Hello and welcome back to the second installment of my glorified food diary. This week I discovered a new food show on Netflix called The Best Leftovers Ever!, which not only should be applauded for not going down the traditional pun foodshow title route, but was genuinely a useful and interesting concept for normal people. Sure, some of the presenting has the forced enthusiasm of a new stepmother trying to be your friend, but I genuinely enjoyed watching normal people have to figure out how to turn cold fries into something interesting and well… not cold fries.
Also I managed to reignite the Franco-Swiss divide with a Twitter poll, but we’ll get onto that later.
Let’s start with the food I liked this week:
Spar Strawberry Cheesecake (multipack)
My sister’s boyfriend works in the Spar near us and brought home lots of reduced shop desserts. I’m always open to free dessert (if you are the PR of any food company, that is an open invitation) but I don’t tend to have cheesecake very often as it’s too much at the end of a very filling meal and I didn’t hold out high hopes for a cheap snack pot.
But I was nicely surprised. Tbh, I’m not entirely sure what discerns a *really good* cheesecake, but in terms of a small post-meal dessert or snack, this was like the level above a luxury yoghurt. The top layer of strawberry compote added a necessary burst of flavour above a nice thick vanilla base. The biscuit wasn’t too crunchy, but this is Spar we are talking about here.
Heck Vegan Italia Sausages
I haven’t massively gotten on with Heck as the last sausages of theirs that I bought had a very weird playdough texture which didn’t translate well when cooking - these “chipolatas” on the other hand felt more reminiscent of my beloved discontinued Quorn Best of British sausages. (Where did they go? No one knows…) They had an agreeable and not too strong flavour, so would go well with sauce or in a sausage sandwich.
Post-Crying Custard Tarts
Have you ever been crying and realise you’re hungry but don’t want to leave your room just yet as your face will betray you? Have you ever then known the joy as you realised that you bought a pastel de nata from the supermarket bakery and it is fact in your bag right next to you?
The second is more specific, but I highly recommend any Portuguese style custard tart from a supermarket bakery if you can get one. There are far superior to the ones you often get in the chilled dessert section as they have a flaky pastry base and the custard is sweeter and less dense!
Mac and Blue Cheese
After my sister requested mac and cheese with a crispy topping, I decided to adapt as I often find there isn’t enough flavour to cut through.
I diced onion and mushrooms and fried together with garlic, then added a bit of tomato puree for extra richness and stock. (I also added a splash of soy and balsamic vinegar, but depends on your taste). Once that simmered down, I let that cool and made a cream sauce (as I didn’t have enough milk for a roux) and added a chunk of grated cheddar, parmesan and Saint Agur as well as salt and pepper. Once the cheese was melted and sufficiently cheesy, you can add the cooled down mushroom mixture and stir until all incorporated.
I cooked the pasta separately, drained then put into a small ceramic dish,added the sauce and then topped with more parmesan and breadcrumbs. Depending on how much time you have or how hungry you are, I just grilled the top but you can put in to properly bake as well.
It was frankly delicious, but hard to go too wrong with copious amounts of cheese.
The Croissan-wich
As mentioned in the previous newsletter, this was a passion project based on recreating a veggie version of the Burger King breakfast sandwich. Traditionally it consists of a sausage patty, bacon or ham, a cuboid of egg(??) and cheese in a croissant sliced like a bun.
So how best to go about this?
To paraphrase Drake, we start from the bottom.
Now in terms of sandwiches, as you may know I love halloumi, as when it’s quickly fried it has a soft tender quality. This combined with it’s natural saltiness comes up in my mind as a natural substitute for bacon and covers your cheese factor too, so win-win. I paired it with roasted garlic mayo and I always do, but feel free to add a sauce of your choosing (sweet chilli is a common pairing or if you are my boyfriend, some form of nando’s sauce.)
Secondly, I added mushrooms. I know this is a controversial subject in the veggie community as a lot of vegetarians I know hate them, but fried with garlic, soy sauce and balsamic vinegar in my opinion gives them a lovely meaty-without-the meat quality with that sweet yet savoury sticky flavour. Also if you are vegan or lactose intolerant, they can be a great non-cheesy filling!
The egg.
I honestly cannot tell for the life of me whether this is meant to be an omelette or fried or what, so I went plain and simple with fried, sunny side up. When I served them, I ended up rolled the egg accidentally but actually worked in my favour, with the lovely runny yolk bursting through the middle. C’est magnifique!
Cheese (again). This was totally unnecessary, but I grated some parmesan on top, because honestly it’s my favourite grated cheese at the moment. However, you can obviously leave this out, add any cheese you like (I’ve heard you can get very nice vegan smoked gouda these days) or maybe even a pesto if you’re feeling real bougie.
Butter.
Now this was where Twitter came in. My instinct is to always butter a sandwich, although my boyfriend often tells me that croissants don’t need more butter as they mainly consist of butter. I asked my beloved following, and whilst 71.4% of my voting public agreed with me that a croissant can and should be buttered, this also ignited a debate of how it should be buttered. My French friend said it can be sliced open, whilst my Swiss friend not very neutrally argued that croissants should be torn and dipped. This argument literally lasted at least a couple of days between them, much to my surprise, as I frankly like it both ways.
(I will be opening my the bakery The Bi-Langerie hopefully in 2022.)
In the end, I settled for buttering the top, with a few drops of truffle oil if you’re n̶a̶s̶t̶y̶ fancy. Yet again, this is very much me being extra so not necessary although if you have a little flavoured oil like chilli and garlic and haven’t already added, you definitely could!
Make sure the croissant is warm before filling and hey presto! You will have one of the best (if quite messy) veggie sandwiches you can imagine! In the words of not Burger King, I was loving it.
Aims for next week:
honestly not sure. I’m going into essay hard-mode so will inevitably end up procrastinating by looking up recipes. Me and my sister were reminiscing about Bone Daddies and its great ramen the other day, so may at some point experiment with trying to make a good mushroom broth. Otherwise send me any good (and cheap) ideas/recipes if you got them!
That’s all for this week, but tune in next week when essay madness will have inevitably settled in!
If you enjoyed any of this and want to keep this going/want me to test out any of your recipes/veggie-friendly ideas, you can donate to my Ko-Fi or Paypal.