Nectarine + tomato panzanella

Guys, I quit my job recently. Today was the first day of my life without my old job. So far I have:

– Eaten nearly a whole bag of corn chips
– Organised my loose leaf tea collection into labelled jars
– Spent $40 on a candle
– Done the spring clean I’ve been meaning to do for at least a year
– Run up the steepest hill in Brisbane. With these guys. Three times in a row.

I think I’m doing stage 1 of unemployment right. To clarify, stage 1 is when you haven’t run out of money yet and buy extravagant items you always denied yourself WHILST WORKING (what’s with that?). It’s the getting-shit-done and screw-my-diet but also time-to-get-fit stage. I suspect stage 2 is when I whip out re-runs of The Office and sit on the couch for days eating homemade strawberry ice cream, but that’s not confirmed yet.

BUT FIRST: Melbourne. Tomorrow I’m heading down to the cultured city to hang out with my friends in their rambling house in… hang on, let me get this right: Carlton North, most assuredly not North Carlton. Because another aspect of stage 1 unemployment is booking spontaneous interstate trips to visit the people you care about way more than a silly job.

But before any of that we need to talk about panzanella. It’s a bread salad, which is good news for you if you like bread and you like salad.

The nectarine is a somewhat personal addition to this traditional Italian dish, but I think that it worked here. It’s also got chunks of tomato, bocconcini, garlicky croutons, and an almost illegal amount of basil. It’s an ugly, chunky monstrosity of a salad, but its beauty lies therein. Grab a fork and get all of those flavours in ya mouth.

Catch you soon! Hopefully I’ll be perfecting that strawberry ice cream recipe sometime soon.

Nectarine + tomato panzanella | Serves 4

(The size of my slicing is just a guide. This is a messy, beautiful beast of a salad, and you can slice the tomatoes and nectarines up however you wish. Similarly, if you can’t deal with the idea of ripping up the baguette, go ahead and slice it instead!)

3 large tomatoes, sliced into 8ths
3 large nectarines, roughly sliced into ~3 cm pieces
200g bocconcini or mozzarella cheese, roughly cubed
20-25 basil leaves (most of a bunch)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small baguette or similar crusty bread, torn up into rough pieces (or sliced if you prefer)
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

Dressing
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp maple syrup

To make the dressing: pour the extra virgin olive oil, apple cider vinegar and maple syrup into a small jar or container and shake to combine. Set aside.

Place the tomatoes, nectarines, bocconcini and basil leaves into a serving bowl and toss to combine.

Heat the olive oil in a large frypan over medium high heat. Add the bread and garlic into the pan with a big pinch of salt, and saute for 3-4 minutes until crispy. Add the bread into the serving bowl, pour the dressing all over the salad, and use tongs to mix everything together.

Serve straight away, and eat it all up because it does not keep well (dat bread goes soggy pretty quick being surrounded by all those liquids).

Rye soda bread + dill butter

Most Fridays, I wake up thinking, “Yay, it’s Friday! I’m gonna have a few quiet drinks tonight, because I deserve it.” Fast forward 12 hours, and you’ll most likely find me giggling uncontrollably, beer sloshing unsteadily in my glass, well on my way to being happily sozzled. The next morning when I wake up, the first thing I ask myself is, “Was last night worth today?” And the answer is usually, “No,” before I drag myself to the lounge room and stare longingly at the coffee machine from the couch, feeling like crap and strangely guilty that today is going to be another write-off. Yet since the start of my drinking career at age 19 (much older than the Australian average), I’ve never stopped to question what it is that makes me do this so frequently. Why do I need to reward a week of hard work with a night of hard drinking? Then I started reading this book by The Age writer Jill Stark, a Scotswoman living in Melbourne, which she wrote whilst taking an entire year away from booze.

Only a few days ago, the idea of a Friday night without a drink glued to my hand seemed like an impossibility. But Jill’s book made me realise that it might be possible to have a great time without getting drunk. If she did it for a whole year, surely I can manage a Friday night. So that’s why I’m writing this blog post today, having done four loads of washing, cleaned the house, and baked and photographed this gorgeous recipe from Heidi Swanson. It’s actually staggering how much I’ve achieved just because I didn’t choose to get drunk last night. And despite my expectations, I had a fantastic night nonetheless, getting home at 11.30 pm, which I consider to be a late one. In fact, getting this blog off the ground has been pushed back and back too many times because of a hangover getting in the way. All I can think is I need to do sober Fridays a lot more often.

This is one of my favourite things I’ve made from Heidi’s (second!) cookbook, Super Natural Everyday. The rye soda bread comes together in five minutes, and the dill butter is the perfect accompaniment. But the best thing about this was when it came down to tearing off a wedge of the bread, still hot, slathering it with the herby butter, and shoving it inelegantly into my mouth, I didn’t feel the least bit queasy. So to more sober Fridays, and more Saturdays spent doing what I love.

Rye soda bread + dill butter | Makes 8 wedges of bread
Recipes from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Everyday – no adaptations (they’re really perfect as is – recipe steps rewritten by me)

Rye soda bread
275g rye flour
225g plain flour, plus 1 tbsp more for dusting
1 3/4 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
1 1/4 teaspoons fine sea salt
475ml buttermilk, plus 1 tbsp more for brushing

Dill butter
1 1/2 tbsp finely chopped fresh dill
1 1/2 tbsp finely chopped fresh chives
1 1/2 tbsp finely chopped eschalot
115g unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 tsp fine sea salt
60g soft goats cheese

Preheat oven to 220C and line a baking tray with baking paper.

Sift the rye flour, plain flour, bicarb soda and salt into a large mixing bowl and stir together with a spatula. Make a well in the centre and add the buttermilk. Mix with the spatula until the mixture just comes together.

Turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead for around 30 seconds and form into a ball.

Place the ball of dough on the baking tray, brush with additional buttermilk and dust with additional flour. Using a sharp knife, cut 4 deep slices into the dough as though you were slicing a pizza. It’s meant to be a rustic-style loaf, so it doesn’t matter if there are cracks in the dough or if some slices are deeper than others.

Bake for 30 minutes in the middle of the oven then transfer to the top for 5 minutes to grill the top and achieve a nice, toasted top.

While the rye bread is baking, prepare the dill butter. Mash all ingredients together with a fork in a small mixing bowl and store in a jar.

Remove the rye bread from oven and eat pretty much straight away. Slice off wedges and slather them with dill butter.