Peppered Bacon and Blackberry Grilled Cheese

We wish you a Happy National Grilled Cheese Month. Take the time this month to grab some cheese, some other ingredients and sandwich them between two slices of bunnage or breadage.

That's certainly what we will be doing. We have this simple yet tasty recipe for you today, plus a few more later this month.

As with a lot of our recipes, this one started with an ingredient: Blackberry Spread that we picked up from Brennan's Food Market. (If you can't get it, you could use some other blackberry preserves or jam.) We used a lot of it in previous dishes and snacks, but we had some left over. 

We wanted some other ingredients that would stand up to that deliciously sweet spread, so we picked out some aged cheddar (again from Brennan's) and some Nueske's Thick-Sliced Peppered Bacon. We piled all of that on some hearty Sprouted Rye from Angelic Bakehouse.

We wanted the cheese to stand out, obviously, and the tangy aged cheddar does well. It pairs nicely with the almost syrupy sweet blackberry sauce and the smoky bacon. You'll be glad you gave this grilled cheese a try.

Peppered Bacon and Blackberry Grilled Cheese
2 servings

4 slices rye bread
butter
4 to 5 ounces of aged cheddar, sliced
4 to 5 slices of peppered bacon, cooked
2 tablespoons blackberry spread

1. Place one slice per sandwich of rye bread on griddle, buttered side down.

2. Place cheese on top of unbuttered side of bread. Top that with bacon. 

3. Spread 1 tablespoon of blackberry spread on unbuttered side of another piece of bread. Place on top of sandwich, buttered side of bread up.

4. Grill until golden brown and delicious on both sides.

Rotisserie Chicken Panini with Caerphilly Cheese, Granny Smith Apples and Lemon Mayo

We had some delicious sliced rotisserie chicken that we bought at Costco a while back. When we were pondering meals recently, we thought of that and of paninis, and that led to a great and delicious sandwich.

That's how this recipe started to come together. But we knew we wanted some cheese and a couple of other ingredients to really make a good panini.

So we headed to Brennan's Market and perused their cheeses. (Yes, we ate multiple samples while we were there. It's a tough job, but we do it for you, dear readers. :) ) And we came across a Wisconsin caerphilly cheese sample that we thought would be perfect. (We also bought a loaf of Breadsmith bread there, too.)

The cheese ended up being a lovely crumbly creamy, a perfect complement to the sweetness of the Granny Smith apples and the slight acidity of the lemon juice in the mayo that we included.

Rotisserie Chicken Panini with Caerphilly Cheese, Granny Smith Apples and Lemon Mayo
4 to 6 servings

1 loaf artisan bread
1/2 to 3/4 pound, sliced rotisserie chicken
2 to 3 medium Granny Smith apples, sliced
1/4 to 1/2 pound caerphilly cheese
1 cup mayo
1/2 lemon, juiced
butter

1. Juice lemon and add to mayo and mix thoroughly.

2. Butter two slices of bread with butter and lay them, butter-side down, on a griddle over medium heat.

3. Assemble panini by adding chicken, apples, cheese and lemon mayo. Top with other piece of bread, which is also buttered on the outside.

4. Cook until bottom is golden brown, then flip. Serve when both sides are golden brown.

Stuffed Veggie Bread

Stuffed bread turned up during a recent meal planning discussion, and for good reason. Melissa came across several recipes on Pinterest and our Wisconsin food blogger friend Alison made Stuffed Veggie Bread recently.

So we set off to the store and the kitchen with a couple of roadmaps in hand.

The first (and what this blog post was going to be) was for Stuffed Pizza Bread. Alas, we realized when we started making it that we lacked mozzarella cheese, and it didn't feel right to call this recipe "pizza" without it.

Instead, this one morphed into Stuffed Veggie Bread, but there's nothing wrong with that. We'll just throw on some Parmesan instead. (Insert Wisconsin cheese giddiness.)

