Grilled Fontina and Vegetable Antipasti

Choosing this recipe for a weeknight meal came more from the awesome bread I had from the farmers' market than it did from its ease and simplicity.  We bought a loaf of Farm Bread from our favorite baker at the market: Rock Hill Bakehouse; it's dense and jam-packed full of flavor but the downside?  It goes bad.  And fast.  So I try to incorporate it into my meals as much as I can before the mold moves in.

Looking through my saved magazine recipes, I found this one from Food and Wine: Grilled Fontina and Vegetable Antipasti.  The online recipe has all the measurements (the original print version I have doesn't have any amounts or measurements) but the beauty of this recipe is that it's perfect for improvisation, especially if you're nervous about improvising.  Here's how mine turned out:

GRILLED FONTINA AND GRILLED ANTIPASTI

adapted from Food and Wine

8 1/2-inch thick slices of peasant bread

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

12 oz. sliced Fontina cheese

1/2 c. (4 oz.) roasted red peppers, sliced thin

1/2 c. (4 oz.) marinated artichokes, drained and roughly chopped

3 pickled jalapenos, seeded and roughly chopped

1 stalk green garlic, sliced thin (optional)

Fresh ground pepper, to taste

Brush the bread on one side with olive oil and arrange, oiled side down, on a work surface.  Top half the slices with Fontina, peppers, artichokes, and jalapenos.  Close the sandwiches.

Preheat a skillet, panini press, or grill (I have a stovetop castiron grill).  Grill the sandwiches over medium heat  until the bread is toasted and the cheese is melted, about 10 minutes.  Use a panini press - or a spatula - to put pressure on the sandwiches; this helps the cheese melt and melds the flavors together.  Flip the sandwiches to toast the other side.  Take off the grill, halve the sandwiches, and serve right away.  Serves 4.

You can treat these ingredients as guidelines rather than rules; it really is all to taste.  I added fresh ground pepper.  And I also had some fresh green garlic (not the usual dried kind) from the farmers' market so I sliced that super thin and added that as well.  I'm not a fan of olives but maybe some olives might be good too?  If you like more heat, you can add more jalapenos.  It's all up to you.  Fun, right?

I'm on the bacon bandwagon and I love myself a chunk of rare steak.  But I do try to keep it to a minimum and, more often than not, we eat vegetarian meals around here.  This one is packed with flavor, and the variations are endless.  Lastly, I can easily deconstruct it for Bug: she just had cheese on hers (a.k.a. a grilled cheese sandwich).

Eat, drink, and don't skimp on flavor just because it's a weeknight.

Artichoke Crostini and the Picky Eaters who Don't Love Artichokes

We're still in post-moving mode around these parts so my dinners have remained simple affairs and I have a real easy one to share with you...

...but before I do, I want to address something that I don't think I've talked much about in the last three years of writing this blog: Picky Eaters.  Specifically, picky kids.  Bug is a Picky Eater...which my mom thinks serves me right since I was THE Pickiest Eater as a kid.  Which goes to show you that kids can grow out of it, as now I'll eat (or at least try) nearly everything.

So how do I handle my Picky Eater?  Well, first, Adam and I have 1-2 nights a week that we call Adult Dinner. I give Bug her dinner around 6:00, usually Annie's Homegrown Macaroni and Cheese with a sliced apple on the side.  Then while Adam puts her to bed and reads to her, I make our dinner.  Which is always something Bug would hate.  Our Adult Dinners keep me sane: I can be adventurous with my meals a couple times a week and I can also connect with Adam without having to worry about what Bug is (or is not) eating.

Most nights, though, we're having Family Dinners.  But I'm not living on mac n' cheese and apples!  And I am firmly against making a separate meal for kids on a nightly basis.  So what I often do is set aside a deconstructed version of our dinner for Bug.  As an example, when I made Jamie Oliver's Fifteen Christmas Salad, I took a picture of me and Adam's dish.  Bug's dish, though, was set up different.  I separated the ingredients from one another: her plate had a small pile of prosciutto slices, a small pile of orange slices, a few pieces of cheese, a couple slices of bread.  So she didn't have a different meal - it was all the same ingredients we had.  I like to think that I just plated it differently.

That was the case with these artichoke crostini.  I first read about this in Saveur's "6 Quick Preps" for artichokes.  I brushed bread slices with olive oil and then grilled them on my stovetop castiron grill.  Once grilled, I set them aside and sprinkled with flake salt and freshly ground pepper.  Then I spread each piece of bread with marscapone cheese (I leave the amount of cheese up to your own tastes).  On top of the toasts, add generously chopped jarred marinated artichoke hearts.  I finished it with a sprinkling of finely chopped Italian parsley and cut garlic chives (from my window "garden"!), flake salt, and pepper.  On the side, I tossed baby arugula with olive oil, Dijon mustard, salt and pepper.

For the Picky Eater, I omitted the artichokes from the crostini so she basically got grilled bread and marscapone cheese.  Then I added a bite of artichoke on the side because the rule is that she has to at least try one bite of everything.  And she got apple slices instead of salad.

So that's how we do it in our family because a foodie parent does not a foodie kid make (even Mario Batali has publicly talked about how picky his kids are).  This meal was incredibly simple but high in flavor - exactly what I'm looking for in a weekday meal for two parents who work outside the home.  And it was "deconstructable", which is a crucial element in pleasing the entire family.

Eat, drink, and hope that my Picky Eater becomes a Foodie Adult.