I've finally gotten some more cooking done. Well, sort of, this wasn't much of a feat. You see, I finally got around to making recipe number 14, Mozzarella and Tomato Skewers, from the "400 Appetizers & Party Recipes" book. It's a pretty simple recipe, and only calls for about 4 ingredients, bread, tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. What's had me putting it off for so long was my lack of skewers. You see, they don't sell them at my local Sainsbury's. Of course, now that I've gotten some from Sea Woo, the Asian supermarket, a new store has opened up right next to Sainsbury's that does carry skewers; just my luck.
Well, I went out this morning and spent entirely too much on groceries, which I've been doing far too often, I'm afraid, and among those groceries were the requisite ingredients. First, you cut the crusts off the bread, cut into quarters, cover with olive oil, and bake.
Look at all those slices of bread! It takes three breads for each skewer, and here I have forty two pieces, which will eventually make fourteen skewers. Since each skewer also gets two pieces of mozzarella and two slices of tomato, I'll need twenty eight of each.
Once the bread is baked, you just stack them up: bread, cheese, tomato, basil, bread, cheese, tomato, basil, bread, and put a skewer through them. I took fresh basil leaves off my basil plant. I thought the poor thing would be stripped bare by this recipe, but it turns out these plants are dense with leaves. I hardly made a mark.
If you're making these, I suggest you stop at this point. This is basically a stacked Caprese salad, and it's delicious. However, the recipe says to drizzle it all with olive oil, add some salt and pepper, and put it all back in the oven until the cheese starts to melt.
Fresh out of the oven, they've all shrunk a little bit, so you've got to push them down so they stay together, and be sure to let them cool before you try one, unless you want a mouth full of lava-hot molten tomato juice. Once they've been baked, the top piece of bread becomes scratch-the-top-of-your-mouth crispy, and the other two pieces are soggy. That's not to say that they're not still delicious. I've already finished about ten of these things for my dinner.
After all that, I was left with the problem of what to do with all the crusts I had cut off the bread. I've heard that people around here like to eat their bread pudding, so I thought I'd give it a try. I read some recipes online and from "The Joy of Cooking", but none of those were really what I was looking for, so I made my own recipe.
Ingredients:
Crusts and Heels from 1 small bag of white bread, chopped into sticks
3 eggs
~3/4 cup double cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp mixed spices
1/4 cup white wine (I'm trying to get rid of the stuff)
~3 tbsp butter
handful of pine nuts
~3 tbsp golden syrup
I basically just raided my cupboard for some things I could use to make it. You put the pine nuts in with the bread and chop the butter up to place on top. Then, mix together the remaining ingredients and pour them over the bread. Let it sit for a while and press the bread down so that it soaks everything up. I put it in a 350℉ oven for about 30 minutes. In the end, it was a little dry, but not bad. It tastes a lot like French bread, but it's in the shape of a pie. I kind of like it.
If I've ever got a bunch of bread sitting around, I might make this again.
All right, next on the list are, Cherry Coke Cupcakes, from the internet and, Roasted Garlic and Aubergine Custards with Red Pepper Dressing, from the book. Maybe I'll get to that someday.
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