Category Archives: Basil

Johnsonville Italian Sausage Pizza With Roasted Garlic, Portobello Mushrooms and Parmesan Crisps

For the past two months, we’ve been hosting weekly pizza parties.  Well, truth be told, they have been competitive throw downs where our friends are invited to say goodbye to the week that was and bring their best recipes to battle it out for the pizza crown.   We’ve had some pretty fantastic creations.  After 8 weeks though, inspiration begins to wane. So we were quite excited to hear of the tastespotting.com Johnsonville Italian Sausage competition.  Inspiration, the chance to get our pizza on our favorite food porn site AND the likelihood (albeit remote) of winning a food making competition.  How could we not be excited?

Anders had this one on his mind for a whole week and came up with this creation: Johnsonville Italian Sausage Pizza with  roasted garlic, Portobello mushrooms and topped with parmesan crisps and toasted pine nuts. Does it get any crazier than this?   We hope you like it, and if you do please vote for us when the time comes.

Johnsonville Italian Hot Sausage Pizza
Johnsonville Italian Hot Sausage Pizza

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Crab Cake Sandwich With Focaccia Bread

For the past few weeks I have been berating Anders that he has abandoned his sandwich making craft. Berating is a bit strong – more like a strongly nudging.  He has been focusing on taking photos while I make the sandwiches.  This week, he heard me and made this tasty sandwich that proves even more than his passport and birth certificate, that he is indeed from the land where smorrebrod was born.  It was one of those evenings when I just got home from work and crashed with no thought as to dinner. I was in the middle of one of those marathon phone conversations with one of my girlfriends when Anders came through the door, smiled and nodded in my direction and headed to the kitchen.   He was a man on a mission.  15 minutes later, his mission became clear. He returned to the living room with this dinner sandwich that was so good to look at that I felt guilty eating it.  Not too guilty though.  Costco membership that made purchasing the crabcakes possible: $60/year and worth every penny and more.  Having a husband with smorrebrod making in his DNA: priceless!

Crab cake sandwich with cucumber, red pepper, and mozzarella on focaccia bread
Crab cake sandwich with cucumber, red pepper, and mozzarella on focaccia bread

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Four Tomato Caprese Panini With Buffalo Mozzarella

Ever heard of the four cheese sandwich?  Typically this sandwich involves an abundance of cheese with little smidgen of veggies.  A few weeks ago, we decided to turn that recipe upside down and make the four tomato caprese panini.  Thanks to overshopping (yet again) at the annual Tomato Mania, our garden has quite a variety of this summer necessity.  If only the variety was matched by abundance.  Sigh!  This year, we have been outdone by the garden pests who have made off with most of our yield.  Poor Anders. In anticipation of this annual raiding, early in the season he stocked the pantry with peanut butter – the bait of choice for our Have a Heart trap.   Months later, we are out of peanut butter and tomatoes.  There are some very fat well fed squirrels and rabbits running around Poway right now and they owe it all to Anders.   How they managed to get to the PB without springing the trap is beyond me.   Ocassionally, (grudglying, we suspect), they left us a few, from which we were able to have a few tomato meals – like this sandwich.

Four Tomato Caprese Panini With Buffalo Mozzarella
Four Tomato Caprese Panini With Buffalo Mozzarella

You can use any combination of tomatoes you wish. We used: white oxheart, brandy boy, Mr. Stripey and XXX.  It was delish, so much so that after eating his mammoth sandwich, Anders begged for another.  After eating his second sandwich, he was nearly comatose on the sofa.  Sweet reward for me… that and hearing him declare, “this is hands down the best panini I’ve ever tasted.”

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Sandwich Roll With Tomatoes, Crayfish Salad, Basil, Parmesan And Sautéed Leeks

A fantastic sandwich, using the highly undervalued leek. That’s right. When is the last time YOU cooked with leeks? That’s what we thought. We made the rolls specifically for this sandwich, they have a center (which you can’t see on the photos) of pesto-infused dough. It was a grand experiment, but in reality they didn’t rise quite as expected. This was our best specimen of the lot.

