If you follow my daily blog Chiot’s Run you know that we’ve been moving from Ohio to Maine. That explains the crickets that you’ve been hearing here at EOtB. Well, my computer is all set up and I’m ready to roll, kind of. I’m still short on time since I have to catch up on all my work, but I am going to be posting here again regularly. I have so many requested recipes that I’ve promised to post for people that I really need to get those up. While I work on those, I figured I’d break the posting fast with the quick dinner we had this evening. It’s my local seasonal take on the Caprese salad.
Insalata Caprese (salad in the style of Capri) is a simple salad from the Italian region of Campania, made of sliced fresh buffalo mozzarella, tomatoes and basil, seasoned with salt, and olive oil. In Italy, unlike most salads, it is usually served as an antipasto (starter), not a contorno (side dish).
I used these beautiful small orange tomatoes and basil from the garden, goat milk feta, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, freshly ground pepper and a few toasted pine nuts. Instead of having it as an appetizer, it comprised our main evening meal. I had spent the day working in the garden looking at these tomatoes and basil, dreaming of using them for dinner. “Too bad I don’t have any mozzarella” I thought to myself. Then I realized feta cheese would do.
It was quite tasty, definitely worthy to grace our plates again. When I get some extra raw milk I plan on making some mozarella, hopefully we’ll still have a few tomatoes left. Then we can have an official Caprese salad. This would be the perfect evening meal on a hot summer day, but it was equally great on a warm fall day. No need to heat up the kitchen
Have you enjoyed any impromptu garden fresh dinners recently?
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The garden is a great “idea book” for dinners. After cleaning up most of my garden I had a few small zuchinnis and 2 small eggplants. I stuffed them with lamb ,brown rice and mint for dinner. Love fresh tomatoes and feta, it looks delicious.
Not much left in our garden now, since there wasn’t a whole lot to start with this year. I used some of the last ripe tomatoes and basil to make a sauce for eggplant Parmesan a week ago, but that’s pretty much the last time I’ve used anything significant I grew myself. Thank God for farmers markets (and farmers).