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| Sauteed Apples and Brie Quesadilla |
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| Pack Square Brie |
I recently found myself with a lot of extra Brie cheese on my hands … being a cheese lover, this was not necessarily a bad thing. If you happen to trip across the Pack Square Brie-style Cheese from the Looking Glass Creamery in Asheville, North Carolina – grab some! It is absolutely delicious. My favorite way to eat this cheese is sliced with some fresh apples but for lunch the other day, we needed something a little bit more substantial so I decided to fancy up a traditional quesadilla with some sauteed apples and beautiful slices of Brie and Gouda. Instead of sliced apples beside your sandwich, why not just put the apples IN your sandwich??
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| Apples in Asheville, NC |
We are really enjoying apple season here in Charlotte – apples are in abundance just a few miles down the road from us and we can’t get enough! For the past month or so, my kids were devouring Mutsu Apples and now they are currently obsessed with the Pink Lady Apples … all of them grown on Ben Lynch’s Orchard not too far from here. And, as I have mentioned before, we really emphasize knowing where your food comes from in our house. Apparently, I might have been making too big of a deal about this (or perhaps not…) because the following story came up at parent-teacher conferences on Friday…
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| Baby R prefers NC apples! |
According to the teacher, another first grader was about to throw out his mostly uneaten apple and the teacher intervened and told him to save it for later, don’t waste food. The boy agreed to stick the apple back into his lunchbox. My daughter felt the need to defend her friend and tell the teacher that S usually eats apples but he only really likes the apples that his mommy picks up from our house from the big bushels. The teacher, just slightly confused by the fact that people are picking up apples from my daughter’s house in relatively urban Charlotte, tried to teach a little lesson about the fact that all apples come from trees. My daughter had the following reply: “Yes, Ms. C, all apples come from trees, but the apples at my mommy’s house come from North Carolina trees. We don’t know where those apples at the store came from. North Carolina apples just taste better.” And so, apparently, the propaganda machine is hard at work here at our local elementary school.
If you have some local apples, or if you have the apples from your favorite grocery store … the following recipe will work just fine!
Ingredients:
Corn Tortillas
Sliced Brie (about 3 to 4 slices per quesadilla)
Thinly sliced apples (1 apple for 3 to 4 quesadillas)
A little bit of butter
A little bit of brown sugar
Directions:
1. Gently saute the thinly sliced apples in a little bit of butter until the apples are very tender. Depending on the apples that you use, you might want to add in a little bit of brown sugar – about a teaspoon or so.
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| Sauteed Apples with Butter and Brown Sugar |
2. Remove the apples from the pan and put in one corn tortilla. Layer a few slices of cheese on the corn tortilla and top with apples. I used a combination of brie and gouda.
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| Brie-Like Cheese and Gouda |
3. Cover the apples and cheese with another corn tortilla. Press together with a spatula and cook over medium heat until the cheese has melted both tortillas together. Flip the quesadilla and cook for a few minutes on the other side.
4. Enjoy! I like to cut up our quesadillas with my kitchen shears to make them more kid-friendly for little hands.
Gluten-free or not … We make grilled cheese quesadillas around here because they are naturally gluten-free when made with corn tortillas but this can easily be made with bread as well… gluten free or not! For this sandwich, I used muenster cheese and sauteed pink lady apples. Our favorite gluten-free bread is from Udi’s – check out your grocery store and see if they carry it. Delicious!
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| Grilled Cheese Sandwich with Sauteed Apples |
