get a bit of bread time!
July 14, 2011 § 1 Comment
Some days in the golden kitchen I have hours to research, tweak, fiddle and faff about with what we’ll be eating. Other days, when there’s somewhere else to be or something else to do there’s barely enough time to chew and swallow, never mind prepare food. We had such a day this week, when husband was going to have a turnaround time of 10 minutes from arriving home before we had to leave again and make the mammoth car journey to Castlebar. I say mammoth not because it’s far [about an hour's drive] but because it’s one of the most awful twisty depressing roads I’ve ever had the misfortune to travel. If there wasn’t for the lure of shops, people, and general town-like-activity at the end of it, then I’d happily never travel that road. But I digress…
Sunday evenings in our house when I was growing up were called ‘get a bit of bread time’. Mum would have been knackered from cooking the obligatory roast chicken lunch, [the same meal every Sunday for over 40 years - my parents are nothing if not consistent!] and any hunger pangs later in the day were, in her eyes, up to ourselves to sort out. The premise was that you [a] got a bit of bread and [b] put something on it and [c] ate it. Which is what we did the other day…
The bread I had on hand was focaccia. I’ve made my own before and it’s turned out well, but last week the supermarket were doing a special offer on small individual loaves so I bought a ton [approximately!] of them and froze them for handy ‘at-a-moment’s notice’ focaccia emergencies.
The things I had to put on the bread were [from the back left] some chopped sun-dried tomatoes, sliced black olives, a roasted yellow pepper, mature cheddar and Parmigiano-Reggiano, some sliced German salami, a few slices of regular cooked ham, a jar of green pesto, and some sliced tomatoes. Having them all ready like this only takes a minute or two, and at least they’re all ready for when the bread comes out of the grill.
So [surprise!] I toasted the bread on both sides for a few minutes, spread some pesto on the cut sides, then flung on all the stuff I had prepared, topped with the cheeses and some oregano, and… after popping back under the grill till the cheese went all melty…
…we ate them! 
Awesome