Piling on the Grilled Vegetables

At her home in little Washington, Grace was overflowing with fresh vegetables: tender little eggplants, onions, summer squash and peppers. She picked up some homemade sausage links at a farmer’s market; and some fat baguettes from the Corner Store in Sperryville and made a kind of summer panini.

Grace also had some leftover mozzarella sticks that serve as snacks for her hungry nephews, and decided to use them as one layer for her grilled vegetable stacks. She sliced the vegetables, coated them with olive oil and fresh herbs, and grilled them until the edges were brown. Sausages went on the fire, too, until they were well marked by the grill and cooked all the way through. She split the baguettes, sliced the string cheese on top, piled on the vegetable slices, with huge raw tomato slices on top. One baguette half got a layer of halved sausage links as well, and Grace drizzled olive oil and sprinkled sea salt and fresh ground pepper on top. Everything went under the broiler until the cheese melted, and then Grace tucked whole basil leaves under the tomato slices at strategic points. She cut the loaves into small wedges to serve.

The grilled vegetables had so much flavor that the sausage wasn’t missed on the vegetarian loaf; and the string cheese – though not as good as high-quality mozzarella when it’s the main feature – did fine here as an anchor. Grace served her summer sandwiches with a potato salad using tiny “La Ratte” fingerling potatoes, tossed with olive oil, onion, cider vinegar and a little mustard. Adrina arrived with tiny broccolis florets she steamed and tossed with lemon, and a watermelon from Che’s garden, to complete our wonderful late-night feast. Mike contributed a bottle of dry Riesling , a perfect companion that stood up well to the flavors of tomatoes and smoke.