Pantry Collective

This side dish is crazy delicious. It’s pretty rich, so even though it seems like there’s not much once you’ve made it, don’t worry - you don’t need a lot for it to fill you up. The flavor combination is awesome. Caramelized onions and sweet squash and pungent gorgonzola… mmmm. Technically the original recipe calls for crispy fried sage, but I must be missing something, because when I tried to fry my sage it just turned black and gross. Needless to say, that didn’t make it into the dish. I chopped a little of the fresh sage I had left and tossed that in; it was delicious. Also, don’t overdo the gorgonzola - a little goes a LONG way. You can save the leftover gorgonzola for next week’s dish - Apple, Walnut and Gorgonzola Galette.

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First order of business: sorry for the bad photo. It doesn’t look nearly as good as it tastes. I was in a hurry and didn’t let John take a proper photo, plus it’s not really the most beautiful dish in the first place (although I’ll be they could make it lovely on Top Chef or something).

Second order of business: the window of opportunity is kind of over for this sort of thing at this point, since we’re no longer at the height of fresh tomato season (in Chicago, anyway). But maybe you have a secret source of delicious, juicy, non-mealy tomatoes in the winter. If you do, make this. Really. It’s amazingly yummy.

Back when the summer was in high gear, I saw a lot of recipes for panzanella, which is basically a bread salad. I thought, why not combine my love for caprese salads with my love for bread? And thus, caprese panzanella was born. This was made for a picnic and there wasn’t a bite left over if I recall correctly.

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I belong to Weight Watchers. Sometimes I even eat according to the Weight Watchers plan! One recipe I hear again and again (usually on HungryGirl, I think) is to use crushed up Fiber One cereal on anything you would normally coat in bread crumbs and fry to achieve a yummy crunchy coating. I don’t have the plain Fiber One in the house, but I love their Honey Clusters variety and eat it for breakfast most mornings. I decided to try it on chicken, and it totally wins. It definitely falls into a sweet crunchy coating category, like coconut shrimp or Cap’n Crunch coated chicken, but it’s totally yummy. It would not be good as leftovers, though - the cereal would get too soggy. Eat it straight away and you won’t be disappointed.

I had one large chicken breast when I made this; it served two people when accompanied by more generous side dishes (here, pilaf-stuffed acorn squash and green beans).

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