Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Back to Blog Main Page

Panzanella

Posted September 20, 2010
Find more about salad , panzanella , bread , tomatoes
9  | 
I found this helpful Thank You! Your vote will be tallied soon!

So pretty. Also: yummy!

Attack of the Killer etc.

This comes together very quickly and fills your kitchen with the elegiac fragrance of summer's end.

See! It's already nearly done.

Voy-la!

In a slightly dishier dish. . .

Anni's baby needs panzanella, it turns out! Lots and lots of it.

And it is, of course, the herbivore Birdy's dream dinner.

Ben is a good sport. He ate two cubes, then polished off the rest of the baguette with butter. He lives for the rare occasions when white bread is permitted entry into the house. Poor little grain-fed thing.

It is the cusp season. Our countertops sound the alarm of tomatoes: "They're red! They're ripe! Something needs to happen with them! The fruit flies are coming!"; the summer perfume of basil lingers in the kitchen; our freezer and shelves are filling with salsa, sauce, and jam; our Anni housemate is like the tomatillos overflowing their quart baskets, each one so ripely full that it's splitting its husk. Her baby is due this week, and she is like an icon of the season, drifting through the house with her enormous peach of a belly--part now, part future.

And that's what it's like, because it's fall too, now. We drive past field after field embroidered with rows of butternut squash, and Michael, not a lover of squash, is incredulous. "Do they feed those to the cattle or something?" He is serious. "I mean, surely it's not people who are eating all of those." Oh, but it is! Soon it will be us too, with our warming and warm-hued soups, with our candles on the table as the evenings grow short. Birdy and I are reading Little House in the Big Woods, which always feels like the perfect Autumn book, since they are always harvesting this and that before some bad thing happens ("Is Pa still making bullets?" Michael asks, passing through the room. It is true that Pa melts many spoonfuls of pewter by the fire every night.) Here in the modern world, we go to bed with the ceiling fans spinning away the last of the muggy air, and then wake chilly-nosed under our down comforters. It is neither one thing nor yet the other.

It is also, if I may speak less romantically for a moment, allergy season. Ragweed? Sunflowers? Whatever it is, it's dreadful. Ben, practicing his recorder on my bed last night, stopped and sniffed into its mouthpiece with that delighted revulsion that comes from smelling the strange accumulation of your own spit. "Smell my recorder hole!" he said, holding it out to me. "Weirdly, it smells like lobster!" But I couldn't. Because I had a Kleenex wedged into each nostril. I want him to remember me as beautiful and elegant, canning tomatoes in the kitchen with my hair up. Instead of sprawled out beside him on the bed and stuffed with tissues, rasping and hawking to try and scratch my allergic throat, not even able to smell, beautifully and elegantly, his stinking recorder hole.

Still, I did make a beautiful dinner in an effort to get as many tomatoes off of the counter and into our bodies as was possible in a single sitting. I go through tomato-season phases where I make this Italian bread salad nearly every day--I love it so much. The bread gets all soggy and addictively garlicky, and the basil is so bright and pungent, and the tomatoes are just perfect in every way. Unless you're Ben, who will eat this salad, bless him, but only after he picks out the tomatoes. Make it because you've got a baguette staling on your counter top or because you've got tomatoes ripening everywhere or because it will be just such a perfect summer-fall meal. Which it is. You'll see.

Panzanella
Serves 4
Active time: 10 minutes; total time: 40 minutes

Crusty bread, tomatoes, basil, and vinaigrette are constants here, and then there are the variables: a bit of chopped red onion and white beans (both of which I add here) or cucumbers or fresh mozzarella, which is my favorite thing to add, but which I was too cheap to buy yesterday. Still, the beans make it a complete meal, albeit a nice, light one.

Part of a large crusty baguette or other good loaf of bread, cut into 3/4-inch cubes (enough to make 4-6 cups) 

2 pounds perfectly ripe tomatoes (about 4 to 6), cored and cut into chunks

1/2 cup basil leaves, stacked and slivered 

1 15-ounce can cannellini beans, drained
1/2 a small red onion, finely chopped
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

1/2 cup olive oil

1 large garlic clove, pressed

1 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

Put bread, tomatoes, basil, beans, and onion into a large bowl. Whisk together remaining ingredients. Pour enough dressing over the salad to moisten it, tossing it together with your hands, then let it sit for around half an hour to get soggy. Taste, and add more dressing if it needs it (although the tomatoes will have given off a lot of juice by now, so it may simply need a bit of salt.

Member Comments On...

Panzanella

Back to Main Blog Page
Search Recipes
300x250

About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

View My Profile View My Guestbook
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
August 2006
300x250
728x90
Please log in ...
Close
You must be logged in to use this feature.
Become a member

Thank You!

Thank you for helping us maintain a friendly, high quality community at Family.com. This comment will be reviewed by a community moderator.

Flag as Not Acceptable?

We review flagged content and enforce our Terms of Use, in which content must never be:

See full Terms of Use.