Weekends are tough. Not for dinner. There’s time for dinner. And certainly time for breakfast. Weekend mornings are great for breakfast. A slow prep in a well-lighted kitchen, the house waking into itself. We enjoy the scent of freshly brewed coffee and have time enough to pause and enjoy it. Eggs or oatmeal, French toast or fruit. Lunches, however, are another matter.
In my house we sit down together for dinner nearly every evening, even weekends. In fact, Sunday dinners are one of my favorites; I have time enough in the kitchen to really cook. But lunch is often a solitary affair, each of us cobbling together nourishment from a hodge-podge of ingredients and scarfing it down between morning laundry and afternoon errands.
I think it might be time to stop the rush, to pause a moment and enjoy the mid-day meal. To make something worth eating. Worth enjoying. It doesn’t have to be complicated or fancy, and it doesn’t have to take forever. Indeed, it can’t. It just has to be good. Sunday’s lunch fit the bill nicely, based on a Rocco recipe (I know, right?).
Grilled cheese and roasted red pepper sandwich with fennel salad
Ingredients (serves 4):
8 slices of delicious bread
2 red peppers, roasted and peeled
Provolone cheese, sliced thin
2 medium fennel bulbs, shaved
Fennel greens, plucked and sorted
2.5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
kosher salt
ground black pepper
Techniques
shave
slice
Method
grill
Begin by placing a pan over medium heat. While the pan heats, cut the fennel. Halve the bulbs, remove the stalks. From the stalks, pick the tender greens. They look like dill. Use a mandolin to shave the fennel bulbs, then mix in the greens.
Make sandwiches using a half a pepper and two slices of provolone for each one. Swirl a pat of butter in the heated pan and lay in the sandwich, cheese side down. Let it grill for about three minutes, flip, then three minutes more.
During the final three minutes, toss the fennel and greens with the olive oil and vinegar. Add a couple pinches of salt and a dash of the black pepper.
The mid-day break was fantastic. Home from grocery shopping I sat in the living room with my son perched in his bouncy chair on the coffee table. He watched me eat and drink and I watched him laugh and play with a plastic bee. Would that all weekends could contain such pause.
2 Comments
this is mouthwatering!..mmm… a grown up grilled cheese. Love red peppers!! Id like to bite into it right about now..haha.
Looks delicious! So much better than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich! Nothing better than waking up Monday feeling you were able to pause and relax over the weekend.