Yummy sandwich

I think I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again; sometimes the best things in life are the simplest things… Now take for example this delicious bruschetta. Made with some of the leftover contents of our fridge and voila, you have a perfect lunch sandwich.

Not sure how the weather is in your part of the woods but here it is currently grey and boring… I’m glad all the snow and ice are gone as I am soooo ready for spring at the moment! We still had all the snow on Saturday, on sunday the temperatures rose quite dramatically from -10 to +5 C and the snow disappeared equally fast. Within a day virtually all was gone, except for the ice on the rivers. Some of that still remains even today but the majority is gone. And while I was fed up with the snow at least it gave the world a slightly more cheerful look. Now when I look outside it is grey and well, boring.. I have a little bit of green from the evergreen shrubs in the garden but that’s about the only green I see. Are you also ready for spring?

I have visions of warm summer nights, bbq-ing with friends in the garden. And light, lots of light! Especially in the evening. Although you can tell that the evenings are getting longer in terms of light, it is still no where seriously light… In any case, these delicious little sandwiches give you a hint of spring since tomatoes always make me think of spring (don’t ask me why, they just do..)

It’s incredibly easy to put together and while you certainly don’t really need a recipe to make a bruschetta I thought I share the ingredients of mine with you anyway. So if you want to you can make this yummy sandwich yourself too. It has tapenade on it, cheese, ham and roasted tomatoes and topped with just a few mustard-cress. I love growing those by the way. Within days you have a pot full of any cress and they really do add taste as well as looks to almost anything!

Sourdough bruschetta

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Serves	2
Prep time	5 minutes
Cook time	10 minutes
Total time	15 minutes
Meal type	Bread, Lunch
By author	Simone van den Berg

Ingredients

• 2 slices sourdough bread
• 4 slices Prosciutto
• 1-2 tablespoon Tapenade (I used a variant with olives(green and black), tomatoes )
• few slices cheese (I used a variety called charmeur cheese but you can use any cheese you like)
• 50g cherry tomatoes
• salt, pepper
• 1 tablespoon mustard cress

Directions

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Put a thick layer of the tapenade on top of the bread. You can make it yourself or buy a good version at a delicacy store. Cover the tapenade with the cheese. Put the bread in the oven. Put the tomatoes in a small baking tray, sprinkle with olive oil and pepper and salt and put them in the oven too.

Remove the bread once the cheese is melted and leave the tomatoes until the skin cracks. Line your melted cheese with a few slices of prosciutto (or other ham) and add a few of the grilled tomatoes. Sprinkle with some mustard cress and you're done!

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Home made fresh buns

Don’t you just totally love it when you walk into the house and you smell that best of smells; freshly baked bread? And then to take it out of the oven and the moment you hear that soft crack when you break of a piece of warm crust and pop it in your mouth, unable to resist? O how I wish that scenario actually happened here in this very house!

Instead I tend to end up with bread that is either too dry, too firm or just plain disappointing… In all of the before three cases, it still beats getting the bread of the supermarket. Not that they have bad bread perse, but it’s just not the same as homemade, now is it? So yes, I do struggle with breadbaking. I followed a breadcourse before as you know, but as with many such things, haven’t baked a bread since. It was an enormously interesting course and I learned a lot but it was also pretty daunting to do all that stuff yourself. So when I learned about Levine’s workshop I decided that’s where I wanted to go.

Dough rolled and ready to be baked sprinkled with poppyseed

She approaches the whole breadbaking from a homebaking perspective, so I felt right at ease and with her guidance I actually started to feel confident I could maybe do this myself at home without too much danger of messing up the bread. We made two types of bread; the soft buns you see above and some crusty pistolets that I haven’t eaten yet. Too much bread to all eat in one go so they went straight into the freezer. But if the lunch we had is anything to go by then I just know that it is going to be awesome too. O and Levine gave us some amazing baguette too, which basically means I will have to come back to learn how to make those too.

Fresh crusty bread

For now I will tempt you with this recipe for soft buns, which you can also make into the pretty ‘braided’ buns you see on top and below. And trust me when I say that it took me a while to make anything resembling a knot with that bread but it was fun and if you can’t do that you can always just keep them round!

