BlissFullU

Meatless Mondays are a program to reduce the environmental impact of our eating while improving our health by committing to a primarily plants-based diet on Mondays.  We’ve done this for years (not religiously….when it is a holiday or special occasion, I substitute a different day for our meatless regime), so of course I want to continue it within our SNAP Challenge.

We had half of the small bag of flour I had bought the first week left, so I wanted to use that up.  Flour isn’t that nutritious (and lots of people have bad reactions), but it is cheap and so flexible.  I made pizza dough with it last time, but how to use it this week?  Make bread?  Make biscuits?  Make tortillas?  Make dumplings?  So many options…

I decided to make main-course focaccia this week.  I made the dough, and after letting it rise, added a layer of ricotta cheese (for creaminess and protein), then tomatoes and basil, then onions and peppers, finally sprinkling with parmesan cheese and dried red peppers.

There is a high ratio of dough-to-other-stuff in this recipe.  I think the thing that makes it work, other than the ricotta, which adds a different texture as well as taste, is using those beautiful heirloom tomatoes from the Farmers Market.  Those tomatoes have so much juice and so much taste that it counter-balances the dough.  Of course, the Farmers Markets peppers help, along with onions and parmesan and red pepper.

Since I think the heirloom tomatoes are the stars of this this show, here is how they look layered over the unbaked dough and ricotta:

While this is how the entire unbaked concoction looks:

A slice of the completed focaccia looks like this:

My son LOVED it!

I taught tonight from 6-10 PM, so I made this for lunch.  The plan was to have some of the leftover broccoli soup for dinner, but since I was missing at dinner time, my son had more focaccia.

I stuck to the broccoli soup (and left off the cheese, since I had cheese at lunch).  But what about focaccia as a side to dip into broccoli soup?

That may just be in my future this week, since I still have plenty of leftovers of both.