Recipe: Greek Style Panzanella Salad with Kalamatas, Feta, and Homemade Olive Oil Croutons

This traditional Italian bread salad is given a Greek twist with feta cheese and kalamata olives. Crunchy pan-fried olive oil croutons are hard to resist (recipe here).

This Greek Style Panzanella Salad is one of my favorite recipes, and I've been looking forward to making it all summer. I'd never been a fan of panzanella, which I always thought of as soggy bread salad, until two summers ago when I came across Ina Garten's Greek style version.

I have five words for you: pan-fried olive oil croutons.

This colorful salad is made with cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers, kalamata olives, feta cheese, red onion, and crunchy homemade croutons, all tossed with a flavorful red wine vinaigrette.

It makes a great side dish for grilled meats and a perfect light supper or lunch. I've even eaten the leftovers for breakfast. To make it more substantial, stir in some organic garbanzo beans.

The lemon cucumber vines and four enormous Sweet 100 cherry tomato plants (that I planted way too close together) in my kitchen garden have been overflowing with beautiful bounty for weeks, and what's left of this year's small but tasty red onion harvest is safely tucked in the pantry. But not a single pepper on my 21 pepper plants has yet to turn completely yellow or orange or red (I can't stand green peppers).

I'm running out of patience—and am probably going to run out of cherry tomatoes and cucumbers and onions.

Fortunately I managed to score seven sweet red peppers from my Amish friend Sarah's little produce stand, which is basically a large table set under an overhang next to the house where she piles extra vegetables from their enormous garden and advertises with a sign out on the highway. If there's nobody around, please leave your money in the can.

When we stopped by last week and I was picking through a bucket of green peppers in search of any red ones, she said a woman had just come by and bought every red pepper she had. "I thought about telling her I needed to save some for Susan!"

Thankfully the shopper who stopped by right before we did yesterday had only wiped her out of tomatoes. Sarah even tucked an extra pepper in my bag, "Since these are all kind of small." As long as they aren't green, I'm happy. Let's eat!

P.S. Savory Tomato, Mozzarella, and Basil Pesto Pie (with an easy cheesy biscuit crust) and No-Cook Fresh Tomato Pasta Sauce.

© FarmgirlFare.com, the burnt fingers foodie farm blog where I just made a batch of croutons using some stale slices of an Easy Four Hour Parisian Baguette and had to come upstairs so I wouldn't devour the entire batch straight out of the cast iron skillet.