Fresh soft buns with seeds

Soft buns

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Serves	16
Allergy	Egg, Milk, Wheat
Meal type	Bread
By author	Levine van Doorne

Ingredients

• 560g flour (Good quality)
• 9g yeast (dry yeast)
• 10g sugar
• 60g butter (unsalted, at roomtemperature)
• 100g egg (At roomtemperatue, whisked loosely)
• 250 g full fat milk (lukewarm)
• 10g salt
• baking tin of 24 cm, greased

Additional ingredients

• 1 egg
• baking trays lined with baking paper

Additional ingredients (Optional)

• poppyseed or sesameseed for the top

Directions

Kneading the dough in the kitchenaid; put all ingredients, except the butter in a bowl. Stir together with a wooden spoon. Using the doughhook, knead the dough for about 8 minutes and then add slowly add the butter and keep kneading until the dough feels pliable and is stretchy. It should feel as sticky as a post-it note. It is usually around 10-15 minutes. If you're kneading by hand; put all ingredients into a large bowl. Stir with a wooden spoon until the flour gets moist. Turn out onto a worksurface and knead by hand for about 15-20 minutes til you have a pliable dough. Don't ad extra flour if it's not really necessary; the dough will get less sticky during the kneading.

1st rise; Grease a large bowl with some oil and put the dough in. Turn once so all sides are covered with oil. Cover the bowl and leave the dough to stand at roomtemperature for about 1 hour so it doubles in volume.

Shaping: Turn the dough out onto a lightly oiled workbench. Divide with a doughcutter into 16 equal parts and make them into little balls. Leave those covered for about 10 minutes and round them again firmly.

For separate buns: put the balls of dough onto a baking tray a few centimeters apart. If they do not fit onto one tray take your other tray and divide them over the trays. Bake them one after the other.

Breadcrown: Divide 8 balls of dough into a baking tin and put the other 8 in the other one.

Coat the dough balls with a little bit of eggwash and sprinkle with seeds if you want to.

Second rise; leave them covered at roomtemperature for about 60 minutes until almost doubled in size. The dough has risen enough once you press a finger in and it slowly moved back.

During the second raise preheat the oven to 200 C. Bake the buns for 15-20 minutes brown. Remove from the baking tins or from the baking trays and leave to cool on a cooling rack. You can freeze these really well. You can use the same dough to also make little knots in your bread. See notes

Note

As mentioned you can use these same buns to make different shapes. You can rol them out after the first raise to very thin long strand and then tie a knot in them or use your imagination to make something pretty of them. Continue also here with the second raise

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Creamy goatcheese with pomegranate and chives

Wow… if you are reading this, that actually means that it worked! You might have wondered where I went to the last couple of days but I have been very busy behind the scenes with changing over all my websites (and there are six in total) from one host to the next.

My friend and  Dutch blogger Kay from Kayotic Kitchen first alerted me to the fact that maybe I was paying just a bit too much on my hosting package and then when I went to Germany Meeta told me pretty much the same thing. Time for me to start looking at other options.

While I have been really happy with my hosting company the fact of the matter is that I am now going from something like 1200 euro per year to a total of 90 dollar a year… That is too big of a difference to dismiss!

I’ll spare you all the nerve wrecking details, but as I said; if you’re reading this.. it is working!!

What else is going on here; I had my second meatcourse which I will tell you all about later. I had a couple of really fun cupcake shoots and in the meantime I am starting to think about Christmas menu’s.

It’s been difficult getting my head into cooking mode with all that is going on. On top of that I am also worried what January 1^st is going to bring. With Tom still looking for a new job and the change over to the studio it’s quite a bit of changing around here lately but that’s ok. Change is what makes the world go round right?

So to give you a lovely and very tasty recipe I am bringing you this creamy goatcheese with pomegranate which is fabulous as a quick lunch spread but would also be ideal for any party. Try it you’ll love it!

Creamy goatcheese with pomegranate

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Recipe type: Sidedish

Author: BBC good food

Prep time: 10 mins

Total time: 10 mins

Serves: 6

Ofcourse goatcheese and honey is a classic combination but add the pomegranates and the chives and it is even yummier!

Ingredients

• 150g pack soft, rindless goat’s cheese
• 250g tub ricotta
• 50g pomegranates seeds, from a tub
• small bunch chives , snipped
• 1 tbsp clear honey
• 2 tsp red or white wine vinegar
• loaf of crusty bread , to serve

Instructions

1. Mash the goat’s cheese and ricotta together in a bowl, then use a spatula to roughly spread over a large plate. Scatter with the pomegranate seeds and chives and set aside until ready to serve.
2. Stir together the honey and vinegar, then as you’re about to serve, drizzle over the plate. Enjoy with crusty bread.

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Cranberry chipotle bread

I peer into the oven, a little worried that my bread will not be coming out as I had intended it to. Hmm, still undercooked. I close the door again, busy myself with cleaning the kitchen after having made quite a bit of a mess doing various dishes at the same time. Open the door of the oven again, just a crack and it’s starting to look better.

