Panzanella, an Italian bread salad, is one of the easiest dishes you can whip together on a hot summer day. It contains such a beautiful mix of refreshing ingredients. Ripe tomatoes, fragrant basil and rustic bread are tossed together with a tangy vinaigrette. The juice from the…
…tomatoes soak into the crunchy but still soft-in-the-center bread and you wind up getting bursts of flavor and different textures as you eat. A basic panzanella salad is typically made with only tomatoes, bread, fresh basil and olive oil but it is quite versatile. While it’s perfect with just these few ingredients, we’ve added some olives and bocconcini cheese to the mix. It’s also common to add cucumbers, capers, anchovies, or bell peppers. Really, you can use any garden fresh ingredients but just remember…less is more. A great salad is one where you experience something different in every bite, so don’t add too much of each ingredient. This salad is all about using the best tomatoes and is a great way to celebrate one of the finest ingredients of summer.
Just had to share this. We have a huge fig tree here at Rouxbe Central and we cannot keep up with how many…luscious…juicy and SEXY figs there are.
So…we invited a few fig lovers over this morning to pick the crop.
(mouse over the pictures to see captions)
It was a beautiful and extremely hot day…but that didn’t seem to matter. Everyone was out to help.
It was fun to see everyone out there picking their share of figs and then once they got enough,
they then helped others gather their fair share.
Okay, some had to gather more because someones’ Mom stole theirs, but to be fair, she couldn’t help herself. She was just too excited.
This is Tony’s Mom, who’s visiting right now… and this is what she kept saying…in her “oh so cute” Italian accent, “I never see anything so like this in my life…I always remember this day.” If I had offered her a million dollars instead of the figs, I am pretty sure she would have taken the figs hands down.
It’s so fun to see how people react with certain foods. Figs are certainly a soft spot for many people. They really seem to appreciate how fantastic nature can be. It also makes it just that much better that these figs just happened to be right in our very own backyard!
Gooey…mouth-watering…sinful…and frickin’ fantastic are some of the words that come to mind when I think of this bread.
This recipe comes from Joe’s Aunt Mary Bea. I have made this bread for many barbecues and “get- togethers” and it’s a hit everytime - in fact, I think it’s one of the reasons why I get invited to barbecues myself, “oh, ah…ya, Dawn…can you also bring that bread.”
I know it is not the healthiest bread around, but don’t judge it until you try it.
People will go crazy for it. And I bet that most people will guess that there’s garlic in it…but there’s not!
Just make sure you make enough ’cause I can guarantee you won’t be able to have just one piece.
This is one of my “go to recipes” and by “my” I mean one of the recipes that Joe makes for me regularly, bless his little heart. The first time he made it for me I said, “oh my goodness, what did you do, it’s so good”. Turns out it’s just the ingredients.
This recipe is just that good! Really! This is just another example of fresh ingredients making the best meal.
RSS
