Berry Fontina balsamic grilled cheese.
We're gonna do an ancient recipe
where we macerate berries with aged balsamic vinegar.
Thick and syrupy, and you can make this
out of any balsamic that you have in your pantry.
Put it in a pot with a little brown sugar
and let it cook down until it's thick and syrupy.
So we're gonna pour balsamic syrup onto,
in this case, blackberries, with lots of shredded basil.
So we're gonna take the mashed balsamic berries
and put them onto our Italian bread,
again, butter and olive oil, flip it down.
This is Fontina, any easy melting cheese will do.
And get them onto the griddle.
(griddle sizzling)
So about a cup of basil, about 1/2 a cup of mint.
About 1/2 cup of Parmigiano Reggiano grated cheese.
And I toasted, you could see them down at the bottom there,
few tablespoons of pine nuts and I threw in
one fat clove of spring garlic.
You can add salt and pepper to taste
and now we're going to add about 1/3 of a cup of EVOO.
And that's it, you guys know how to make pesto.
Okay, so in this small bowl,
I have a combination of EVOO and melted butter,
just did that in the microwave, quite frankly.
So now we're buttering some sliced Italian bread.
Now we're gonna put the buttered, lightly-brushed sides out.
We have a griddle getting hot over medium-low heat.
We're going to spread our mint basil pesto
on a couple of these slices.
You want mozz and prov.
All right.
We'll do one for Ria, my sister, with Muenster and prov.
And we're gonna put this together.
And get set for our second grilled cheese.
Here are our mint and basil pesto grilled cheese.
And here's our berry Fontina balsamic basil.
A summer tomato soup.
We've peeled the tomato and cored it.
Here's how that went down.
Stick the knife in the top to hull the tomato,
to take the core out.
Then we scored the bottom, just with an X,
throw it in boiling water, put it in cold water,
peel them, whole thing takes like two, three minutes.
And then we chop them.
Now of course you can use canned tomatoes.
I have three pounds of fresh tomato.
So if you wanna use canned tomato,
I would use two large 28-ounce cans
or three 15-ounce cans for your tomato product, okay?
I have two tablespoons of butter,
two tablespoons of olive oil, only some sea salt,
and two Vidalia onions that I've let cook to absolute mush.
Now we add all of our tomatoes and their natural juices.
And you're going to add roughly two cups or so
of vegetable or chicken stock.
So this is a little over a quart-size container
so I poured in half, or about two cups.
And we're going to throw in a stem of basil.
Now we're gonna let this simmer for about 20 minutes
until the tomatoes break down.
So we pull out the basil that's done its job in the soup.
If you have an immersion blender,
just puree the soup in the pot.
Otherwise you can use a food processor.
So just puree and put it back on the stove
to simmer until you're ready to serve.
(crowd cheering) (bright chimes)