Marinated Goat Cheese and Olive Tapenade from the NY Times
Turn "apéro hour" into a French snacking dinner.
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One of my favorite kinds of snacking dinners is the “pantry snack”: fun and easy meals you can throw together with ingredients you already keep stocked in your pantry and fridge (and freezer). So Rebekah Peppler’s menu for “The French Don’t Snack. They Apéro.” in the New York Times (published last May) made me unreasonably happy.
The menu—marinated goat cheese and homemade tapenade with baguette, plus an “all day cassis” to sip as you snack—is made entirely of from ingredients I almost always have in my house. (This includes the baguette; sometimes parenting includes buying fancy bread for a tween who needs coaxing to finish her school lunches.) The only things I didn’t already have in my kitchen, in fact, were the crème de cassis and sparkling rosé needed for the cocktail, and I quickly remedied that. (I haven’t included the drink recipe here; for that, you’ll need to subscribe to NYT Food, which I highly recommend doing anyway, not only for the food but also because it helps pay for the paper’s journalists.)
This menu takes just a bit of planning ahead, because the cheese needs to marinate for at least two hours, but both dishes can be made ahead of time and kept in the fridge—making them not only “pantry snacks” but also “prep-ahead snacks”! I’ve started making both regularly whenever I have an extra 20 minutes, then keeping them around for later in the week. (And, yes, the tween will happily eat them with me!)
As a bonus, these recipes also make a perfect, easy hors d'oeuvres plate to set out for a holiday party. Double the recipe, and you can feed your guests on the day, then feed yourself after the party, when you need a break from cooking.
Pink Peppercorn-Marinated Goat Cheese
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more as needed
6 ounces fresh goat cheese sliced about ¾-inch thick
1 tablespoon whole pink peppercorns
1 teaspoon dried herbes de Provence
Sliced or torn baguette, to serve
Add 1 tablespoon of the olive oil to the bottom of a wide-mouthed jar or a bowl just big enough to fit the cheese. Add the cheese to the jar and then sprinkle in the peppercorns and herbes de Provence. Add the remaining olive oil; if it doesn’t cover the cheese completely, add more.
Cover the jar and marinate the cheese for 2 hours at room temperature or overnight in the refrigerator. (Once finished, it can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 1 week and brought to room temperature before serving.)
To serve, spread the cheese with some of the oil onto a piece of baguette (and make sure to sop up any remaining oil with more bread at the end of the meal).
Tapenade
The recipe below is formatted for a mortar and pestle, but you can also pulse everything in a food processor, if you prefer.
2 small garlic cloves
3 anchovies
2 tablespoons capers (rinsed if salt-preserved)
¾ cup pitted olives (such as Niçoise, Kalamata, Picholine, or Lucques, or a mix)
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper
Roughly chop the garlic, put it in the mortar and grind it with the pestle until a rough paste forms. Roughly chop the anchovies and capers, then add them to the mortar and pound them, scraping the sides frequently, until you have a mostly smooth paste. Roughly chop the olives, then add them and pound them into a slightly chunky paste. Add the oil, 1 tablespoon at a time, mixing to combine. Season with pepper.
Photo: Georgia Freedman