 

Ready to be grilled

1. Slice the focaccia and drizzle it with a little bit of olive oil so that you can "grill" it over high heat on a skillet on your stove - a few minutes per side until the focaccia has a nice crispiness to the outside. I used about 1/2 of a loaf of focaccia - this recipe is a great use for leftover bread - no need to buy fresh bread.

2. Whisk together the ingredients for the dressing - olive oil, minced garlic, brown mustard, and white wine vinegar - I used a pinot grigio vinegar that I purchased at Harris Teeter. Taste test the dressing and add a little salt and pepper to taste.

3. Roughly cut the toasted focaccia bread into bite-sized squares and combine the focaccia and the dressing in a large bowl. Let the bread soak up the dressing while you are preparing the veggies.

About to be added to the bread...

4. Chop the vegetables - cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, olives, red onion into similarly sized pieces. To prepare the basil for the salad, I like to layer the basil leaves into a small pile and roll them tightly together - then slice thin strips from the rolled basil.

5. Toss the vegetables, the basil, and the capers with the bread that has been absorbing all the flavors of the dressing.

Ideally, you would like to let this salad sit for about 30 minutes before serving. In reality, that might not be possible - it will still taste delicious!  


 

Red, White, and Blue Trifle

A trifle is the absolute easiest dessert to make for a party at your house or anyone else's. These desserts are easy to make, they travel well, and they are always gobbled right up!

For Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, I love to make a Red, White, and Blue Trifle. To keep it red, white, and blue, I stick with strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries for the fruit. The organic strawberries that I just got yesterday from Jake's Farm in western North Carolina are the sweetest berries I have had since I remember picking strawberries from my Papa's back yard up in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts when I was little - so juicy and naturally sweet.

A trifle basically has three layers that you repeat until you fill your serving dish - for this glass bowl, I am able to do three layers of three layers - a bread or cake layer, a "cool whip" type layer, and a fruit layer.

Layer One: Tear up pieces of angel food cake, lady fingers, or some type of gluten free cake or cookie with a similar consistency. (I'm working on an gluten free Angel Food Cake recipe, but click here for a recipe I found on a Celiac website if you want to test one out yourself.)

Layer Two: Cool Whip or a preservative-free homemade version like the one I found here from The Thrifty Mama's website: http://www.thethriftymama.com/2010/11/homemade-cool-whip.html - simply making homemade whipped cream won't cut it in a trifle because whipped cream is not meant to stand up for very long.  (This recipe calls for xantham gum - if you cook gluten-free, you probably have this on hand, if not, you can buy xantham gum at most health food stores.)

Layer Three: The Berries! Slice strawberries and use whole blueberries and raspberries for the red and blue berry layer. I use about 1 quart of strawberries and 1 pint of blueberries and raspberries to make three layers of berries.

Repeat the layers until your dish is filled to the top. Share and enjoy!

Strawberry Quick Bread

Although we are approaching the end of strawberry season here in North Carolina, I have to post this recipe and hope for a few more flats of berries to come my way in the next couple of weeks. This recipe is actually my second attempt at a strawberry bread. I felt my first attempt was a bit too dry and not quite sweet enough (but, for the record, I did give a loaf away anyway and definitely didn't hear any complaints). The recipe that follows is heading in the right direction ... a little bit moist, a little bit dense, and pretty sweet - but not too sweet. My children have been enjoying it plain or with a little bit of cream cheese on top!

Ingredients:

4 cups of strawberries, sliced
1 1/2 cups of sugar, divided
1/2 cup of butter (1 stick), softened
3 tablespoons cream cheese, room temperature
1/4 cup olive oil
4 eggs
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda

Directions: 

1. Sprinkle about 1/4 cup of sugar over the strawberries. Do this even if the berries are fresh out of the garden sweet. The sugar sitting on the berries will create a nice little pool of red berry juice in the bottom of your bowl - this will go nicely when you add some berries and juice to the bread batter.

2. Combine butter, cream cheese, and olive oil in a stand mixer. Mix well. Add 4 eggs all at once. Mix again.

3. Separate out about 2 cups of the sliced berries to fold in at the end. Pour the remaining berries and juice into the mixer and mix. You can mash the berries a bit at this point.

4. Add in 3 cups of flour and the salt and baking soda. Mix.

5. Gently fold in the remaining 2 cups of sliced berries.

6. Pour into greased loaf pans - either 2 large loaf pans or 4 small loaf pans.

7. Cook at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. The loaf should be a nice brown color - I placed a knife in the middle to make sure it was cooked all the way through. Keep an eye on the time - smaller loaf pans might cook more quickly than 45 minutes in your oven and if you choose to use 2 large loaf pans, you might need just a few more minutes.

