BOOK/A TABLE - Rollin' on the River

Percival Everett’s remarkable novel James reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as narrated from the enslaved Jim’s perspective. The New York Times bestseller was also recently announced as Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year.

During Jim and Huck’s journey together down the Mississippi river, they discover a stash of books that includes Candide. I loved Jim’s testament to the transporting nature of reading:

       “I pulled my sack of books closer, reached in and touched one. I let my hand linger there, a flirtation of sorts. The small thick book I’d wrapped my fingers around was the novel. I had never read a novel, though I understood the concept of fiction. It wasn’t so unlike religion, or history, for that matter. I pulled the book from the bag. I checked to see if Huck was still sleeping soundly and then I opened it. The smell of the pages was glorious.

       In the country of Westphalia...
       I was somewhere else. I was not on one side of that damned river or the other. I was not on the Mississippi. I was not in Missouri.”

Now, the friends don’t find a lot to eat during their travels (their bread ruined, they mostly subsist on catfish and berries), but talk about nourishment! Huck couldn’t read much, but Jim was thankful that he could feed his soul.

What are you reading that feeds your soul? What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving? While you chew on that, think about making these traditional yeast rolls courtesy of Southern Living to share with your family and friends as you break bread together for the holiday.

Why? Because that’s how you roll, of course.

Click on the Southern Living link below for tips and make-ahead options and do enjoy!

Buttery Yeast Rolls
Adapted from Southern Living Test Kitchen
By Southern Living Test Kitchen
Yield: 32 rolls

Ingredients
2 (1/4-oz) envelopes active dry yeast (4 1/2 tsp)
1 1/4 cups warm water (105° to 115°F), divided
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup vegetable shortening, melted
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp kosher salt
5 to 5 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, as needed, divided, plus more for work surface
1/4 cup butter, melted
2 tsp flaky sea salt

Directions
Activate yeast:
Stir together yeast and 1/4 cup of the warm water in a large bowl; let stand until mixture is foamy, about 5 minutes.

Make dough:
Add eggs, shortening, sugar, salt, 2 cups of the flour, and remaining 1 cup warm water to yeast mixture. Beat with a wooden spoon until well combined and smooth, about 2 minutes. Gradually stir in 3 cups of the flour until a soft dough forms, adding up to 1/4 cup remaining flour if dough is too sticky.

Complete first rise:
Cover bowl with plastic wrap or a clean dish towel; let rise in a warm place (about 80°F) until doubled in size, about 1 hour.

Divide dough into rolls:
Punch down dough in bowl. Turn out onto a floured work surface, and knead until slightly smoother, 3 to 4 times. Divide in half. Working with 1 portion at a time and keeping remaining dough covered, shape each portion evenly into 16 balls (about 2 heaping tablespoons each). If baking right away, skip to Step 6.

Freeze dough balls if making ahead:
To freeze, arrange dough balls about 1 inch apart on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Cover with plastic wrap. Freeze until solid, about 4 hours. Transfer to a freezer-safe zip-top bag. Seal bag, and freeze up to 3 months. Thaw at least 8 hours in the refrigerator, covered, before using.

Complete second rise:
Arrange fresh or frozen dough balls in 2 lightly greased (with cooking spray) 9-inch square metal baking pans. Cover each pan with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm place (about 80°F) until slightly more than doubled in size, about 1 hour. If dough balls were frozen, let rise about 1 hour, 30 minutes. You can also let the dough rise in the refrigerator overnight. Let sit at room temperature while the oven preheats before baking.

Bake rolls:
Preheat oven to 375°F. Remove plastic wrap from baking pan. Bake until golden brown, 15 to 18 minutes. Remove from oven, brush evenly with butter, and sprinkle with flaky sea salt. Serve warm.

BOOK/A TABLE - A Pumpkin Party!

“But it was rather remarkable, seeing so many pumpkins or vegetable marrows, whatever they are. They were everywhere, in the shops, and in people’s houses, with candles or nightlights inside them or strung up.”

So says Ariadne Oliver, ranting in Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party. But good gourd! She didn’t say a word about all the many other ways to feature pumpkins—such as chicken pot pie or cheese fondue in a pumpkin, outrageous cheesey-choco-pumpkin bars, pumpkin pie of course, or its modest sister—pumpkin bread.

