This Guanciale Chickpea Salad is a play on an Italian Antipasto Salad. It features crisp gem lettuce, olives, sliced red grapes, pickled shallots, torn fresh mozzarella, and chickpeas tossed in a preserved lemon vinaigrette and topped with seared slabs of guanciale and hard-boiled eggs. This salad may seem a little disjointed and it certainly does have a lot going on. But I think you will find that each forkful makes a certain sense. This dish hits all the notes: salty, sweet, savory, sour, tart, and meaty. No two bites are the same. And while this dish has a lot of moving parts, it is a cinque to make. This salad isn’t a side or a starter, it’s definitely a main course.
Bangers and Butter Beans
I have a small confession to make. I developed today’s recipe because I liked the way its name sounded. The phrase Bangers and Butter Beans randomly strolled into my mind one day and I fell for the sonic romance of it. It sounded like something a Roald Dahl character would tuck into. It’s funny, you never know what will set a recipe in motion. I think most people would imagine a recipe’s name would be the final touch rather than the starting gun. And it is true, this is more an exception than a rule. Sometimes a recipe is born from a particular detail in a restaurant meal or a dish of little consequence featured in a movie or TV show. Sometimes it’s as simple as finding an abundance of one ingredient at your local grocery store. And let’s not forget the OG food muse – seasonality.
BLT Pappardelle
Okay, I realize today’s BLT Pappardelle might be a tad controversial. Admittedly using a sandwich as a jumping-off point for a pasta dish is a little eyebrow-raising. I mean, for some strange reason the BLT makes sense as a salad even as a pasta salad, but a pasta fresh from the skillet? It’s also a pasta that isn’t remotely Italian, which the Internet generally hates. And there is the question of hot lettuce – is that really something we need in our lives? All of these are valid points and reasonable reasons not wanting to make this BLT Pappardelle. But I have one counterargument – this dish is freaking delicious and well worth the rule-breaking. And I promise the lettuce is introduced after the pasta has been taken off of the heat.
Rosemary Focaccia with Mortadella and Pistachio Labneh
I’ve always been a fan of thick-crust pizza probably because I’ve always been a fan of bread. Well, really carbs in general. In my neck of the woods, most restaurant pizza is Neopolitan style, which is great – I have no complaints. But it’s not the only kind of pizza I want to see in the world. I adore New York style, and I can get down with Detroit, but my true love is Sicilian-style pizza or Sfincione. Today’s Rosemary Focaccia with Mortadella and Pistachio Labneh features a pillowy Scilian-style pizza crust topped with rosettes of shaved mortadella, dollops of earthy and tangy pistachio labneh, and torn fresh mozzarella. This pizza is by no means a traditional sfincione but my goodness, is it delicious. So let’s make it!