Baked Feta

Good evening,

The past two days have been really exciting and sort of stressful at school. Monday marked the beginning of individual plate presentations, meaning that instead of just serving food family style on platters we are now making actual plates (such as you would see in a restaurant). We also switched into new groups, and after working with the same people for the past few weeks and getting to know their habits, we now have to figure out how to work with new individuals. It's both fun and challenging. Check back this weekend for photos of my plates from the week.

Now onto the recipe. Matt loves feta, like loves it so much he could eat an entire container plain. I, on the other hand, could take it or leave it. It's far from my least favorite but it is also far from my favorite. This being said, Matt would be happy adding feta to just about anything; pasta, pizza, salad, and so on. Since knowing him, he has mentioned this baked feta dish that he had at a restaurant years ago. This weekend I decided that I was going to try my hand at this "baked feta". Not knowing where to start we found a recipe on one of my favorite blogs and tried it out. I changed a few things such as omitting an onion because Matt hates them and adding extra garlic because I love it. I also used sun-dried tomatoes because it is hard to find good tomatoes in late October but if they were in season I would have used those. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it (I'm pretty sure I ate an obscene amount).

Baked Feta (serves 3-4 if Matt isn't included)
10 oz fresh feta
1 c. sun-dried tomatoes, julienned
1/3 c. kalmata olives, chopped
2 big cloves garlic
1 tsp olive oil
1/2 tsp dried oregano
black pepper, to taste
crackers, bread, crostini - for serving

Preheat oven to 400˚F.

Fill ramekins half way with feta or place feta in an oven safe dish. Mix sun-dried tomatoes, olives, garlic, olive oil, oregano, and black pepper together. Spoon this mixture over the feta and bake for 10-15 minutes until the top starts to brown. Serve hot! If it cheese cools it will firm up, but you can always pop the cheese back in the oven to re-soften it! We ate this by spreading it onto some crostini - it was delicious.

xx
-c