What do you do when you are hungry for a snack and you have a fresh baguette and all of the ingredients for the two perfect summer salads to go with it? Well if you are almost incapable of avoiding complication in the creation of even the simplest of summer snacks (like me), you make both.
Today’s summer afternoon snack started with a caprese. I think an insalata caprese would be in the top 3 contenders of foods that I’d want to have to eat on a desert island. I love them so much that when our garden is kicking out tomatoes and basil like mad, I’m eating them in as many as three meals a day. They are summer’s loveliest flavour and texture combination. A luscious tomato, cut thick, with generous slices of fresh mozzarella and just-picked basil leaves floated down upon them; finished with the lightest drizzle of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, salt and maybe a little pepper. I’m no stickler, but I will mention that these things taste like a million bucks if you’ve grown your own tomatoes and basil, or bought them very fresh from friendly farmer who has. And the mozzarella-it must be very fresh, milky and on the watery and porous side. I think the cryo-packed balls can often be as good as the packed-in-water in plastic containers from the grocery store. So many people love good fresh mozzarella that it is becoming very easy to find and cheap to buy. Enough about my caprese obsession. How about a picture of the golden tomato caprese that launched a thousand word paragraph?
This on its own is the perfect summer snack, but there are two hungry people in this house, and, I’ve also got some lovely dill, fresh eggs and lettuce, so I can’t stop with just the caprese. I boiled the eggs, or, if you are a student of Martha Stewart –hard cooked them.
Check out these gorgeous fresh eggs that I bought from a man named Fernando who raises them in the little town where I work.
For egg salad, eggs are boiled, peeled, sliced in half and ready to be chopped and combined with a little light mayonnaise, mustard, diced onion and celery and a little pepper and salt to taste, then piled on top of some lettuce and garnished with dill, both from the garden.
There isn’t much more to do then to place the plate between two hungry people to eat with baguette, or on their own. I put salt and pepper, olive oil and vinegar on the table, to adjust flavours, as needed. We dove in. It was fresh, flavourful and satisfying; the perfect summer snack.
