Tags
Around My French Table, balsamic vinegar, bruschetta, Dorie Greenspan, goat cheese, sourdough rosemary baguette, strawberry
Today is French Friday and after taking last Friday off (pistachios are among the nuts I will not eat, I just don’t care for them or enough to make an oil or buy their oil) I’m ready to go with this weeks recipe!
It was really simple, a “tartine” of baguette, strawberries and goat cheese drizzled with balsamic. Essentially a fruity goat cheese version of bruschetta which I think would have been a better “word” for it.
I bought a locally baked sourdough rosemary baguette – which was fabulously crusty on the outside and soft and pillowy on the inside, and the only baguette to date that has that hard crusty outside. I don’t know what’s going on in bakeries around here but they just can’t bake a decent baguette! Any Frenchman would just spit on the bakeries around here… I should just go back to baking my own for as much as I have been let down. But let me tell you, this baguette was right on the money! The only drawback was that was sourdough, but lucky for me, they dont do that well either so it was pretty good for me! Mei and Emily munched on it while in line to pay and the entire car ride home. In fact, it ruined Mei’s dinner because she ate so much of the baguette and then strawberries as I was slicing them – but that’s another story.
The strawberries simply needed to be sliced and layered with the goat cheese and thinly sliced baguette but in my mind, the baguette just had no place in the picture. It was weird to eat such a ripe, fresh strawberry against the baguette so we ditched the baguette and smeared a good dollop of goat cheese on a thickly sliced strawberry and set them on a plate. I gave Mei the rounded ends of the strawberries to eat which just delighted her to no end.
This trip to the store, I bought what promised to be a good bottle of balsamic vinegar and tried my hand at drizzling…. you can see the picture, my drizzling skills need a bit of work, I barely tipped the bottle and it sploshed all over the place. Lucky for me, this balsamic was pretty good and I didn’t mind it too much against the cheese and strawberries, although I prefered them without the balsamic.
Oh and the cheese! Gone are the days where I can go to the store and pick up blocks of cheese for a couple quid. I can’t believe I spent $4 on a small round of goat cheese! That’s nearly triple what I ever paid in England… such a shame to have left Europe all together. The cheese when we opened it was just compressed into a small baggie so I wasn’t able to slice it they way I imagined I would like to serve it, so shmearing was the best route and it turned out to work out well anyways!
This is easily a great recipe to be pulled out last minute for a party or, even better, for breakfast…. I simply cut a bunch of strawberries in half and shmeared them with goat cheese for breakfast and toasted some of the baguette to have with it. DELICIOUS!!
To see how the other Doristas fared, click here! If you would like to join our group, look here for a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Around My French Table,” and join in the fun!