My grandma used to make an amazing dish called tomato & onion salad. It was very basic-cut up tomatoes & onion, sprinkle generously with dried oregano and covered with vegetable oil. Dip Italian bread into the oil & eat the tomatoes & onions. As you can imagine, it wasn't very healthy & I could eat about 8 pieces of bread soaked in oil at a sitting. Honestly, I should have been an overweight kid. Thanks for the good genes Grandma!
Anyway, I need to start using my abundance of tomatoes, so tonight I made a similar salad that's just a bit healthier. I sliced up my tiny onions from my garden (tedious comes to mind), tomatoes from the neighbors and frozen sweet corn. Green onions would be really good here, too if you can't take strong raw onions.
I would have liked to use fresh corn, but I don't have any so this works too. I sprinkled it all with salt, garlic powder, dried basil & of course dried oregano. I splashed on EVOO, a little red wine vinegar and some True Lemon to brighten it. Since I was too lazy to seed the tomatoes, I dumped the whole mixture into a colander to drain. I like this salad at room temperature, so the draining time works perfectly for it to come to room temp.
Instead of eating 8 slices of bread, I kept it to 2. I really wanted another one, but I abstained. (It was hard!)
In kind of a panzanella fashion, I laid a bread slice-crusts removed-in the bottom of my bowl and topped it with the salad & a bit more EVOO to encourage the bread to soak up the goodness.
And this is the heaven I ate! Fresh, bright and summery. Summer in a bowl.
Not the best picture, but you get the idea, right? Try it, I think you'll like it!
On to the main course, the meatloaf sliders. Just the name implies fun food! Honestly, all they are is sliced meatloaf on dinner rolls with ketchup. Don't tell anybody though. I gave Brian his plate and he seemed really excited. He gets excited about very little, I assure you. He said "What are these fun little things?"
Not bad for leftover night, eh? This winter I plan on mastering a vegetarian meatloaf. I'm not sure what will go in it, or how to make it stay together, but I will figure it out-if only for meatloaf sliders!
