Black Bean Panini

What's even better than cooking lesions in your very own kitchen with a chef who graduated from the Natural Gourmet Institute, cooked on the line in NYC Michelin 3-Star restaurants, and managed his own restaurant in St. Croix?

When this chef is also your good friend, and the two of you are chatting a mile a minute while cooking together in the kitchen!

When Zach and I were first dating and he started introducing me to his friends, I was of course a bit nervous, meeting the guys with whom he'd been friends since high school, and there was usually an awkward introduction stage before I was able to feel my comfortable self again. When I first met Zach's friend and collage roommate Donald, however, there wasn't a single moment of awkward silence - I asked him a question about cilantro, we wound up talking about cilantro for over an hour, a feat I didn't even know was previously possible, and we've been fast friends ever since. Between Donald's travels and our move away from Louisiana, however, it had been over 2 years since Zach and I had seen him, so you can imagine our enthusiasm when Donald emailed Zach last week with the news that he was driving to Georgia for the weekend...

Zach and Donald toasting Donald's arrival in Georgia!

Luckily, I was off work on Thursday, Donald's first day visiting with us in Georgia, and I quickly compiled an elaborate list of sightseeing possibilities in Atlanta from which Donald could choose as his fancy dictated. Glancing up from the printed brochures, however, Donald instead smiled and simply asked "want to go to the grocery store?"

We wound up driving into downtown Atlanta anyway, but with a tastier goal in mind, to visit my favorite downtown farmers' market, eventually returning home with a bag of apples, 2 eggplants, a bottle of hot sauce, some locally grown organic chicken, a little bag of black lentils, and a square of homemade tofu.

While I know that because of the pressures of daily lives, grocery shopping usually needs to be a brief affair (although I typically manage to drift off into the joys of browsing anyway...), I love those days when the single, focused act of selecting produce merges seamlessly with friendly chatter into a lingering act apart from time, when one is able to pause with a friend and examine the curve of every eggplant, the scent of each apple...

By the time we arrived back at the house, it was time for lunch, and while I whisked together some salad dressing ingredients, Donald gathered the most simple of ingredients, and then magically transformed them into panini before my eyes...

Donald's Black Bean Panini

1 T olive oil

1/4 tsp granulated garlic

1 tsp olive oil

1 clove garlic, minced

2 scallions, thinly sliced diagonally

1 (14.5 oz) can black beans, drained

4 slices whole grain bread (We used a loaf of Yeastless Whole Wheat Focaccia I'd baked the day before...)

2 slices jalapeno-jack cheese

~ In a small bowl, whisk together the 1 T olive oil and the granulated garlic, and set aside

~ In a small saucepan over medium heat, saute the minced garlic, the scallions, and the pinch of salt in the 1 tsp olive oil just until the scallions begin to release juices.

~ Stir in the black beans, and cook until heated through.

~ Remove the black bean mixture from the stove, and mash the black beans with a fork to form a coarse paste.

~ Spread the black bean paste thickly on 2 slices of bread, and top each slice with the other slices of bread.

~ Brush the outsides of both sandwiches with the olive oil and garlic mixture.

~ In a grill pan or panini press over medium-high heat, sear the sandwiches on one side until golden brown and slightly crispy.

~ Flip each sandwich over, and immediately top each sandwich with one slice of jalapeno-jack cheese. Continue to cook the panini until they're golden brown on the second side. Serve immediately, toasty warm!