Super Quick 20 minute dinner: Cheat’s Tomato Bread and Pumkin Seed Pesto

by hettychatters

Sunday dinner at our house is a fairly casual affair. usually, I cook dinner after taking a general consensus of appetite earlier in the day, and my brothers J & B, and J’s girlfriend K, oh and often G’ma too, will drive up to our house for dinner, with a delicious pudding. Today though, I had it all in control.

I originally had the plan to make foccacia, but that desire burnt out when I went shopping and smelt the lovely fresh loaves, and decided to cheat on the ‘pretty side dish’ angle of things.
Slice off the top of your loaf, you don’t need that, so it’s fairly flat, and slice in half again. Grab 6 or 7 sun-dried tomatoes, finely chop up with some basil, crush a couple of cloves of garlic, and add 4 tablespoons of the oil from the tomatoes, mix up and soak it into your bread.  Top with some grated Parmesan and stack the bread back on top of one another. Bung in the oven for around 10 mins until just almost crisp on the top, leave on a chopping board cut into fingers with some balsamic vinegar and oils, easy peasey starter that kept the everyone happy, and looked fussier than it was, tasted good too. Personally, I was rather pleased with my cheeky short cut!

In my super quick Sunday dinner phase 2 I whipped up a quick pesto,  about 50g each of pine nuts and pumpkin seeds, lightly toasted for about 8 mins at 180C. Blitz up with as much basil as you fancy, 50g Parmesan  juice of 1 lemon and 5 or so tablespoons of olive oil. It ended up being a crowd pleaser, the pumpkin seeds gave an extra lovely rich nutty flavor. This dinner took next to no time from beginning of preperation to mopped up plates.