The recipe I found in the New York Times turned out to be a pretty good roadmap, but not quite the fall flavor-burst I’d hoped for. Pumpkin on its own tends to be bland and the flavor really needs to be teased out, so next time I would double up on the cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger before digging in. Don’t over bake, but do slather with apple or pumpkin butter. 

Pumpkin Bread With Brown Butter and Bourbon
By Melissa Clark
Yield:Two 8-inch loaves

Ingredients
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
¼ cup bourbon (or use water or apple cider)
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 ¾ cups pumpkin purée, homemade or canned (1 15-ounce can)
4 eggs
½ cup olive or other oil (such as canola)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1¾ cups light brown sugar
1½ teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground cardamom

Preparation
Step 1
Heat oven to 350 degrees and arrange a rack in the center. Grease the insides of two 8-inch loaf pans with butter or line with parchment paper.

Step 2
In a large skillet, melt ½ cup (1 stick) butter over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to medium and cook until the frothy white milk solids sink to the bottom of the pan and turn a fragrant, nutty brown, 5 to 7 minutes. Brown butter can burn quickly, so watch it carefully. (A tip: You will know your brown butter is almost ready when the frantic sound of bubbling begins to die down, so use your ears as well as your eyes and nose.)

Step 3
In a glass liquid measuring cup, combine bourbon and vanilla. Add water until you reach the ⅔ cup mark. In a large bowl, whisk together bourbon mixture, pumpkin purée, eggs and oil. With a spatula, scrape all the brown butter from the skillet into the pumpkin mixture and stir to combine.

Step 4
In another large bowl, whisk together all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, brown sugar, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger and cardamom. Pour liquid ingredients into dry ingredients and stir to combine.

Step 5
Divide batter between the two greased loaf pans. Place them on a rimmed baking sheet and transfer to oven. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes or until a tester or toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean. Allow bread to cool completely before removing from pan.

Keep the party going! Karen Pierce features Devilled Eggs also inspired by Hallowe’en Party in her fabulous cookbook Recipes for Murder—66 Dishes that Celebrate the Mysteries of Agatha Christie. Read about another Agatha Christie celebration here. 

                                                       

I hope you enjoy some of these fanciful, seasonally spot-on dishes—and if your guests ask who made them, you can certainly take satisfaction in telling them YOU dunnit. 

Happy Hallowe’en!

A Plucky Pot Pie

This isn't your typical chicken pot pie. As scribed by Melissa Clark with In Praise of Pale Food, this White Chicken Pot Pie diversion is just great and had my guests swooning. The recipe may be found here and below, with my comments in italics. I made a few adjustments over and about, adding in canned potatoes, an assortment of wild mushrooms and substituting canned green beans for suggested frozen peas. Just add these before the dish goes into the oven to bake so nothing is overly mushy.

As any adventure begins when trying out an unfamiliar recipe or creating something new, I was simultaneously unsure and curious how this biscuit topping would turn out as we left the traditional pastry crust behind. In a word: MARVELOUSLY! Added in dollops, the biscuits cooked perfectly in the oven while the filling underneath bubbled merrily.

I was only serving three of us, so this potpie with a simple salad was dinner, lunch the next day and also leftovers. Do enjoy!

White Chicken Potpie

TOTAL TIME

1 hour 45 minutes

Ingredients

3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (1 1/2 pounds) Nope, an already cooked rotisserie chicken

Kosher salt

Black pepper

3 cups chicken stock

1 cup white wine

2 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled

1 bay leaf

1 thyme sprig

1 rosemary sprig

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter (18 tablespoons), chilled, additional for greasing pan

2 leeks, thinly sliced, white and light green parts

1 shallot, thinly sliced

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup heavy cream, more as needed

1 small celery root or 2 small carrots, peeled and diced (1 1/4 cups) I included 1 1/4 cups mirepoix, the celery, carrot and onion mixture, already chopped

Package of sliced wild mushrooms

1 medium potato, peeled and diced (1 1/4 cups) Sliced up peeled potatoes from a can

1 cup frozen peas, optional Indeed! I used a can of Del Monte French cut green beans that we had instead

1 1/2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest (from 1 1/2 lemons)

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 1/2 cups buttermilk

3 tablespoons sliced blanched almonds I didn't use almonds, I didn't think the recipe warranted any

Preparation

I skipped this step entirely by using the rotisserie chicken that I later hacked apart and shredded before adding it into the mix.

