Bread, Fruit, and Cheese

It's really impossible to mess this up.

This summer has been an unusually hot one for Portland.  While I love the enormous gas stove in the kitchen, I don’t love the fact that it heats up our entire kitchen and living room area.  While foolishly making a mushroom stroganoff the other day (recipe to come later), I felt that I was now able to intimately understand the term “slaving over a hot stove”.  Cooking never felt so much like a chore to me.

My housemates and I plan out communal dinners most days of the week.  We decided we needed to have at least one no-cook meal this week to get a little relief from the heat.

You can’t go wrong with bread, fruit, and cheese.

So my housemates and I decided to have a bread, fruit, and cheese night.  K. baked two loaves of french bread, L. bought a wedge of brie from Trader Joe’s and a quart of raspberries from the fruit stand, and I bought the rest of the fruit.  Then we went to town on them.  Served alongside cold glasses of ice water, the dinner was a perfect combination of creamy cheese satisfaction and refreshing fruit.

I recommend buying the highest quality fruit and cheese you can afford for this dinner, as they’re really the star of the plate.  Don’t be afraid to experiment with different combinations of fruit and cheese.  Tart apples and sharp cheddar is a classic.  Blue cheeses go wonderfully with fresh or dried figs and a drizzle of honey.  The creamy mildness of brie is a nice contrast to tangy, brightly colored berries.  While K. spoils me with homemade baked goods, I think this would still be delicious with store-bought french bread.  This dinner was a little more expensive than making a cooked dinner from scratch, but it was worth it to keep the kitchen cool.    Besides the plus of no skillets or pans to clean, we had lots of leftover brie for future ham-and-cheese sandwiches.

For a tasty (and somewhat cheaper and healthier) alternative, substitute the cheese for ripe a avocado sprinkled with a pinch of coarse kosher salt.