From Fancy to Finger Food

This one has been in the works for a long time. I really like the idea of making a panzanella where I grew the tomatoes and baked the bread myself, and finally my plants are giving me ripe fruit! For those of you who are unfamiliar, panzanella is essentially a bread salad. Traditionally it was made as a way to use stale bread, but here we will toast the bread to get a little extra flavor. Though I don't dislike greens, it's nice to mix things up a bit (I've been eating a ton of greens since I often get them in my CSA box), and this salad is all tomatoes and bread. The vinaigrette is very punchy, which I think is necessary in this type of dish and also makes it quite refreshing. Following a brilliant tip from a Serious Eats article on the subject, I salted the tomatoes and collected the juices to add to the vinaigrette, which really made it pop. I thought I'd want some sliced red onion in the panzanella, but I actually found that it wasn't necessary - ...

It's officially tomato season in Apt 2A, where the tomato plant:human ratio is 3:1! (I won't delve into the overall plant:human ratio, but it is very high). I picked my first harvest recently, most of which went into this salad. My cherry tomato plant, especially, has really exploded and I expect I'll soon be drowning in cherry tomatoes. Perhaps more importantly, this blog is a year old today! Although it has occasionally been neglected for long periods of time, I'm still quite pleased (and a little surprised) that I've been doing this for a whole year. Lots of people surprised me with their support and enthusiasm for my public ramblings about food (and occasionally plants), so thank you all for reading! In celebration, I've prepared one of the most summery things I could think of. Like all good summer recipes, this is more of a loose sketch and should be guided by whatever is freshest and most beautiful in your crisper at the moment. Or, in my case, whate...