Food & Wine Magazine did it again. They totally seduced me. I mean, I love to make fun of how out of touch they are with the “little folk” who don’t have $80 to plunk down on a wine. And the recipes? Don’t get me started. Half of them require ingredients that you need to crawl up a Himalayan mountain and see the guy in the second yurt on the left in order to find them. Or hit up six specialty stores, depending on your neighborhood.
But every now and then, they’ll showcase a recipe that looks easy. Panade? Well, maybe not. BUT – call it a Tomato, Chard and Gruyere Casserole, and you’ve hooked me. How easy can that be?
Six hours after I started shopping for ingredients, the darn thing is in the oven. (Okay, so I went along the untrodden pathways to find the freshest tomatoes at little roadside stands. So it took awhile. Cutting up the chard? That took forever!) Unfortunately, the first roadside stand is where I bought my tomatoes. It was also the biggest roadside stand, the most commercial stand, and the most expensive stand. It is not a place I will go to again.
But the ingredients, by themselves, weren’t expensive, except for the gruyere cheese. $21 a pound! I bought just under half a pound, since I knew I had some in the fridge – but still, $8.50 for a tiny sliver of CHEESE? I’m thinking, the next time I’ll make it with swiss cheese, and whatever else I may happen to have in the fridge.
So you butter a casserole, layer in the day old peasant bread (which I cut the minute we got home and let just sit out), then layer in thickly-cut fresh tomatoes, then the cooked chard/onion mix (oh, go ahead and look it up – you KNOW you want to!), plus the aforementioned gruyere. Repeat, and end with the last of the bread. Then you do some magic to it (get the recipe!) and put it in the oven. For an hour. And a bit.
See? It’s a sandwich. Sigh.
When I showed the photo of the casserole to my oldest son, he said to me, “Oh. A sandwich.”
I felt like such an idiot. Because duh, this is exactly that. A sandwich. True, a hot sandwich with no meat in it and a nifty sense of France, but still…a sandwich. With expensive and yummy cheese in it.
Seduced again by Food & Wine. (Recipe, page 100 of the August 2012 Food & Wine Magazine)
What are you cooking this week?
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Hey, all month I’m over at The Romance Reviews for their Sizzling Summer Event! http://www.theromancereviews.com/event.php
Lots of contests and freebies and Author Chats – I’m there Saturday, July 14th. Drop on by and say “hey” !
I think I’d chop the chard before I cooked it – it’s easier, and wouldn’t take so long to cook…. you could basically blanch it and then do the onions. Or, even better, just saute it with the onions and thyme (and some garlic).
Sounds good, though!!
Smart, Laurie! Yes, I thought about doing that, too – but it said to cook it whole. *shrug* The first time around, I do try to follow the recipe…
“Panade” should have been your first clue. “Pan” bread and so forth. Still, though, it looks yummy, sandwich or not. I’m having a problem with the chard factor, however. Just picked a bushel of the stuff and made for dinner the following: chard and mango salad (with balsamic vinagrette), pasta with tomato and chard sauce (grated parmesan) and for dessert, chard and blueberry smoothie. I may never be able to look at a curly leaf again. 😉
True, Sarah – but unfortunately, “panade” was in tiny letters below the Tomato, Chard and Gruyere casserole! My bad for not looking more carefully…
Okay, I laughed my rear off when I read your son’s comment because I thought Panade was just a fancy word for Panini which used to be a fancy word, too, but now just means toasted and pressed sandwich to me. The picture also made me think, “ooo, what a yummy looking sandwich.” $21 dollars for some cheese?!?! What the heck. Swiss it is
It looks yummy. It had better be deliciously cheesy for the price tag. lol