1. Season chicken lightly with salt and pepper. Let rest 15 minutes. In a medium pot over medium heat, combine chicken, stock, wine, garlic, bay leaf, thyme and rosemary. Bring to a simmer and cook chicken gently until no longer pink, 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer meat to a plate to cool completely. Strain and reserve cooking liquid (you should have about 2 3/4 cups). Once chicken is cool, shred into bite-size pieces.

2. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Lightly grease a 9-by-13-inch baking pan with butter.

The beautiful pale leeks!

 

3. Melt 4 tablespoons butter in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add leeks and shallot and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. 

Add in mushrooms and cook for a little longer until they release their juices. 

 

  

Melt in 4 more tablespoons butter. Stir in 1/2 cup flour and cook, stirring occasionally, 2 minutes. Slowly whisk in the strained stock (I used vegetable stock but chicken stock of course would work) and the cream. Season with 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Bring mixture to a simmer. Slice your can of potatoes during the simmer. Stir in celery root or carrot, and potato; simmer over low heat, stirring frequently, 10 minutes (This is where the mirepoix comes into play). Stir in chicken, peas if using and lemon zest. Scrape mixture into prepared pan.

4. In a large bowl, whisk together 3 cups flour, the baking powder and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Cut the remaining 10 tablespoons butter into cubes; using a pastry cutter or two forks, mix into flour until mixture forms coarse crumbs. Stir in buttermilk. Dollop mixture on top of potpie filling (it’s O.K. if there are spaces between biscuits). Brush tops with cream and sprinkle with almonds.

5. Transfer casserole to oven; bake until top is golden brown and filling is bubbling, 35 to 45 minutes. Somewhere around 15 minutes into it, I thought to pour in a little dry-ish white wine.

Let cool 10 minutes before serving.

YIELD

8 to 10 servings

Play Reading - All About Eve

This month we took to the living room to enact All About Eve, the scintillating classic drama about a neurotic, aging (she's only turning 40!) actress and the young upstart who schemes to uproot her life. The reading was different this time, we weren't reading from a copy of a staged play--I had found a transcript of an old Lux radio play, edited to fit the format--and actually featured the star of the film, none other than Miss Bette Davis.

As the legendary New York restaurant '21' figures into the film, I was inspired to create a menu from one of my favorite cookbooks, '21' of course, that was given to me by a dear friend years ago, with recipes by chef extraordinaire Michael Lomonaco. I set the table to mimic the tables at '21' with red and white checkered napkins, and cocktail napkins and stirrers from the joint that a bartender was kind enough to give me when I had recently visited. And of course there was a wide-rimmed martini glass for decoration.



Tonight's Menu
Chilled Relish Tray (celery, radishes and black olives)
Butter Lettuces with Peas & Shallot Champagne Vinaigrette
London Broil with Roasted Shallots
"Cold Cocoa" Cups

I filled a copper gratin pan with crushed ice and placed my dish of appetizing raw vegetables upon it before we began reading, as we caught up with a few glasses of wine.

Simple butter lettuces with peas served as a wonderful salad, dressed with Lomonaco's utterly distracting vinaigrette.

A London Broil steak was cooked well enough in an attempt to evenly gauge everyone's taste for doneness. Our off-oven preparation may be found here from a great New York Times article. The recipe for accompanying roasted shallots was pulled from the '21' cookbook and tasted like we had entered a Parisian bistro when paired with the meat.

The shallots before, performing a merry dance all on their own, quite bouncing about, as they sauteed in butter...

And after, being roasted in the oven with sugar, butter, salt, pepper and chicken stock for about 40 minutes until they become such a lovely gold brown.

The meat of the matter!

