Just Plain Panzanella

Just look at that. So simple, so humble, so tasty!

Bread salad with lamb chunks, marinated artichoke quarters, ripe tomatoes and romaine.

Early in the day, I cut the bread cubes from a leftover sour baguette and left them to dry. When it was dinner time, I sautéed them lightly in olive oil in which I had softened two minced cloves of garlic. Set them aside and raised the heat and added some fresh thyme to the pan to sear bite-sized chunks of lamb steak quickly in the same pan so they were caramelized but still very pink inside. Set them aside. Piled the lettuce, tomato wedges and artichokes in a salad bowl and tossed with some balsamic vinaigrette thinned with an equal amount of lemon juice, then added the lamb, the juice from the pan and the bread to toss it all together.

Presented in a wide pasta bowl, it was hearty, chewy and filled with flavor. When the ingredients are good, food like this doesn't need to be fancy. It can be humble and simple and yet still pack a mighty delicious punch.

Pamzanella

It all began with stale bread, a lovely loaf of herb slab from the Acme Bakery that I forgot to serve with the beef stew. I hate it when that happens! So, here I was with a boatload of rapidly ossifying bread and My Beloved out of town on a business trip, so there was no one to help me eat it. Well, Cora would gladly help but my vet would have a fit.

Croutons are always a solution - and I made some - but there was still plenty of bread. Then, I remembered a wonderful chicken dish that I had at the Universal Café many moons ago, one that had a sort of bread salad underneath the succulent chicken, and that released my mind to think of bread as an ingredient rather than a side dish and that seemed like pure genius since we are trying to eat a meatless meal a week, anyway.

So, I looked over some quick recipes for panzanella but they all seemed to feature nice, ripe, summer tomatoes, an ingredient in very short supply in California del Norte right now. I could have bought lots of ripe ones from Mexico where they have a more salubrious climate for tomatoes but then there's the whole "eat locally" thing. Sheesh!

Nothing to do but invent. I had half a small yam, a couple of fresh carrots, a leek that needed eating, two or three shallots, and a handful of fresh asparagus in the fridge. No tomatoes. So, cut up the yam and carrots into bite-size pieces, washed and sliced the leek into sections, peeled the shallots and left them whole, and snapped the ends off the asparagus. I tossed the veggies in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, put the carrots and yam pieces into a large baking pan and slid them into a 350 degree oven, setting the timer for 20 minutes.

While those veggies were roasting, I cubed some of the herbalicious bread and tossed it with a little olive oil, as well. When the timer rang, I added the bread cubes and the sliced leek to the roasting pan, stirred them around with the other veggies, and set the timer for another 10 minutes. When the bell rang again, I threw in the asparagus and stirred everything one more time. Five minutes later, the asparagus were still brightly green and a little crisp, the bread cubes had toasted nicely and the rest of the veggies were richly caramelized. The thinnest leeks had gone over to the crispy-chewy side, a great place to be if you're a leek.

The resulting plate was crunchy-crispy-chewy-sweet-mellow-and-caramely dinner for one, as good a solo dinner as I have ever made. All because I had too much bread.