Sandwich Roll With Tomatoes, Crayfish Salad, Basil, Parmesan And Sautéed Leeks
Sandwich Roll With Tomatoes, Crayfish Salad, Basil, Parmesan And Sautéed Leeks

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Jamie’s Bruschetta Appetizer

This is another of Jamie Oliver’s recipes we decided to make along with the “ Grilled Eggplant Crostini Appetizer” and the “Fava Bean Crostini Appetizer” both from his delicious book “Jamie’s Italy“. It’s basically tomatoes, basil olive oil and a slice of bread. The key is as always to use great ingredients for great results. We tweaked it a little like we always do since we believe in creative liberties.

And today we just launched the free Amazing Sandwiches iPad application. Why do you ask? Well, because we can. Browse all our sandwiches in glamorous high-res – literally sandwiches at your fingertips. It’s not fancy, it’s just… sandwiches. Enjoy. Oh, and you can download it directly from here.

Bruschetta Appetizer
Bruschetta Appetizer

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Crab Cake Sandwich: Toasted Focaccia With Crab Cake, Roasted Garlic, Lettuce and Lemon

I love a good crab cake, so naturally ever since we started this blog I’ve been dying to make a crab cake sandwich. Last week-end we had out-of-town visitors begging us to make some amazing sandwiches, so I thought that would be a good time to try it. One of our friends is Indian and an ex-vegetarian so naturally this had better be good or else he might snap back (he didn’t 🙂 ). When you make anything fishy, it’s almost impossible to add too much lemon, so we made sure to soak these sandwiches good in lots of lemon juice. The slice on top is just for show and is a classical Danish garnish back home.

The focaccia was baked by Wendie, and we highly recommend making more bread at home. It’s a lost art these days, but the smell of fresh bread in the house is priceless.

Crab cake Sandwich: Oven Roasted Focaccia With Crab cake, Roasted Garlic, Lettuce and Lemon
Crab cake Sandwich: Oven Roasted Focaccia With Crab cake, Roasted Garlic, Lettuce and Lemon

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The Big Bad Wolf Burger

Sometimes a man needs to be a man, and that’s when he makes “The Big Bad Wolf Burger“. Oh yeah, 1/2 pound of patty with basil, cilantro, oven roasted garlic and blue cheese chunks. What a great 4th of July celebration that was. Inspired by the moment, I topped it off with crispy hash browns and a jackfruit/avocado rough guacamole. I can’t even begin to tell you how good this burger is, but this is so far the best burger I’ve had in my life. The jackfruit guacamole sweetness perfectly blends with the spicy mayo, the juicy patty, and the crunchy hash browns. These are the times when I think back to all the missed opportunities of my childhood to celebrate with awesome burgers, the food of men 😉

aThe Big Bad Wolf Burger
The Big Bad Wolf Burger

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Grilled Eggplant Crostini Appetizer

Inspired by Jamie Oliver’s book “Jamie’s Italy” this is one of our favorite appetizers so far this year. It also looks beautiful. The crunchy toasted pane siciliano bread and the smoothness of the eggplant (or Aubergine as we call it in Denmark), goes very well together and fills your mouth with flavor and adventure. Eggplant seems to be largely a forgotten vegetable in the US, at least in SoCal (Southern California), and really it’s a wonderful ingredient in many dishes. People, wake up and smell the eggplant!

Grilled Eggplant Appetizer
Grilled Eggplant Appetizer

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Caprese Panini Sandwich

We love caprese salads so much we had Phil’s BBQ change their menu and serve it at our wedding (They did a great job too). So, it should come as no surprise that we had to try and turn the art of the caprese into a sandwich. A panini sandwich to be exact. It has all the classic ingredients: Mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. For the bread we went with our own homemade pesto-sourdough bread, but any regular sourdough will do just fine.

Caprese Panini Sandwich
Caprese Panini Sandwich
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