Sourdough Bread Canapés

I had a visitor yesterday - someone I grew-up with in the Philippines and had not seen for more than 20 years. She was in Costa del Sol chaperoning students with other teachers from some high school in Los Angeles, and came over for dinner with her friend. We had a great time.

Her mother made the best Chicken Cashews I've ever had and was really a good cook, so Ronny and I were under some pressure to make sure we regaled her with food that was up to par.

We made some canapés by slicing sourdough bread thinly, slathering them with herbed garlic butter and topping them off with Jamon Iberico and Spanish cheese - since she was only going to be here for a short period of time and I wanted to make sure she got to try out some Iberico ham. The Spanish cheese we used was a mild variety made from cow's milk from Asturias, but I'm not sure what exactly this is called.

The red stuff on these canapés are cocktail tomatoes that we had leftover from making the sandwich cake which was our main course and the green stuff is fresh oregano leaves.

Herbed Garlic Butter

Ingredients

225 g Unsalted Butter

A Small Bunch of Chives

A Small Bunch of Italian Parsley

1 Clove Garlic

2 Tsp Coarse Spanish Salt (Any good quality salt will do)

Freshly Ground Black Pepper (As much as you wish)

Step 1: Let the butter soften to room temperature inside your food processor.

Step 2: Throw in your garlic clove, chop up the chives (I cut them with scissors) into the butter and put the Italian parsley leaves inside. Put a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper into this.

Step 3: Blend everything. The food processor will mince everything for you so let it do its job.

Step 4: When everything looks more or less blended, put in the salt and let the food processor spin for another minute or so. You want the salt to be evenly distributed but not pulverized so you can feel the crunch of the crystals.

Ronny made a beautiful sandwich cake for our main course but we didn't take any photographs. It was decorated with prawns boiled in dill and salt, halves of cocktail tomatoes of different colors, sprigs of fresh dill and caviar. It was a smaller version of this one without the lobsters.

For dessert I made Gâteau de Zoë again and baked it for 20 minutes this time. The original recipe says 15 minutes but depending on the quirks of your oven the cake will need to be baked for a few more minutes.