The '21' flourless chocolate torte that we intended to make had some issues--Baby and I couldn't unmold it from the pan! Julia Child once lamented (more or less) that "cooking is one disaster after another!" But as with any recipe, calmed assurance, control and a touch of ingenuity must also be added to the list of ingredients. We scooped the torte out of the pan as there was nothing wrong with it except for its unwillingness to budge, and into some elegant cups from a vintage coffee service. We topped this with spurts of whipped cream and blossoms of dark chocolate curls for a truly fabulous dessert.

It started out this way,  with sugar and corn syrup brought to a boil.



Ten whole eggs goes into this torte, beaten in an electric mixer to a frenzy!

Melting the chocolate in a double boiler until it turns to...

shimmering chocolate silk for the rich base of your torte!

Although our torte wasn't what we had hoped for, and it pained us to disrupt our confection in such a way as we did, nobody was the wiser and practically licked their cups clean. So don't tell everybody all about our evening.

Soundtrack: Atlantic Jazz, Hits of the 50's; Jorge Bolet, Lizst, Piano Works, Vol. 1; Applause, Original Broadway Cast.

Brrrrrrrrrrr-Roast Beef Sandwiches!

 

Perfect for a wintry day! And goodness, just how delicious. Outrageously so! I spied this in last week's New York Magazine, there it was, just calling my name. It's all very easy to make, the roast is the only thing that takes time, but that's just the slow time involved to cook the meat; there's no fussing over it at all. And it's really only two hours of agonizing over the amazing aroma wafting through the kitchen, desperate to dig in. Do laundry or tend to the garden to take your mind off of it. But there are other simple things to do involving this wondrous creation, such as making the Henry Bain sauce and the pico de lettuce to be later stuffed in a warm baguette.

Click here for the full story about Mr. Henry Bain and his classic sauce/condiment, both of which hail from Louisville. 

The roast, all rubbed down, ready to go in the oven. Seen here before...

Off-Oven Roast Beef

Ingredients

1 beef roast, like top, eye or bottom round, approximately 3 pounds

1 tablespoon kosher salt

1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper

3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

1 tablespoon olive oil

Red-pepper flakes to taste

Preparation

Remove roast from refrigerator. Preheat oven to 500 degrees.

In a small bowl, mix together salt, pepper, garlic, olive oil and red-pepper flakes to create a kind of paste. Rub this all over the roast. Place beef in a roasting pan or cast-iron skillet, fat-side up, and put in oven. Cook undisturbed for 5 minutes per pound.

Turn off oven. Do not open oven door. Leave roast to continue cooking, undisturbed, for two hours.

After two hours, remove roast from oven. Slice and serve alongside, ideally, a watercress salad, some skillet-fried potatoes and a small tureen of Henry Bain sauce.

YIELD

4 to 6 main courses, with leftovers for sandwiches 

Making Mr. Bain's sauce at a slow simmer until just thickened, while cooking the meat. This sauce is cooled down and refrigerated until ready for use.

Henry Bain Sauce

Ingredients

1/3 cup mango or peach chutney, best available

4 tablespoons of your favorite steak sauce

4 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

4 tablespoons chili sauce

2 tablespoon ketchup

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Hot sauce, to taste

4 tablespoons chopped watercress, optional

Preparation

In a small pot set over medium heat, stir all the ingredients except the watercress. Heat until slightly thickened, then remove from heat. Allow to cool and refrigerate until ready to use.

Just before serving, if you like, stir chopped watercress into the sauce.

...And after! The juicy roast, having sat in the oven off-heat for two hours.  

 

Pico de Lettuce

Ingredients

1 head romaine lettuce, cleaned, dried and cut into chiffonade

1 clove garlic, peeled and minced

1 small red onion, or half a medium-size one, peeled and sliced very thin

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon white vinegar

1 teaspoon olive oil

Pinch of salt

Preparation

Put the lettuce into a medium-size nonreactive bowl. Set aside.

In a small nonreactive bowl, combine the other ingredients and whisk to emulsify. Taste and adjust seasonings.

Mix together the lettuce and the dressing and allow to sit, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes. Drain off some of the juice that will accumulate at the bottom of the bowl. Use on a sandwich.

  
While the roast rested, I heated up loaves of par-baked bread for the sandwiches.



Here's our meaty friend at rest on a carving board having been transferred, soaking up all the juices.