When I saw the recipe for a Jalapeno cranberry skillet bread on E-curry by my good friend Soma just this morning, I just knew I had to try this one. It looked so good and it looked so pretty too on Soma’s photos! Ofcourse I did not have a skillet so I figured in terms of cast iron it was either my Dutch oven or my aebleskiver pan. Now the latter would have been a very interesting experiment but I will leave that one for another time… Although mmm, while I’m writing this all sort of ideas pop into my head how I can make mini buns this way! Oooo, next on the to do list!

In the end baking the bread in the Dutch oven did work out but it was difficult getting it out in one piece since it was a little bit stuck to the bottom so I had to cut it in two. Still not a bad effort for my first skillet pan. This is also fitting nicely into the budget for Living Leaner, the challenge setup by my good friend Mona. I actually had this bread together with those pretty pears you saw earlier and miraculously managed to stay below the 10 euro. I didn’t think I would be able to make it but I did.

So what did I pay? I obviously had some stuff in the fridge and cupboard that I used otherwise I would never have made it, but still. I bought extra for both the pears and the bread the following item.

• One bottle of red wine            € 2,99
• 100 gr ham                                € 2,29
• 100 gr spanish salami             € 2,50
• 1 kilo pears                                € 1,10

Out of stock I used a lot as I had all the ingredients for this bread in house. Flour, cilantro, dried cranberries, milk and butter. The original recipe called for cornflour which I did not have so I used all purpose flour instead. It also called for jalapeno peppers which I substituted for some chipotle peppers in Adobo sauce I had also leftover from another recipe. So I do feel a little bit like cheating as I had so much still in house, but on the other hand, that’s what it’s all about also right? Using up the things we have leftover.

The meats are gonna be used to be put on the bread, together with some grilled courgette (also leftovers in the fridge). I probably have some roasted peppers and pesto lying around still plus cheese leftovers… and I might find some other things that need to be eaten! This is actually the most expensive meal as all the other meals we had sofar for the living leaner challenge were good for two days and have only set us back less then 5 euro’s a day.

So all in all not bad, and I’ve made some great and easy recipes in the process that are definitely going to be made again!

Chipotle cranberry bread

5.0 from 2 reviews

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Recipe type: Bread

Author: Adapted from E-curry blog

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 25 mins

Total time: 35 mins

Serves: 4

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 150 gr all purpose flour
• 1 chipotle chili in adobo sauce
• 2 tbsp fresh coriander
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries
• 2 tbsp of honey
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp of black pepper
• 150 ml milk
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 3 tbsp unsalted butter, melted

Instructions

1. I used a small Dutch Oven to bake this bread. A 20 cm pan makes about 1 fairly flat bread.
2. Preheat the oven to 200 C.
3. In a bowl, sift the all purpose flour with baking powder, black pepper and salt.
4. Pound the chipotle and the fresh cilantro/coriander leaves until it is coarse paste.
5. Add the cranberries to the flour and toss for them to be coated.
6. Whisk the milk, honey and eggs in a different bowl and stir in lightly with the flour mix. Add the paste of chipotle and cilantro/coriander. Add the melted butter and stir just until blended.
7. Add 1/2 tablespoon oil to the Dutch oven and heat the pan over the stove top or in the oven until the oil shimmer and is really hot. When the dough is added to this, it should sizzle loud.
8. Remove pan from the stove top or the oven and scrape half of the batter into the hot pan. Transfer the pan to the oven and bake for about 15-20 minutes, or until the center springs back when gently pressed. The bread should be golden brown and crispy at the edges.
9. Turn the bread out onto a rack to cool and slice only when cooled.

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Salmon sandwich

Sometimes the simple things in life are one of the best and my lunch of today was no exception. Today is one of those days that I am stuck in the studio all day shooting productphotos of books and paper; arguably not the most exciting material, so I wanted to at least have something good to nibble on for lunch. And it had to be quick too, as you don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen and then continuing with the same work, now do you?

Quick and healthy lunch

Everytime I think about something healthy, that is quick and delicious; I do end up a lot of the times with salmon. Can you imagine that there was a point in my life that I didn’t like salmon (or any fish for that matter) I sometimes find it hard to believe myself but it is true…

Recipe I cannot really give you as it is simply sour cream on top of sandwich, pepper and salt, salmon and dille.

Anyway, needless to say that I need to return to work now, so I thought I leave you with some mouthwatering images of my lunch and then back to work!!

O and for those interested; I now also have a blog in Dutch. A foodblog ofcourse, although the content may vary from Junglefrog Cooking. If you’re Dutch (or just curious) just have a peak and check it out…! It’s called FROGBITES

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