Notes about strawberries: Did you know that conventional strawberry growers in California use about 267 pounds of pesticides per acre of berries? That number is so disturbing! I think strawberries are a great example of why organic produce is worth a little extra money. Unfortunately, organic strawberries can be really hard to find. This season, I have mainly compromised by buying strawberries from Sunshine Farm in western North Carolina - the berries were sprayed once before growing but never sprayed again - in my mind, a far better choice than 267 pounds of pesticides per acre.

Although I am happy with the compromise, I have remained on the hunt for never-sprayed local berries and I did find delicious certified organic strawberries from Jake's Farm (also in NC), but his supply is really limited - fingers crossed for more this week. (If you are in or near Charlotte, check out the Farmers Fresh Market website to see if he has any available!) Truth be told, I cannot schlep around town with four small children in search of organic berries so I welcome all suggestions. Lisa at 100 Days of Real Food said that she was buying organic berries grown in South Carolina at our local Earth Fare and I have heard that an assortment of Harris Teeters have been carrying organic South Carolina berries intermittently. Sooo... Where have you been finding strawberries?!?

Good luck finding and enjoying delicious local produce!! Hope you like this recipe!

Slow Cooker Bratwursts with Turnips and Sauerkraut

Turnips from Jones Family Farm in NC

This meal took an entire 10 minutes to prepare and only uses 4 or 5 ingredients! 3 out of four children surveyed would eat it again for dinner tomorrow. Unfortunately for mommy, there are no leftovers so that isn't actually an option.

This morning I took our favorite bratwursts from C-Saw Hill Farm out of the freezer and let them thaw for a bit.  A few minutes before I was scheduled to be in line for preschool carpool pick-up, I remembered that I had not actually done anything with the brats sitting patiently on the counter. I am not kidding when I say that this took ten minutes to get all the ingredients roughly chopped and into the crockpot. 

He LOVES turnips...

Ingredients: 

1 pound bratwursts or Italian sausages, cut into 1 inch pieces and quickly browned (not cooked through)

3 or 4 turnips, ends trimmed, peeled, and cut into bite-sized pieces

1 apple, roughly peeled and chopped into bite-sized pieces

About 2 cups of sauerkraut 

About 2 large tablespoons brown sugar

Directions: 

In the crockpot - ready to cook

After roughly chopping the bratwursts into 1 inch slices, I tossed them into the pan to brown on medium high. I stirred them once. My goal was to give them a little bit of color - not to cook them through. They will cook in the crockpot.

Roughly chop the turnips and the apples about the same size. There was a bit of trickery involved by including an apple - I thought that, if need be, I could say that I think *most* of the pieces are apples, so why not give them a try? Thankfully, no little white lies were needed, the turnips were a hit. Possibly thanks to the tablespoons of brown sugar that I sprinkled over the top of the turnips, apples, and sauerkraut before I added the browned brats. 

Ready to eat

Using a large spoon, gently stir to combine bratwursts, turnips, apples, sauerkraut, and brown sugar. Cover and cook on low for about 4 hours. Enjoy! 

Goat Cheese and Sun-Dried Tomato Pasta Salad

This recipe is perfect for a quick one-dish summer meal or a take-along dish for a potluck. You can use any type of pasta - rice penne pasta works well in this recipe if you would like to make it gluten free. If I am taking this with me, I generally use tortellinis. They cook up so quickly - usually only a few minutes if you buy fresh tortellinis - and they hold up very well in the salad.

The main ingredients...

At the start of the week, I had a small bowl of leftover "crunchy things" from the previous night's salad so I used those ingredients as the jumping off point for a quick weeknight, make-ahead meal. We had purchased two delicious crowns of broccoli at the farmers market last weekend - so fresh it would be a sin to cook it so I just chopped it up and popped it into a fresh salad. We also had some delicious radishes ordered from my farmers at my virtual farmers market - Farmers Fresh Market. Delicious! My children loved the crunchiness of the radishes - I sliced them quite thinly and just tossed them silently into the salad. The kiddos just threw them in their mouths with everything else. Only after did I mention there was a new veggie in their salad did they even notice it.

Ready to toss

For this pasta salad, you really can use whatever "crunchy" veggies you have on hand - broccoli, carrots, radishes, red onion, and chopped onion tops were our main veggies in this meal. However, I think that what makes this salad a winner is the sun-dried tomato! I thinly sliced some sun-dried tomatoes and green olives that I unceremoniously scooped up from the olive bar at Harris Teeter. Make sure to add in some of the oil in which the sun-dried tomatoes are sitting in and use that to lightly dress your pasta salad. For the finishing touch, I generously spooned fresh goat cheese from The Looking Glass Creamery (located in Asheville, NC) over the top of the salad.

