CAPRESE and CAPONATA

After reading Blood, Bones, and Butter by Prune chef Gabrielle Hamilton I was completely inspired to cook simple, summer ingredients Italian for Alexa and Sima. These girls are also seriously sophisticated New Yorker foodies who like to eat light and tasty and green market fresh (like most New York foodies). I decided to go with a couple small dishes. Right now eggplant and tomatoes are in season, so I constructed dinner around these these ingredients.

A way to eat mozzarella di bufala:

I first fell in love with creamy, silken, wet, fresh mozzarella in a Caprese salad at Cipriani's downtown. If you start with the real thing, it's pretty hard to mess up, so I like to buy my own rather than spend $27.95 for a tiny plate of the stuff in Soho. The idea of pairing the cheese with balsamic vinegar comes from Gemma where they use a thick, dark, sweet version that tastes more like sin than vinegar.

Find mozzarella made from buffalo milk. Nothing else is the same. Cut into thirds. Place a slice on each plate. Ideally one would have super aged balsamic vinegar or time to have reduced a regular bottle into really thick syrup. Add whatever you have in an artful drizzle around the mozzarella disk. Slice ripe summer tomatoes into thick slices. Add three to four to each plate, covering any parts of the balsamic vinegar that did not land on the plate so artfully. Sprinkle a little salt over the tomato (a slightly coarse sea salt would be good), grind pepper on top of both the tomato and mozzarella, garnish with basil leaves. Admire the piece of geometric color art you've made.

Best eaten by candlelight with some bluish flowers (like hydrangeas) nearby to offset the golden flame and compliment the warmly lit red, white, and green on the plate.

Eggplant Caponata:

The benchmark caponata is Casa Nona's, and my obsession with all things involving smushed eggplant plus other stuff began in Romania when I first tried zacusca. I was lucky that this zacusa had been made by someone's grandmother. Oh my god, I brought back a single mason jar of the stuff to Cambridge and proceeded to ration myself to one spoonful a day over Easter term. I have ever since been searching for that flavorful, fresh vegetables sweet, sort of smoky taste.

I'm not going to say much because the caponata didn't come out exactly as I wanted, and wasn't as good as the first time I made it. I combined an Alice Waters Roasted Eggplant recipe with a Mario Batali caponata recipe. All I will note are the things I would change. Next time, use farmer's market eggplants and onions (I used an American and a Sicilian from Fairway and they were just okay), diced tomato instead of tomato sauce, no cinnamon, more vinegar, and less cooking time on the stove. Chunky is better than mushy.

This meal is of course best eaten with lovely beautiful friends.