• Feel free to use less butter, if you're so inclined. We mixed in a lot of garlic and wanted to have those flavors in the dish, but you can always decrease the butter and garlic.

Stuffed Veggie Bread
4 servings

1 loaf Italian bread
1 stick butter
4 garlic cloves
2 to 3 green onions, chopped
1 green pepper, diced
2 to 3 large mushrooms, diced
10 to 12 black olives, diced
2 medium tomatoes, diced
1/2 cup cheddar cheese
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
pasta sprinkles for garnish

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. While the oven is heating, melt the butter and garlic together in the microwave. (Tip: Watch the butter or it will overflow if you put too much time on.)

2. Slice the bread in half, but do not cut all the way through. Leave the bottom 1/2 inch to 1 inch attached. Do the same for the loaf length-wise, cutting about 1 inch apart.

3. Stuff veggies and cheese down the slits and coat the garlic butter on the top of the loaf. Bake for 20 minutes.

Chocolate Zucchini Bread

After last year, I tried to be better about harvesting zucchini from our plant before they hit the ginormous size.

Well, that didn't happen this year. I have 30-plus cups of shredded zucchini sitting in the freezer. So there's nothing I can do but bake and bake and bake.

And, believe it or not, one thing I haven't baked is zucchini bread. So I set off to the kitchen with a recipe from Sugared Whisk.

I loved, loved this recipe. Really the chocolate had such strong flavor that you could barely notice zucchini was in there. Just a hint of zucchini flavor. Perfect.

This recipe will be made again, but with 30-plus cups, I'd like to diversify my zucchini baking. What else should I use my zucchini to bake?

Summer Bread Salad

Well, July 4 is now behind us, but we won't forget the family -- or the food -- from this weekend. As the plans for the get-together were gelling, Melissa saw some recipes for bread salad that she based ours off of.

It was a side dish she made to bring to the family gathering and, as always, it got good marks from testers aka our family. It's a nice, light dish to accompany any summer gathering.

Summer Bread Salad
1/2 ciabatta loaf
olive oil
salt and pepper
1 garlic clove
6 tomatoes, roughly cut
1 English cucumber, cut (or regular cucumber with inside scooped out)
1/2 cup basil, julienned
8 ounces Crave Brothers pearl mozzarella
Dressing
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 lemon, juiced
1 tablespoon honey
3 or 4 basil leaves, cut finely
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
salt and pepper

1. Cut the loaf in half and rub with garlic clove. Cut into squares and leave out to harden overnight.

2. Drizzle olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper over the ciabatta cubes. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes at 375 degrees.

3. Combine dressing ingredients in bowl and shake thoroughly.

4. Combine the bread salad ingredients into a bowl immediately before serving. We used red, orange and yellow tomatoes that we purchased from the Brookfield Farmers Market as a way to infuse color into the dish.

UPDATE (7/18/11): Welcome Post-College Kitchen readers! Dan messed up; only half of a ciabatta loaf is needed.

BLT Bread Salad

The search for quick and easy mid-week meals never stops. And our supply of garden-grown lettuce is the same way -- at least it seems so.

Convergence occurred in the A Duo of Chefs household when the June 2010 Cooking Light magazine showed up. Inside was a great and easy recipe for BLT Bread Salad.

To prepare the salad, cut a loaf of bread into cubes and bake for about 18 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Meanwhile, take some of Wisconsin's own Nueske's bacon and cook it on the stove.

This recipe sounds delicious already, right?

The rest is super easy. Take bacon out and stir in oil, red wine vinegar, black pepper and salt -- the dressing is done.

Then combine lettuce, wedges of tomatoes, green onions, feta and crumbled bacon. Coat with dressing, then toss and serve.

Using some of that bacon fat as the dressing? Genius. The flavors are so incredibly awesome -- smoky, tart, rich. And yes, it does taste like a deconstructed BLT sandwich. Yeah, it was a good night.