Quick Eats: Panini at Home

by agavin

Location: The Villa Malka (home), Pacific Palisades, CA.

Date: Nov 02, 2010

My brother came over to whip up a quick batch of brunch panini, one of his specialties. All the actual cooking in this post is courtesy of “guest chef” Mitch Gavin. My related masterpiece are my home made pizzas, I’ll post about them sometime.

First the ingredients. This particular batch was vegetables and cheese. Red onions, farmers market tomatoes and baby bell peppers, fresh basil, two sorts of parmesan, sharp cheddar, and mixed greens.

We often use lavash bread — after all, we live in LA, home to about 1000 great Persian markets. The cheese goes on the bottom, thinly sliced, then some salad.

The salad is dosed with fresh squeezed Meyer Lemon (good on everything) and onion.

The peppers and tomatoes, then some various spices like pepper and oregano. Anything will work.
A little “really good” Olive Oil drizzled on goes a long way. Laudemio makes fantastic single orchard varietals.
You can find these Panini machines at any specialized cooking store these days.
Cook it down until the veggies really collapse, and the cheese goes all over.
Voila!
It’s like grilled cheese and a salad all in one.
And as a bonus you can scrape off the fried cheese (mostly parmasean). Even my two year old liked that.
You can throw just about anything in a panini and it will go great. In this particular one you could add yesterday’s left over steak (sliced), or turkey, or grilled chicken, or prosciutto, whatever.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s