All there is left to do is to slice the meat, slather the bread with the sauce and top with the nostril-tingling dressed lettuce, having essentially pickled the onions and garlic with the acid from the lemon juice. Once everything comes together--consummate this marriage and EAT!

Thanks to the Times for such an outstanding outing!

What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

My friend's birthday coincides with New Year's Eve, so what else to do but throw a New Year's Eve Birthday Around The World Buffet Party! Baby and I had invited somewhat of an international roster and folks from out of town were also coming, so we planned on a buffet where our friends could come and graze as they pleased instead of cramming in around the table. This was a great idea as people really did filter in and out through the evening, arriving at different times. As far as the menu was concerned, we knew we wanted to make French onion soup which served as the base before we ventured further across the globe. We also had planned to serve a different course every hour on the hour, leading to a midnight Champagne toast but things rarely work out that way.

Classic prawns in pints from England were actually easier-to-procure shrimp and the Lobster Bisque Dip I whipped up, with chunks of lobster, grilled corn, and a diced mango finish was simply from New England (more on that later). It was served with kettle crisps but the shrimp also found its way in the dip too!

The French onion soup enriched with Cognac was ladled out from a marvelous tureen with individual gruyere cheese toasts to top our guests' little cups. For our Italian pasta course, Sam Sifton's Mushroom Lasagna from the New York Times was an absolute time-consuming chore--thank goodness I made it the day before--but it should sit in refrigeration over night anyhow. I feel it was worth it though, nearly blushing over the ensuing compliments. There was barely any left and what was went to other homes, sealed in Tupperware. Baby used a recipe for ragu from Saveur to complete the course. This meaty sauce with beef chuck and pork shoulder also incorporated chicken livers and pancetta. He even made his own ricotta cavatelli for a perfect pasta foil!

Here it all deliciously came together, with a judicious shaving of Parmesan cheese:

Behold the octopus!

We wanted something lighter to serve after all that pasta, so Baby tackled this slimy sea creature with abandon to create a Greek dish, with red wine and sliced wild fennel. The olives in the dish were salty to be sure but even the squeamish amongst us tried it and I believe we had a few converts.

Before midnight we served a simple marble bundt cake to celebrate our friend's birthday. We had planned on Swiss chocolate fondue but we were just too exhausted by that point and everyone else was too tipsy to care.

Blow out the candles and make a wish...!

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

Buon Giorno! When Baby and I went to Italy last summer, apart from sipping Negronis and visiting various ruins, we also ordered a carbonara pasta in the three cities we visited: Venice, Florence, and Rome. Although the classic dish arrived on our plates in different variations, our hands-down favorite was at the Taverna de Romana, on the via della Madonna in Rome. Not only was it dirt cheap, it stayed the closest to tradition and didn’t incorporate an overly creamy sauce, mimicking an alfredo as so many places tend to do here in the states.

We had traveled with Baby’s sister-in-law and wily nephew, whom I shall affectionately refer to here as Mama Bear and Baby Bear (Baby’s brother, Papa Bear, doesn’t like to leave the country). They live in Los Angeles but just came to New York to check out a few colleges, as Baby Bear enters into his freshman year this fall. Children grow up so quickly, don’t they?

So they were coming for dinner and we decided to make an Italian dinner as a reunion of sorts. We knew we wanted to make carbonara of course and Baby had a recipe from his McCall’s Cooking School binders that are comprised of recipes he’d received monthly in the mail back in the 70’s. I thought of pizza too, as a starter, but didn’t want to be cliché nor did I want something so heavy to impede upon the carbonara. I’m not really too interested in making my own dough, and as we had a tube of Pillsbury pizza dough in the fridge that I wanted to use, I stuck with my idea and began to construct a pizza plan, lightening it up with a lot of vegetables. Instead of a tomato sauce, I chopped an onion, the white parts of two leeks, and two garlic cloves and sautéed the lot in olive oil. When it had all wilted, I deglazed with balsamic vinaigrette, threw in a few grinds of salt and pepper and made a quick jam by adding a few tablespoons of honey. When the mix had cooled, I spread it on the pizza dough. After salting and draining shavings of zucchini and yellow squash (either a mandoline or a vegetable peeler will work) in a colander for 30 minutes, I dressed the pizza. The topping was grated Gruyere cheese; the whole thing went in to a 425 degree oven for 17 minutes, as the Pillsbury package dictates, perhaps a little longer to thoroughly roast the vegetables with a nice color. It was gorgeous all around.

