cook: charcuterie + comfort

Last Sunday, Cecilia invited neighbors to participate in charcuterie. To balance out all the proteins of cheeses and meats, I made a vegetable dish. Endive encasing hearts of palm drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt and black pepper.      

Cecilia thought the palm heart was cheese not a vegetable! The bitterness of the endive was a pleasant counterpoint to all the salty fats in the cambezola, gouda, toscano, salami and cappicolla.

A few nights later, I had invited Cecilia over for family dinner of sinigang. While the pork neck bones and spare ribs were furiously boiling in a Dutch oven, I quartered eggplant from our garden, spliced baby bok choi in half, trimmed long beans, and peeled and cut up taro.                

After a couple hours when the pork was slipping off the bones, I added the vegetables to the soup.

I had Cecilia boil a pot of rice, and we enjoyed a fine meal with condiments of soy sauce, patis and calamansi. 

I craved even more comfort and last night made a sandwich with my favorite cold cut of mortadella. However, instead of the usual, I changed it up with focaccia, pistachio pesto, and burrata. The recipe is very simple, slather bread with pistachio pesto...        

 

...then layer mortadella and burrata and eat!

 

The sandwich wasn't as delicious as I thought it would be. I should have sprinkled a bit of sea salt and black pepper on the cheese. 

And yet I want the sandwich again, and so I will eat it again for lunch but will probably add sundried tomato and broil the cheese and bread before adding the mortadella.