Two at the Table_Menu_Week of August 2 2014

We have dinner plans for later in the week, but we still have lots of wonderful produce and cheese (and even duck!) from Long Island to enjoy, so we’re excited to jump into another week of cooking!

Kim has a very special dinner planned for Sunday night: Rachel Khoo’s Crispy Skinned Duck Breast with a Cherry Sauce and Creamy Spinach and Polenta. Duck can be a little intimidating (it’s very fatty, so it’s easy to burn), but Kim has had great success making it before and this recipe seems even easier than others we’ve tried. We’ll enjoy the duck with one of our bottles of Torciano Baldassarre Rosso Tuscano.

We bought a lot of heirloom cherry tomatoes during our recent trip and found the perfect recipe for them for Monday night: Ina Garten’s Salmon and Melting Cherry Tomatoes. (Please note that the link will take you to a review of Ina’s Foolproof cookbook, with the recipe, on the Calgary Herald website.) We’ll pair this with an Italian white wine, Bastianich Friulano.

On Tuesday, we’re going to use up the remaining goat cheese and heirloom cherry tomatoes make something simple: Tomatoes and Goat Cheese with Garlic Toasts, a dish inspired by Ina Garten’s Tomatoes & Burrata with Garlic Toasts. This dish involves minimal cooking – all you need to do is toast the bread and if you have the patience to stand over the toaster, you don’t really need the oven to do that – which makes it perfect for summer. We’ll probably finish the Torciano with dinner tonight.

We still have some leftover baby Yukon gold potatoes from last week, so we’re going to do a mash-up of recipes to use them. Tony found a fun recipe on the Bon Appetit website for Crispy Salt-and-Vinegar Potatoes, which he thought would make a great side dish but would make for a pretty boring dinner on their own. Enter Kim, who found a Martha Stewart recipe for Warm Spinach Salad with Fried Egg and Potatoes. The plan is to cook the potatoes according to the Bon Appetit recipe and use them in the Martha Stewart salad recipe. The rest of the white from Tuesday should pair nicely with this dish

On Thursday night, we say good-bye to the last of the goat cheese (did we mention we bought a LOT of goat cheese?) with a recipe of our own creation: Flatbreads with Wildflower Honey Goat Cheese, Arugula and Grilled Peaches. We plan to use pizza dough we have in the freezer as the base for this dish and to dress it up with the wildflower honey goat cheese and some arugula for a little bit of bite. We’re also going to grill some of the peaches we bough on Long Island. This will be an experiment for us; we’ll let you know how it turns out!