Toasted
♪“I like bread and butter; I like toast and jam”♪
Turn up your speakers really loud, click on those lyrics, and you’ll be in the mood for this blog. And be sure to check out “Andy’s Corner” a new page where Andy has free rein (reign??). And does a NYTimes opinion piece espousing the evilness of expanses of lawns tie into BigLittleMeals? Of course it does. 🙂 Find it in “Food for Thought.” Finally, here’s a Father’s Day toast to all of our dads!
Did your mom – or dad – ever make you chipped beef on toast? Or perhaps you remember it by the very graphic army mess hall term. Or maybe as a child you had creamed tuna on toast? My mom fixed both, and I haven’t tried to replicate either recipe! 🙂 But we’ve found that toast can easily become the basis for the perfect quick little lunch or dinner. Toast for breakfast goes without saying.
Stay with me while I describe the other night around here. We really aren’t big sports fans. Really we aren’t. But when a team we’re vaguely familiar with, usually because of a dynamic player on a team that’s near us – think John Elway and the Broncos; or Shaquille O’Neill when he was at LSU, or now Stephen Curry and the Warriors – gets to the playoffs, we often get interested. SO, to make a long story short, we needed a quick, portable dinner, so we could watch the Warriors/Cavaliers Round 2 Playoff game the other night. I didn’t have anything frozen, but I did have a partial loaf of Della Fattoria Pumpkin Seed Bread, a favorite out of Petaluma, CA, and some Oscar Wilde Irish Cheddar Cheese. And 10 minutes later we were eating our open-faced cheese sandwiches and cheering for Curry. And for Klay Thompson. And we were happy and full. And the Warriors won. And WON.
The key here is to find an artisan, rustic-style, unsliced, loaf of bread – we tend to always go for seeded breads – and have it on hand – either in the freezer or the breadbox (yes, we have one). And to have a nice cheddar cheese always in the fridge. AND, IMHO, to slice the cheese very, very thin.
But toast for dinner doesn’t need to end there. The British apparently find beans and toast a most satisfying meal. Though they traditionally just open a can of Heinz Baked Beans, we can easily concoct a U.S. version, which is vastly superior to the taste of the Heinz Baked Beans. Since Jamie Oliver, the British chef, is sort of the equivalent of a football or basketball star for those of us who are into cooking, I looked at his recipes in creating my baked-beans-on-toast recipe.
In about a month our Early Girl tomatoes (and maybe our Ace, Better Boy, Black Krim, and Celebrity) tomatoes will be ripening, and we’ll be chowing-down on our all-time summer favorite: open-faced Bacon and Home-grown Tomato Sandwiches (on toast).
And for a last delicious toast suggestion: be totally au courant and fix yourself avocado and toast. A lightly mashed avocado, a little salt, a little lemon or lime, maybe a pinch of Dukkah; I just discovered this Turkish seed mix and it’s delish. Don’t over-toast the bread for this. You want the center of the bread to be warm but nice and squishy soft.
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