Dinner With Crayons

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salami

Speedy supper: ciabatta pizza with salami and chilli pesto

ciabatta-pizza-salami-chilli-pesto.jpg

I paired these two ingredients last week in my cichette Venetian style appetisers. Since I had a fair bit of each ingredient left they resurfaced in last night’s supper, a speedy tray of ciabatta mini pizzas.

Ciabatta keeps for a good week unopened in the fridge. I often buy a loaf if I’m anticipating guests who may or may not definitely be coming and not sure which day either. Everything else bar the cheese is store cupboard so it’s a very flexible appetiser or light meal that I first featured as sun blush tomato mini pizzas.

And if it turns out your guests are not coming after all, you can freeze the ciabatta until they do….

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Cichette Venetian style appetisers with salami and chilli

polenta cichette

Last month I visited Venice for my 40th birthday and one of the things I was eager to try was cichette style appetisers in a Venetian bar.

I will publish a Maison Cupcake post with the various Venetian dishes we tried but here is something I reproduced myself at home having been inspired during our trip.

chargrilling peppers

Chargrill some red peppers – I am using my Le Creuset griddle pan which was also used in the courgette salad I published on Tumblr recently.

slicing polenta

Now honestly, I did try to buy real polenta. But actually I could only get hold of a ready made block. Venetian white polenta would have been hard enough to find but I didn’t expect to struggle finding yellow polenta in a gigantic branch of Sainsbury’s. So ready made we have.

chargrilling polenta

It slices up and carries tiger stripes extremely well and it tastes good too. Although admittedly you can’t soup it up with parmesan like you would if you made it from scratch.

Sacla jars

To fire up my red chargrilled pepper I am using Fiery Chilli Sacla pesto which as you can see is one of numerous flavours – I have already instagrammed the wild garlic one in some stuffed mushrooms and there’s a tart post in the pipeline for Maison Cupcake using the classic basil.

This fiery chilli pesto packs a punch. I was rather taken aback how strong it was and it beefed up the Three Little Pigs salami beautifully.

To assemble the cichette simply stack polenta squares, pepper, a teaspoon of chilli pesto and a disc of salami and fix together with a cocktail stick. I could almost be in the backstreets of Fundamente Nove.

I had a trio of these cichette for lunch and when Ted saw the pictures he wanted them too. So my six year old had cichette for supper. Next he’ll be begging me to take him to Venice but that can wait.

Had you ever come across cichette?

polenta cichette

With thanks to Three Little Pigs and Sacla for sample products.