Easy Delights

This is another laggard posting on Christmas food (or at least Christmas food that we ate).

One of my favorite foods is cheese with fresh crusty bread. There is nothing quite like chomping down on an aromatic hunk of freshly-baked bread generously filled with chunks of rich gooey cheese. (I’m not much of a hard cheese person, unless it comes melted down in a grilled sandwich or something.) I think it’s a perfect combination – crispy bread crust, soft creamy cheese. Mmmm…

I also like bruschettas a lot. I find it to be a very versatile food. And I like versatile food (if you haven’t been able to tell already ) Oh, perhaps I should first clarify that the “definition” of bruschetta that I use is the “globalized” (or some might argue “bastardized”) one. If I’m not wrong, the original Italian bruschetta is nothing like what now gets called “bruschetta” in many, many restaurants across the globe. The traditional Italian bruschetta is simply slices of toasted bread that are rubbed with cloves of garlic, then drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil, and seasoned with salt and pepper.

Then along came what used to be called Pacific Rim cuisine, pan-Asian cuisine or fusion food, with cutting-edge chefs in California, North-West USA and Australia leading the way, forging new frontiers in the “new-age” palate. Bruschettas began to appear on menus in all guises… ranging from simple fares like tomatoes and garlic or spicy tuna, to decadent indulgences of foie gras or Kobe beef cappacio.

Nowadays, it would seem that just about any warm open-faced sandwich would pass as a bruschetta. So with apologies to the Italians and other food purists, my concept of bruschettas lies on the internationalized end of the spectrum.

I had intended to make two types of bruschettas for Christmas Eve, to serve as finger food and to keep tummies from rumbling too much while waiting for the rest of the food to be served. I ended up making three – sort of.

I like bruschettas as party food. They’re so easy and quick with countless possible variations, and everyone likes them.

The first variety was sautéed garlic mushrooms on a walnut and onion loaf (I used the walnut and onion Milano bread from Delifrance).

Just slices of fresh white button mushrooms sautéed with some garlic and shallots, deglazed with a little wine and seasoned with salt and pepper. These were topped with shredded cheddar and popped into the oven toaster for 2-3 minutes, enough for the cheese to melt down and for the bread to crisp up a little bit. Oh, almost forgot… the bread (which I halved across its equator) was spread with a thin layer of garlic and mustard margarine (finely chopped raw garlic and a dash of Dijon mustard mixed into softened margarine). Yum!

Next was olive bread (again Delifrance’s Milano olive loaf) topped with fresh tomatoes, garlic and coriander...

These were slightly less successful than the mushroom ones, even though they were all polished off just the same. (I had very hungry guests! ) I think the tastes of this one were perhaps a touch too strong. I was lazy. I had contemplated giving the tomatoes, coriander and garlic a quick sauté to take the raw edge off them. But I was rushing to complete the other main dishes, I was pressed for time, so I just mixed the blanched, skinned and diced tomatoes, finely chopped garlic and chopped coriander with a dash of sesame oil, a little extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and dumped them on the bread which had been spread with a (very) thin layer of garlic margarine (no mustard). More shredded cheddar cheese sprinkled on top, and into the oven toaster for 2-3 minutes. These tasted great – if you like the taste of raw garlic and raw coriander. They would have tasted better if the ingredients had been quickly sautéed. Oh well.

Now these taught me a great lesson that evening, about food, dining, cooking and making mistakes…

These were a mistake “made right”, so to speak. The “bread” from which these cheese bruschettas were made were the dismal results of my second attempt to make American biscuits. My first hadn’t worked. And I was determined to try again. This time, attempting to make cheese biscuits, with the intention of serving them with the lamb shanks. Maybe I just don’t have the necessary genes to make biscuits! I just couldn’t get them to rise. I can make scones. But I can’t make biscuits. And yet they are fairly similar. Sigh!

My so-called cheese biscuits tasted pretty good – very cheesy with a soft, fluffy bread-like crumb. But they just did not rise! Urrgh! So they sat forlornly in the bread box, destined not to see the light of day at the Christmas Eve table. Until I was suddenly struck by an inspiration. (Yes, the proverbial lightbulb going off in my head). How about turning them into bruschettas? They were highly edible. They just did not have the appearance of biscuits. Well, let them be bread then. Hey, I’m not complaining. As I had not planned on doing this, the only thing I had that I could throw on them was cheese. Which was fine. Cheese on cheese biscuits, why not? Ha, I even managed to do two versions of this! One version was to spread the biscuits with garlic margarine and top them with grated parmesan. The second version had the biscuits being spread with honey mustard (I ran out of garlic margarine and couldn’t be bothered to make anymore) and topped with parmesan and cheddar.

Ha ha, these were eaten up almost as soon as they were taken out of the oven toaster. I didn’t even get a chance to plate them properly. People just sort of wandered into the kitchen and helped themselves! Okay, so they were hungry. Where is the main meal already? But seriously, throughout the evening, people were looking to see if there were still any of these left. For some reason, the combination of cheese “bread”, honey mustard and cheddar seems to work really well. Even I was surprised! The parmesan/cheddar one worked much better than the parmesan/garlic one. Maybe I should have added cheddar to that one too.

But I learnt something important… maybe there just isn’t any “real” failures in the kitchen (unless of course the food is burnt beyond recognition, it’s rotting or in some other way totally inedible, or it's edible but not without serious risk to life and limb). What I had deemed as my second abject failure to make American-style biscuits was actually thoroughly enjoyed by others.

At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter how or what the food “should” look or taste like, according to some pre-set (by whom?) norms/criteria/standards or according to some recipe. If it tastes good, it is good food!

Here’s to many more adventures in the kitchen!

Copyright © 2004 Renee Kho. All rights reserved.
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