Back-of-the-Card Cheese & Olive Bread {FFwD}

June 14, 2013 at 11:12 am (Uncategorized)

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This week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe is right up my alley — bread, cheese, olives, tapenade, I mean, what’s not to like about that? This recipe is Dorie’s take on a quick bread recipe from the Comté cheese company.

Dorie’s version combines flour, baking powder, salt, eggs, milk, cheese, tapenade, olives, lemon zest, and olive oil. Everything is quickly mixed together, scraped into a pan, and baked for about 45 minutes. The house smelled heavenly while the loaves were in the oven! I doubled the recipe, and we had one loaf with dinner right after it baked. I’m taking the other one to a friend’s house this evening as part of a cheese plate.

We really liked this bread. It’s salty, cheesy, savory, and really rich. I cut back the salt called for in the recipe by just a bit, as I was worried that the cheese, olives, and tapenade would throw it over the top salt-wise. It came out fine, not too salty for my tastes. But I think it would have been OK without any additional salt, too.

My only complaint about the recipe was the amount of olive oil. It was more than 3/4 cup for the two loaves! And combined with the eggs, cheese, and oil-cured olives, it seemed a little on the oily side for me. I think you could cut the olive oil way back, and maybe even eliminate it entirely. I made a note in my book to use less oil next time.

This post participates in French Fridays with Dorie, a group cooking its way through Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table one delicious recipe at a time. To see what other participants thought of this recipe, click here.

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Goat Cheese & Strawberry Tartine {FFwD}

June 7, 2013 at 10:52 pm (Around My French Table, Dorie Greenspan, Family, French bread, French Fridays With Dorie)
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I wasn’t planning on participating in this week’s French Fridays with Dorie post. In fact, I hadn’t even looked at the recipe. But I wanted to see what everyone else had made, so around 5:00 this evening, I logged into the FFwD website to look at everyone’s posts. I kept seeing words like “easy”, “quick”, “only four ingredients”, and, most importantly “delicious”. I decided I’d better check out the recipe for myself.

Like some of the other Doristas, when I saw “tartine” in the title, I mistakenly assumed it was some kind of cake or layered dessert, which is why I had decided to sit this one out. So I was surprised to look at the recipe and note that it was really an open-faced sandwich of sorts. And a super simple one at that.

Baguette, goat cheese, strawberries, black pepper, and an optional drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Based on the short list of ingredients, the obvious ease with which it could be thrown together, and the rave reviews it was receiving from everyone, I decided to go ahead and make this recipe. I had to run to the store for the baguette (I ended up getting a loaf of French bread, as that was the closest thing they had), so I figured I probably wouldn’t get around to making it in time to post for this week’s FFwD roundup. And it was too late to think about writing a blog post anyway; but I wanted to try the tartine.

It was a lovely evening here, so we ended up lighting a campfire and sitting outside for a few hours after dinner. When we came in around 10:00, I noticed that the goat cheese was sitting out on the counter. I went to put it away, and saw the Mission Fig Balsamic Vinegar from Olive My Heart that I had reduced into a thick, gooey syrup following my balsamic reduction recipe. Before I knew it, I was firing up the broiler to toast the French bread and looking for a nice plate on which to assemble everything.

Less than five minutes later, I had these:

Stawberries and Goat Cheese

These were definitely worth making, even at 10:00 at night. I think Mom put it best when she said, “These taste better than they look, and they look amazing!”

So, with just over an hour to spare in my time zone, here’s this week’s post. I think I’ll look at next week’s recipe tomorrow and maybe make it this weekend.

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