The Baguette
Once I buy any kind of bakery bread, it's like a sprint to finish it off before it's rendered inedible by the passage of time. And this weather always makes me feel like gnawing on a baguette and some fruit and cheese instead of preparing something more elaborate. I guess it's just that, to me, that type of meal feels like a picnic, and it's been picnic weather lately.
So I've been eating on a baguette all week, culminating with bread salad last night.
So Sunday instead of going to the grocery store we detoured to Cheeses of the World, a nice shop near our apartment. We made lunch out of some Cheddar, a gigantic baguette, some spicy coppa and fruit.
Monday night, I sliced off three thin pieces of baguette at an angle, toasted them, then topped them with thin pear slices, some saga blue cheese I had picked up on Sunday and some walnut pieces. Then I put it all back under the broiler just to melt the cheese. (A Rachael Ray recipe.) Ate it with some salad greens dressed with some homemade vinaigrette (equal parts vinegar and olive oil, plus a small dollop of mustard, salt and freshly ground pepper shaken together in a formerly empty spice jar).
Tuesday for lunch I had a (slightly stale) hunk of baguette with some leftover Cheddar and a huge Granny Smith apple. Yes, there was still about half the baguette left, and I was sick of the bread-fruit-cheese thing.
But really one of the main reasons for the baguette in the first place was panzanella. So tonight I tossed two big beautiful tomatoes, cut in chunks, with chunks of cucumber and stale bread and some torn basil leaves. Topped the whole thing with generous drizzles of olive oil and vinegar, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and let it set about 45 minutes so the tomato juice and other liquids could do their work on the bread. I hardly recognized the bread I had been eating all week. The crust gets chewy, and the softer inside (which there wasn't much of anyway because of the shape of the bread) gets a little soggy with basil-tomato flavored juices. Good.