Grilled Vegetable and Cheese Tostadas
Over the winter I tried out a recipe for a roasted halloumi, squash, and cabbage salad that I was quite fond of and have had a hankering to make again. It did have a very cold-weather feeling to it though, so hasn't really come up for me to cook again now that we're well into spring, but I had an idea to transform it into something better suited for this time of year by taking the same primary ingredients to the grill and then serving them on a tostada spread with a layer of guacamole. This afforded me a taste of that salad I loved, but definitely transformed it into a much different meal.
First thing that was needed for this recipe was to fry up tortillas for the required tostadas, which is pretty simple since I merely had to heat some oil and slide in whole tortillas and cook them until browned and crisped. While I was at it, I cut up additional tortillas to have some chips too because I planned on making extra guacamole to snack on in the following days.
The first guacamole recipe I ever made was Alton Brown's, and I liked it so much that I never tried anything else for a long, long time. The only thing that had me stray from something so tried and true was getting gifted a large mortar and pestle, which provided an easy path to making a guacamole with the mix-ins all pounded into a rough paste rather then be diced, which is what I've come to prefer nowadays.
I've been experimenting with different seasonings, but I went pretty traditional with this one, using white onion, jalapeño, garlic, and cilantro all smashed into a paste prior to being mashed together with a few ripe avocados. At this point I also added some more cilantro, lime juice, and salt to taste and was very happy with the resulting dip, which I couldn't help but dunk a few chips into and enjoy while it was as fresh as could be.
Now the inspirational salad did use halloumi for the cheese, which is the king of grilling and frying cheeses in my mind with its great saltiness and chewy squeak that can't be beat. However, for use on tostadas, I thought going with the version of a grilling cheese that I can pick up at my local Latino markets made sense. I experimented with this cheese in my early days of grilling, and while it performs great on the grill, its flavor is definitely more understated than halloumi, making it best enjoyed when part of a more complex dish, as it would be here. The grocery didn't have the version of this cheese simply labeled "Grilling Cheese" the day I went shopping, so I bought the next closest thing, which is "Frying Cheese," and it tastes and grills up pretty identically.
The squash variable here can be tailored to your preference and my initial thought was to use the butternut variety because its sweetness would work well paired up with the salty cheese, but I already had a butternut squash tostada recipe on my site, so I opted for something different— kabocha squash. I use this variety of squash, which has a fairly neutral flavor, often to make a soup that's a staple for my wife's family, but I've never actually grilled it before, so was excited to try out this new-to-me method. I was able to pick up a pretty small squash that was well suited for a meal for just a couple people, and because I didn't need all that much of it, I opted to cut away the peel because losing volume was not really a concern. However, the exterior of kabocha squash is edible, so you can totally keep it on if you don't want to go through the extra effort of removing it.
Once I had all the ingredients prepped, I lit up a chimney of charcoal and got to grilling. I put red onions and red cabbage on first, directly over the coals of a two-zone fire in order to get both well charred quickly while the fire was at its hottest. Once that was done, I moved the red onions to a cutting board, the cabbage to the cool side of the grill, and dumped the squash next to it in the free space before covering.
My goal was to get the cabbage crisp-tender and the squash fully tender, which happened at different times. After about ten minutes of roasting, the cabbage was ready to come off the grill, and while the squash finished up, I used that time to remove the core of the cabbage and roughly chop the leaves. The squash was done to my liking about ten minutes after the cabbage, at which point I removed each of my larger slices and chopped them into smalls cubes.
I waited to put the cheese on last because this stuff is at its best when warm and softened, so I wanted to be ready to eat the tostadas as soon as possible once the cheese was done. To make for easy grilling, I sliced the cheese into three large half-inch thick wedges and let each of those cook until well browned before attempting to flip—there has to be a good seared developed in order for the cheese to release from the grates. Once the second side was browned, I quickly diced up the cheese and assembled the tostadas.
That consisted of spreading a layer of guacamole on each tortilla round and topping that with pieces of cabbage, onion, squash, and cheese. I then sprinkled on some lime juice and cilantro before adorning each tostada with a few radish slices. Initially I was concerned that the veggies were going to need some additional seasoning or moisture, but the guacamole ended up being enough to put everything in a very good balance. The veggies provided a wide range of flavors and textures from sweet to tender to crunchy without any one thing tasting out of place, while the cheese rounded out the experience with a pleasing salty chew. The inspirational salad used pita chips to inject crunch, but the tostada did that even more effectively and with more flavor as every bite had that crackling corn taste in it. Yes, this was more effort to put together than that salad, which was a one-pan meal roasted in the oven, but in the warm months I like a recipe like this that keeps me grill-side for a bit where I can enjoy a beer while cooking and have a very satisfying culmination to my time and effort.
