I made a mistake the other day. I wanted to make a loaf of my Miracle Bread so I could make sandwiches. I dumped the ingredients into my mixing bowl then added the water to mix into the dough. I didn’t have the instructions, but figured I knew how much water to put in since I had made it so many times in the past. Well I dumped in a cup of water and mixed it up. The dough seemed stiffer then I remembered, but I was able to scrape it out into the loaf pan and toss it into the preheated oven.
Forty minutes later the loaf should have been done, so I checked it with a cooking thermometer. It read 150 degrees, so I knew it was done, but it had not risen at all. It was a brick…heavy and solid and not the nice sandwich bread I was hoping for at all. I had forgotten the instructions after all – it should have been two cups of water, not one.
I tried a slice anyway and it was good – just small and solid. I left it to cool and wandered off to do other things. Later that evening I took to cleaning up the kitchen and had to decide what to do with the brick of bread. I tried to slice it very thinly and it did well. That gave me an idea – Crostini!
Crostini means “little toast” and can refer to either just the toast itself or an appetizer made with the little piece of toast. Crostini is similar to Bruschetta, except that Bruschetta is a little toast that is first rubbed with garlic cloves and olive oil, salted and peppered, and then toasted. I didn’t want to go to the effort of preparing garlic cloves and olive oil right then, but I was willing to thinly slice the entire loaf of bread and lay them out on my dehydrator trays. For a touch of extra flavor I lightly dusted the slices with a touch of garlic salt before popping the trays into the dehydrator and switching on the heat.
The alternative was to simply toss out the bread “brick,” but I am reluctant to waste good food just because it does not turn out the way I want. So I re-purposed the bread into something else. The next day the slices were crispy crunchy and ready to eat. I put a spoonful of vegetable stew on one slice to get a tasty crunch to my stew. I tried bit of meat on another slice to get a tiny snack sandwich. I can imagine many different uses for this creation.
Ellen especially likes to have something crunchy with her meals. Lately I have been making the tomato sauce flax crackers to keep her crunch cravings at bay. But now the cracker jar on the eating table is filled with cute little Crostini. We will see how long they last.
Eating gluten free, dairy free, grain free, seed oil free, and low carb makes creating fun foods a challenge. Every so often we indulge in carbs for a few days with fruit, sweet potatoes, and even some sugar, but the rest of the avoidances stay in place because those foods are poison to us. They kick up autoimmune inflammation and attack, and so are not worth the price.
So we get to be creative. Miracle bread is a great base to start from to get creative with. I make blondies and brownies, lemon poppyseed cake, chocolate bundt cake, cupcakes, pancakes, waffles, garlic bread, and now Crostini.
If I want to tweak the recipe for a more savory flavor to the bread, I put in a couple teaspoons of Braggs aminos and coconut aminos or possibly some chicken bullion. I have even used A-1 sauce and wasabi mustard. Herbs of most any sort make a fine addition to the bread mix. Let your imagination go wild.
For breakfast this morning, in fact, we put wild caught sardines on the Crostini with a squirt of yellow mustard – yum… breakfast of champions. Not the usual Sunday morning breakfast, but we chased it down with some ice cold Zevia root beer, so it was all good. Off to a second trip to Costco now. I was undecided on buying some raspberry plants yesterday, and have decided to go for it.