Gently toss the cooked pasta, veggies, goat cheese, and a little bit of oil. Sprinkle with sea salt, if desired, and serve at room temperature or slightly chilled.

The specifics ...

About 1 pound of cooked pasta, drained and cooled
1 to 2 handfuls of chopped veggies
About 1/4 cup of sun-dried tomatoes, thinly sliced
A few olives
About 1/4 cup (or more) goat cheese, in small spoonfuls
A little bit of oil to lightly toss the salad together - preferably from the sun-dried tomatoes

Combine and enjoy!

Kale and Carrot Beef Stew

The beans are a must-have for this stew!

I had to quickly check my archives to make sure I hadn't posted too many kale recipes this month because it seems like we eat kale just about every other day at this time of year. Lucky for me, I have only posted one other recipe this month!

Before the paint incident

Today was not necessarily the right temperature for stew but I really needed something that I could throw in one pot on the stove while I chased down the kids and tried to finish painting the kitchen. As of this moment the kitchen is halfway painted - Carolina Inn Lobby Yellow - and I definitely like it so far! For one brief moment, one wall of my kitchen and one nine month old baby were both painted this lovely shade of yellow, but after a quick to-the-tub rescue and no fingers in the eyes, painting resumed while dinner simmered on the stove.

My dogs will do anything for the carrot tops!

Yesterday, I decided to thaw the stew beef from C-Saw Hill Farms that had been patiently waiting in my freezer for a few weeks. Today, at 3pm, I realized that I needed to make a plan for dinner. I scoured the veggie crisper and came up with a handful of carrots, half a red onion, and the last of the kale. Perfect ingredients for a last minute stew.

Ingredients: 

1 lb. stew meat
Handful of carrots, chopped
4 handfuls of kale, chopped
1/2 large red onion, chopped
4 cups broth (I used low sodium chicken)
6 ounces tomato paste
1 can (14 ounces) small white beans
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon cumin

Directions:

Rinse the kale well

I trimmed the stew meat and tossed it into my dutch oven with a little bit of preheated olive oil. I added some corn starch and Weber Chicago Steak seasoning (you could just use salt and pepper) and gently tossed the beef so it could get browned on all sides. I like to season the beef directly while it browns and then separately season the stew itself after all the flavors start to come together.

Rinse the kale very well and remove the leaves from the tough stalks if you haven't done that already. I like to prepare my entire bunch of kale the first time I use it so that it is at the ready to toss into future recipes in short order. I store my kale leaves in a large ziploc bag and it seems to last in the fridge for about 2 weeks.

Chop the onions and carrots and add them to the beef. Add in 4 cups (1 carton) of broth and the tomato paste. If you prefer a less "tomatoey" stew, just use one or two tablespoons of tomato paste - my kids prefer the broth to be more like tomato soup so I use the entire can of tomato paste. Add in the seasonings and bring to a boil. After the stew is boiling, reduce heat to medium and add in the kale and the beans. Cook on medium heat for about 30 to 45 minutes until the beef is tender.  Enjoy!

 

Banana Breakfast Bars

A few sad bananas

My children eat bananas so quickly that we rarely get to the point of over-ripeness. However, once in a while, it does happen - usually when the kids have been too busy stuffing themselves with a "new" fruit.  (New as in "newly in season.") This past week, our fruit of choice has been strawberries, so a few bananas were neglected.

I wanted to make a simple breakfast snack that my daughter could enjoy so I used Better Batter's Gluten Free All Purpose Flour. In search of a recipe other than banana bread, a friend recommended that I look up the recipe for Betty Crocker's Banana Bars - the recipe looked pretty simple so I decided to adapt it just a bit. These sweet bars came out sticky but delicious. Definitely not an everyday baking project but quite a sweet little surprise for breakfast...


Ingredients (Edited per my children - I forgot we used brown sugar!): 

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar

2 - 3 ripe bananas
1/3 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1 cup Better Batter GF flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butterscotch chips or white chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)

Directions:

1. Combine sugar, bananas, and oil in a mixing bowl. Add the eggs. Mix well.
2. Combine flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.
3. Add the flour mixture to the banana mixture. Mix well.
4. Stir in the butterscotch chips and chopped walnuts.
5. Pour into a greased 9 x 12 pan or 9 x 9. Cook at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes (a few minutes longer if you pour into a 9x9 pan).

