Sometimes we need to simplify. Enough madness and mayhem! Put away the iPhone! Let’s just do something easy peasy and tasty for dinner. And there are certainly enough ways to vary this sandwich to make it out of the ingredients already hanging around the kitchen, or with one quick trip to the market on your way home Friday night.
We need to catch up on our taped Downton Abbey episodes, and there is nothing that makes me feel more plebeian than eating a messy sandwich. I have a drawer full of family silver: the cake forks, the fish forks and the wedding present pickle forks – but I cannot seem to locate a proper sandwich fork, so I guess we must all be downstairs characters and eat our sandwiches with our hands. I will ask the parlor maid to iron a few napkins, just in case. Can’t you imagine what Dame Maggie would be thinking as she watched me wiping the olive oil off my chin? I shudder with delight!
Being a brutish 21st century American, I delight in convenience foods for those evenings when I just can’t put one foot in front of another. I like an icebox that is packed with quality ingredients just in case we have people drop by unexpectedly for cocktails, and need something to counteract the demon gin. We usually have olives and cheese, crackers and the famous bread collection, a stick of pepperoni, cocktail peanuts and a handful of stale pretzels. Several of these staples are ingredients for tonight’s dinner.
I found this sandwich at a very lively food blog, which I recommend highly: Spoons to Sporks: https://www.spoonstosporks.com/
We started with supplies on hand: bread, basil, garlic, olives and olive oil. We had a half of a loaf of day-old French bread. We split it and broiled the bread lightly, just to toast the surface enough to resemble sandpaper. Then we rubbed a garlic clove over the cooled bread. A nice hint of garlic enhances almost every meal. It is democratic, at any rate.
At the market we bought one large red pepper and a container of burrata, which held two large balls of the delectable cheese. We have just recently discovered the fabulousness that is burrata, and were delighted to find it at the grocery store, tucked in with the fresh mozzarella. If you cannot find burrata, fresh mozzarella or even already shredded mozzarella that you keep on hand for pizza will do. The burrata is exotic and cool; a nice rich, textural contrast to the crunchy garlic toast.
We diverged about roasting the red pepper. I was all for torching it out on the gas grill, but Best Beloved thought broiling it would work just as flavorfully. He does not have a pyromaniac’s soul. In any case, broiling it on a cookie sheet until it was almost burnt in several spots did the trick nicely, and made the pepper very, very sweet. Do it your own way. Maybe you have a nice fat Aga lurking in the corner of your kitchen, just itching to render the humble vegetable into a fiery ball of molten pepperness.
I am not a big fan of olives, although I do use olive oil and will eat a tapenade when in an awkward social setting. I prefer not to, usually. I made a brisk little basil pesto, rounding up a handful of leaves from the back porch basil farm, and tossed them into my micro-food processor with a clove of garlic, some olive oil and salt and pepper. I whirred it up to make a chunky paste, which I spread on one side of the toasted bread, while Best Beloved roughly chopped up some green olives to put on his sandwich – which is what I illustrated. Olives make everything look continental.
Here is a big deviation from the Spoons to Sporks recipe – Best Beloved added a slice of bacon to his sandwich. Somehow he just wasn’t ready for an all-vegetarian feast.
We split one burrata ball, shoveling half onto each sandwich, and layered on the other ingredients. The combination of sweet pepper, burrata, garlic, fresh basil and crunchy garlic bread was divine. I doubt if Dame Maggie could ask for anything more magnificent.
https://www.spoonstosporks.com/mb-post-burrata-pepper-sandwich
“England and the English as a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unlivable to them unless they have tea and pudding.”
-George Orwell
(Author’s note to Mr. Orwell: We discovered burrata in London, awash in a small dish of olive oil with sweet roasted tomatoes…)
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