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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One of my favorite dishes to get when I order Indian food is Baigan Bharta (I’ve also seen it spelled Baingan Bharta), which is basically a curried eggplant dish. I’ve had it from multiple places and honestly every place serves it a little differently. This is a close approximation to what I usually receive, though! It’s a great, spicy, vegetarian dish that tastes even better the next day. It also smells AWESOME while it’s cooking. It’s hard to make it look as yummy as it tastes though!

I apparently am pretty sensitive to cayenne pepper, and I think 1/2 teaspoon is a little much, even over the 5 servings we got out of this dish. Next time I’ll reduce it to 1/4 teaspoon, and maybe increase the garam masala a bit.

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Last month’s Real Simple had a few really yummy looking recipes. Earlier this week I made Chicken with Tarragon and Leeks, and a couple of days later I tried their recipe for Mediterranean Salad With Chickpea Patties. I decided to stick the whole thing, salad and all, inside a low-calorie flatbread and grill it like a panini, rather than serve pita chips on the side.

The first day I made this recipe, I found the chickpea mixture to be a little crumbly. We had some trouble flipping the patties without destroying their shape. Once we got them inside the flatbread with all the greens and tomatoes and red onions, and that delicious lemon-yogurt dressing, they tasted great. But there were no photos because they simply weren’t pretty enough to document! When I made the second batch last night, I mashed the mixture up a little more with a fork (since my wimpy little 3-cup food processor didn’t do a great job pureeing it the first time around) and added a tablespoon or two of water - just enough to make the mixture actually stick together. The results were infinitely better. It’s a pretty light meal, so last night I made some lemon-parsely couscous as a side dish.

The patties are reminiscent of falafel, but not as heavily fried and therefore not as bad for you. The seasonings were really good, especially in the dressing, which was so delicious I could eat it everyday. Yumm!

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