A Summer Supper

Last week I bought the newest Cooks Illustrated magazine. Immediately I knew I was going to try their recipe for Rosemary Focaccia. It required quite a few steps, from making a biga to folding it several times over three hours but it promised a beautiful, tasty artisanal bread. And, boy, did it deliver! The crust shattered as we bit into it and the inside was soft but well-structured. Just perfect! I am so making this bread again.
I served the bread with a homemade Minestrone soup that I did in the slow cooker. It was really good too and perfect for all those summer vegetables coming out of your garden right now. The recipe is below.

The final course was fresh mint ice cream made with real mint from the garden. Don't expect your typical flavor here. This stuff is slightly vegetal but oh so good and refreshing. A remarkable ending to a summer supper.

Slow-Cooker Minestrone

Adapted from Cook's Country

Ingredients:

1 cup dried white beans (I used flageolets.)

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 onions, chopped fine

4 carrots, chopped

8 garlic cloves, minced

1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes

6 cups chicken broth

2 cups basil leaves

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 cup fresh green beans cut into 2 inch pieces

1 bunch Swiss chard, stemmed and chopped

1/2 cup dried macaroni

Salt and pepper

1. Soak beans overnight. Drain and simmer for 20 minutes. Drain. Put in slow cooker.

2. Heat oil in a large saucepan. Saute onions and carrots over medium heat for 5 minutes. Add garlic. Saute for another minute. Add tomatoes and cook for 4 minutes. Transfer mixture to slow cooker.

3. Chop 1/2 cup of the basil. Add it to the slow cooker along with the broth, oregano, and red pepper flakes. Cover and cook on low for 7 to 8 hours.

4. During the last hour of cooking, add the green beans, Swiss chard, and dried macaroni to soup.

5. Before serving chop remaining 1 1/2 cup basil. Stir basil into soup. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve with plenty of parmesan cheese.

Martha Mondays: Zucchini Lasagna

So . . . I am finally getting around to posting last Monday's challenge . . . zucchini lasagna. Our neighbors have been generously sharing their bounty of zucchini so this seemed like a good recipe to me until I noticed that it had no tomato sauce. What? No tomato sauce inlasagna? There's no way I was going to get my family to even taste it without tomato sauce. So I decided to make the lasagna exactly as directed but I was going to add a layer of our favorite meat sauce. It seemed a pretty straightforward recipe. A bit different than my own but somewhat similar. The filling was made from ricotta and cream cheese. And the zucchini was not precooked because the no-boil noodles needed the extra liquid. I prepared it. I baked it. It came out looking like this. And it smelled so yummy!

BUT it did not taste so yummy. It wasn't horrible or inedible or anything.

It was just . . . well, it was weird. The cream cheese was all wrong for lasagna. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Great for a bagel but wrong for lasagna. And the zucchini didn't seem cooked to me. It was warm but it was still crunchy, too crunchy. My family ate it but the only one who loved it was the two-year-old. I'll stick with my mom's recipe. Thank you very much!