Now here’s the weird part about the tomato flan and in order to explain it properly I have to go back a few years. Baby and his old pal, Boho Gal, went to Florence in 2000 and discovered the marvelous Cibreo restaurant where they served tomato flan, instead of butter to go with table bread. Back in New York, they happened upon Pepolino just below Canal Street and remarked on the tomato flan that they also served. The waiter overheard the conversation and immediately told them that he and one of the managers had come from Cibreo to open Pepolino! When Baby and I went to Florence last summer, he was anxious to revisit Cibreo, where we had a most incredible meal, where yes, they still served the tomato flan. When we told our friends over dinner at Cibreo about the Pepolino story, the owner overheard us and fled to our table to impart her story of how she had gone to New York to help her coworker friend open Pepolino. Extraordinary! The capper comes with this dinner for Baby’s family, when I was looking through a collection of clippings I had amassed years ago (probably around 2000), trying to find something to make and found—a recipe from the New York Times, the recipe for Pepolino’s tomato flan that I had completely forgotten about and had never made. It’s just delicious and impossibly easy. I want to serve it all the time, as Cibreo does, to be slathered on country bread instead of butter.

I tore up green and red leaf lettuces and tossed them with olive oil and salt to serve with the carbonara, which came out great, but I didn’t follow the McCall’s recipe entirely. The recipe is sort of faulty anyhow and I don’t think that making the pasta first, as is suggested, is wise. You have to heat it up again and rinsing the pasta with hot water only strips it of its starch and the eggy dressing doesn’t cling to it as well. I also used pancetta instead of bacon and a blend of shredded cheeses (parmesan, asiago, Romano) instead of just parmesan. I meant to temper the eggs with some of the pasta water but draining a steaming vat of pasta is so immediate and intense, it’s often easy for me to forget to reserve a cup of the liquid. The cheese coagulated too, the McCall’s recipe suggests adding it too soon: it really should only be added in at the very end.

Gourmet magazine came through again, just in time, this month offering a rustic Ricotta and Polenta Pie (the link is gone; I offer this pdf) which was a perfect way to end the meal. It wasn’t difficult (I used prepared dough here too), we just had to soak apricots and tart cherries in a dry white wine the night before assembling the pie.

And as the glasses of Gavi flowed and the Peroni was poured, Baby Bear and I rocked out to Van Halen and AC/DC into the night and we didn’t even need an air guitar as I had just given Baby a ukulele in honor of our anniversary.

Soundtrack: Lou Reed, Transformer; Tom Waits, The Heart of Saturday Night; Neil Young, After the Gold Rush; Van Halen; AC/DC, Back in Black.

P.S. We were so taken by the tomato flan that we considered its possible variations; we wanted to make a flan out of everything the next day. First up was asparagus, with roasted shallots and a blend of lemon and olive oils, but the flan fell flat, as we were remiss in our exclusion of something acidic, like a little red wine vinegar. Up next is winter squash that we look forward to make with orange, rosemary, and roasted garlic. Below is the original recipe for tomato flan adapted from Pepolino that I had clipped from the New York Times.

Tomato Flan

1 8-ounce can Del Monte or other tomato sauce
12 large basil leaves
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for garnish
4 teaspoons unflavored gelatin (about 1 1/3 envelopes)
Salt and fresh black pepper to taste
Vegetable oil
12 slices country bread

In a blender or food processor, combine tomato sauce, 6 leaves basil, garlic, ¼ cup olive oil, gelatin and salt and pepper to taste. Blend at high speed for 2 minutes.
Lightly oil 6 small cappuccino or other cups. Divide tomato mixture among cups. Refrigerate 20 minutes.
To serve, dip bottom of each cup in hot water to loosen flan. Unmold onto 6 plates. Garnish with a basil leaf and a drop of olive oil. Place 2 slices bread on each plate.
Yield: 6 servings.