Pantry Collective

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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A while back, I was browsing through my favorite food blogs, looking for some new ideas. One glance at these beautiful Eggplant Piccolinos from Kayotic Kitchen and I knew I couldn’t resist. Apparently, I am as easily swayed by the idea of pizza as her adorable little son! So upon returning home from the holidays and feeling like I was in serious need of an infusion of vegetables in my diet, I whipped up a batch of these yummy little treats. Since we had them for dinner, I served them sort of like eggplant parmesan, over a bed of (white whole wheat) spaghetti topped with some leftover pizza sauce.

I followed her recipe almost exactly - basically the only thing I did differently was to add fresh basil to the list of toppings. Fresh basil makes every single Italian-inspired dish better, I promise. Try it sometime! But other than that little tweak, all the credit for this dish goes to Kay!

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