White chocolate & pecans

Edited to clarify: We have made these bars a few times depending on what is in the pantry. My friend asked me where I buy gluten free butterscotch chips which made me realize that I should throw a little mention into this post that not all little bites of processed sweetness are created equal. Nestle butterscotch chips, for example, are not gluten free, yet Hershey's are. Most of Ghirardelli's chips are gluten free, except that they cannot certify the white chocolate chips are gluten free because they are made in another facility. That being said, I use them anyway. Click here to access a great list of gluten-free chocolate (and other) chip options. 

Kale and Wild Ramp Risotto

Kale and Wild Ramp Risotto

This weekend my husband and I split up the kids for some small group activities... the girls went with daddy to see some golf and the boys went with mommy to the Atherton Mills Farmers Market. I rarely get to saunter around the fabulous farmers market at Atherton Mills on South Boulevard here in Charlotte because I generally worry about misplacing a child while enjoying some fresh greek style yogurt from New Terra Farms or cinnamon whipped honey at the yummy Cloister Honey table (they've got fancy bees that live on top of the Charlotte Ritz Carlton - not kidding!). This weekend it was such a pleasure to taste test at leisure and pick up some delicious local produce.

Stripping the leaves

Baby on my back, bags full of produce and a book (I'll write about it more later ... but all of you local North Carolinians will definitely want to get this guidebook ... Farm Fresh NC!) and my older son worriedly exclaimed, "Mom, we can't leave without kale!" Who can say no to a kindergartener in love with kale?!

Kale

Once we got home, we made oven toasted kale chips but we still had quite a bit of kale left over from the large bunch we purchased. While pondering what to make for dinner tonight, I was suddenly inspired by the large bag of kale staring back at me from the refrigerator and the slightly musty smell of ramps that were cleaned and ready to be eaten. Whenever I have leftover produce, risotto is always an easy go-to weeknight meal.

Chopped kale and ramps

Ingredients:

2 cups arborio rice
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Olive oil and butter to saute onion and garlic (about 1 to 2 Tablespoons
4 cups chicken broth
4 large handfuls kale, cleaned and chopped
1/2 bunch ramps (about 6 to 8), chopped
1/2 cup shredded parmesan cheese (optional)

Directions: 

1. Saute onion and garlic in olive oil and butter until soft in a large heavy bottomed pan or dutch oven.
2. Add arborio rice and stir to coat.
3. Heat to medium. Add chicken broth, 1 cup at a time. Stir to incorporate the broth. Wait until all the broth has been absorbed before you add the next cup.
4. Before you add the fourth and final cup of broth, add the kale and the ramps and stir into the rice.
5. Add the final cup of broth, stir until the broth has been incorporated and the rice tastes well cooked. If the rice still tastes al dente, add more broth.
6. Optional: If I have shredded parmesan cheese on hand, I will add it to the risotto at the very end.

Enjoy!!

 

Goat Cheese and Sorrel Omelette

Fresh picked sorrel

I was a vegetarian for many years - it was an experiment that lasted through much of high school and college. I eliminated chicken, pork, and beef, but I still ate fish and eggs. Now that I cook for my own family, I never feel the need to include meat every night for dinner. No one ever misses it!

Last week, I ordered sorrel through our farmers market delivery - I had never tasted sorrel before but the photos looked great. It was leafy and green. How could it be bad? I did a little reconnaissance before the sorrel arrived - was it an herb or was it a leafy green veggie? Admittedly, I am not certain I remember the answer. Perhaps it is best considered to be a cross between the two. Sorrel tastes like a green that has taken a bath in lemon juice. The flavor is completely unexpected!

For dinner the other night, I quickly sauteed an entire bunch of sorrel in a little bit of olive oil. When I say quickly, I mean 1 or 2 minutes - it wilted almost immediately and lost its bright green color. Sauteeing the sorrel seemed to intensify the citrus flavor. I set it aside and prepared the omelette in the same pan.

Maybe a bit too browned...

To make the omelette ... I lightly whisked eight farm fresh eggs with about 2 tablespoons cream. I poured the eggs into a hot pan with the residual oil left over from sauteeing the sorrel. I let the egg mixture evenly cook over medium heat in the bottom of my deep, heavy-bottomed pan, gently pulling the edges of the egg away from the sides with my spatula.

When the edges of the omelette looked sufficiently cooked but the middle was still runny, I placed heaping teaspoons of garlic and dill goat cheese and spoonfuls of cooked sorrel on one half of the egg. Using my spatula, I gently lifted the other half of the omelette and folded it over the filling. I pressed down on the omelette to seal the edges and removed it from the heat.

We served our omelette for dinner with fresh (no spray!) strawberries from Sunshine Strawberry Farm. Yum!

Local,  North Carolina Strawberries