Grilled Caprese Salad, or I Can't Think of a Creative Title Because There are Maine Rednecks Driving by My Mother's House with No Mufflers

If you've never been lucky enough to set foot in a Stew Leonard's, I'm going to go ahead and say you've never really lived. Yes, I mean it.

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Imagine the type of food heaven that Willy Wonka, a farmer, and Walt Disney would create. Imagine a Whole Foods (keep the free samples and seductive displays, lose the pretension) crossed with a Putt-Putt Range (keep the fun mechanized animals and winding course, lose the weirdos).

www.stewleonards.com

Stew Leonard's is the type of place that Connecticut and New York children grow up begging to visit, well before they're old enough to realize that it sells food that's good for them (well, mostly). As a Massachusetts child, I had never experienced one until last summer, and it's safe to say that the trip changed my perspective on grocery shopping.

On a recent trip to Stew's, T's mom and I spotted the first good-looking beefsteak tomatoes of the season. Plump, red, and extremely fragrant, they were the real thing after months of the grainy, pale, bland mush grocery stores try to pass off as tomatoes in the off-season. So we bought...a few.

Then we passed the cheese display, where free samples of fresh mozzarella were being offered to passersby. Did I sample the cheese? Why, yes. Did I think about creating some sort of disguise (purse over head as hat?) so that I could come back around for another sample? Why, yes.

And inspiration struck. Instead of the typical Caprese Salad, why not try grilling the tomatoes first? The heat would caramelize the natural sugars in the tomatoes, rendering them extra sweet and smoky. It would be Caprese Salad plus a little je ne sais quoi, and we all know how I love my I don't know what.

Grilled Caprese Salad

•  2-3 large beefsteak tomatoes, sliced (core removed from center slices)
• 1 ball fresh mozzarella, sliced
• 1 bunch fresh basil, leaves torn in half (tearing as opposed to cutting keeps the leaves from bruising and turning dark green)
• Olive oil, to taste
• Salt and pepper to taste

1. While you slice the tomatoes, preheat the grill on medium heat. Sprinkle the tomatoes with salt and freshly-ground black pepper.

2. Spray the grill with a little olive oil or nonstick cooking spray, and then grill the tomatoes for about two minutes a side. I learned that I needed to have the grill a bit hotter in order to really sear the tomatoes, and ended up not getting those gorgeous grill marks on any of these babies.

3. Assemble the Caprese Salad, stacking one piece of mozzarella and one half of a basil leaf on each grilled tomato. Drizzle olive oil over the top of the platter, sprinkle with a bit more salt and pepper, and serve immediately; the tomatoes will turn a bit mushy if you let them get cold.

In retrospect, I should have drizzled a little bit of balsamic over the top of the platter. A little acidity to balance the sweetness of the tomatoes and the creaminess of the cheese would have really made the dish perfect. Oh well!

If you make too much and are worried about mushy tomato leftovers, never fear! T's mom resuscitated our dish the following night by putting the leftovers in a casserole dish, sprinkling the top with breadcrumbs, and baking it at 350 degrees for about fifteen minutes. The mozzarella turned all melty and delicious, and we had a Caprese Casserole on our hands.

I just love it when a great meal leads to a second great meal. The power of leftovers, people. Spread the word. Amen.

Mark Bittman's Grilled Lebanese Flatbread

I've wanted to make bread all summer, since I tried my friend P's no-knead bread and fell in love. But with the whole wedding thing happening, I hadn't had the brain space to accommodate baking until I saw Mark Bittman's new Minimalist video about Grilled Lebanese Flatbread. It looked pretty easy, so I gave it a try.

See this? This is a perfectly good mixture of yeast, sugar, salt, and warm water that I managed to convince myself I had messed up. I hadn't, but was about to because I had grabbed the powdered sugar canister instead of the flour canister and was fixin' to add three cups of it.

See this? This contains the same exact ingredients, but is a second batch because I am extremely paranoid when it comes to baking. Next, I actually managed to add flour and not powdered sugar.

I became very attached to my dough, checking on it a bit obsessively just to make sure that it was doing what it was supposed to. I kind of felt like a first-time parent, convinced that everyone else must be on to the fact that I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.

After about an hour, my little dough was all grown (or risen) up and ready to be turned into bread. Am I creeping you out yet with my attachment to this bread? Because everyone at T's house thought I was a little nuts when I wouldn't stop talking about it and worrying that I was getting the timing wrong.

Rolling the dough was really therapeutic. And don't worry, I do have a thumb on my right hand.

Remember how I said I was paranoid? I stacked each piece of dough on waxed paper so they wouldn't stick to each other. I also decided to improvise a little and, in addition to brushing each piece of flatbread with olive oil, I added some salt, pepper, and crushed rosemary.

I may or may not have stood over the bread for every second it was cooking. And don't be alarmed by the creatures in the upper left; they're chicken breasts.

It's bread! And I made it! From scratch! Thanks, Mark Bittman. You continue to be my hero.

Also, it's less than a month until the wedding. This means that I've reached the fantastic place in my life where I can scream "I'm getting married in less than a month!" to anyone who asks me to do anything unrelated to the wedding. This is an important threshold to have crossed.

Ok...off to scrape, sand, paint, weed, dig, paint some more, and try to convince a rental company to let me use their tents, tables, and chairs for free.

Grilled Peppers: Easiest Side Dish Ever

In building our wedding registries, T and I have spent a lot of time fantasizing about how much we're going to grill when we move to North Carolina. We've registered for a grill, a vegetable basket for the grill, a set of tools for the grill, and a book on how to grill. Seriously.

Unfortunately, my last two apartments didn't allow grilling on the patio, and I'm frightened of the community grills my neighborhoods provided, so we've been grill-hungry for about two years now. 

So imagine my happiness living chez T's family, where the grill is on more often than it's off. I've started to learn a little bit about grilling as a result (such as how to...turn on a grill), and I've discovered the glory of cooking a whole meal on one surface. 

Getting a grill all fired up for just one component of a meal is a waste of gas/charcoal, and you're already going to be spending the time standing in front of the inferno, hoping your eyebrows don't melt away, so why not cook the whole meal while you're out there? 

To start, go out and buy some peppers. 

First, wash the peppers. Second, slice them lengthwise into roughly 1-1.5 inch sections, taking care to remove the pith and seeds. Third, toss the pepper slices in some olive oil, and add salt and pepper to taste. 

Fourth, put the peppers on the grill, and cook, flipping them over once or twice, until the peppers start to blacken at the edges and soften up a bit (should take about ten minutes). Fifth, serve the peppers with whatever else you're making. We had them with grilled swordfish and quinoa salad, and the flavor combination was fantastic.

 

I'm not crazy about raw peppers, but I looooove them grilled because the flavor becomes so much deeper. You can stick with just one color, if you're new to peppers or don't like the flavor of a certain color pepper, or you can pick a nice variety to make the side dish that much more appealing.

This also works with...pretty much any other vegetable, and most fruits. One of my all-time favorite summer dishes is grilled tomatoes--you cut them in half, horizontally, brush a little olive oil on the halves, and grill them, face down, for a couple of minutes, until the edges are black and the tomatoes are soft. The natural sugars in the tomatoes caramelize while they grill, and the flavor you get is out. of. this. world.

Can you tell I like grilling?