My Vegan Open Sandwich On Sourdough

There were seven small bowls in the fridge that morning, and they were all waiting for today. Onion jam gone almost mahogany. A very green pesto. Cashew cheese with a spoon standing up in it. Diced tomato waiting for salt. A packet of mushrooms. An avocado I had been guarding from everyone in the house for two days. And a loaf of sourdough that I had cut one thick slice from, badly, because I got distracted while cutting.

I had a friend staying. He was in a hurry to catch a flight and wanted to eat some nonsense and call it breakfast, and I wanted him to sit down for a really nice meal. In our kitchen we don’t have things that come out of tins or jars with barcodes on them. That is simply how our kitchen runs. It means you may need to plan a little, it means a morning has some assembly in it, and it means tomatoes taste like tomatoes.

Start with the bread, because the bread does most of the work. Any wet toppings will destroy ordinary sandwich bread. It goes to paste under the salsa within ninety seconds and then you are eating goo. Sourdough survives because its crumb is tighter and its crust is real. Cut the slice thick and hearty, two centimetres, roughly a finger's width. Toast it hot and fast, in a dry pan with a little olive oil brushed on one side, or under a grill, until the outside is properly crisp and the middle is still chewy when you press it. Soft all the way through and it will collapse. Dry all the way through and it will crack when you bite, and the toppings will slide off onto your lap. You want a crisp shell holding a soft centre.

I use our Cafe Vishala’s sourdough bread. I know there is absolutely no nasty stuff in the bread.

The onion jam, which takes 45 minutes and always will

Make onion jam as you are making other things. It keeps well, is super yummy and goes with almost everything. It is just a pan of onions going slowly brown on a back burner while other things happened around it.

Four or five medium onions, sliced thin. Two tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy pan on a low flame. Add the onions and a good pinch of salt at the start, because the salt pulls the water out and the water is what lets them soften without burning. Then leave them. Stir every five or six minutes. When the bottom of the pan starts to catch, add a splash of water and scrape it up. That brown film is the flavour. Keep going for 45 minutes. At the end, stir in a tablespoon of jaggery and a tablespoon of vinegar, balsamic or apple cider, and cook two minutes more until it looks like jam and pulls away from the pan in one mass.

Do not try to hurry it on a high flame. High heat gives you burnt onions, black at the edges and sharp on the tongue, and there is no rescuing them. Shop jam is mostly sugar wearing an onion's clothes, which is the reason we make our own. It keeps well in the fridge, so like I said, if you are anyways going to be at the stove making something else, make the onion jam on the back burner.

Basil pesto with no cheese in it

We were travelling in Italy and were treated to crusty bread with pesto in Sorrento. The flavours burst onto my tongue and I HAD to know how to make it. The recipe is simplicity itself. Simplicity plus a bit of patience like any good thing in life.

Two packed cups of fresh basil leaves, no stalks. Two big cloves of garlic. In India, use around five of the smaller garlic cloves we get here. A third of a cup of roasted cashews or walnuts.

If you want to be seriously fancy, use pine nuts instead of cashews or walnuts. That is just the best and will make a serious dent on your pocket. Every once in a while, we do pine nuts, mostly it is walnuts.

Blend the leaves, the garlic, the nuts of your choice along with the juice of half a lemon. And half a teaspoon of salt. Blend these first, without oil, in short pulses, scraping down the sides. Then pour in a third to half a cup of good olive oil and pulse just enough to bring it together.

The oil goes in last because long blending with oil in the jar heats it and turns the pesto dull and a little bitter. Short pulses keep the colour bright green. Press a little cling film flat onto the surface when you store it so the top does not go brown. The cheese is missing and you will not notice, because the nuts carry the fat on their own.

This is the way most people will make their pesto. But, we want absolute perfection. And for that you need a mortar and a pestle. First crush the garlic and the salt. Then keep adding in the leaves in batches and crushing them till they are almost like a paste. You will need to do at least 5-6 batches and the whole thing can take about 15 minutes. Then add in the nuts and crush them in with the leaves.Finally add in the olive oil and kind of fold it in. This is the most perfect pesto you will ever have. But I will not judge you if you simply bung everything into the blender and do short blitzes.

A tomato salsa made ten minutes before eating

Two firm tomatoes, the kind that resist the knife a little. Halve them, scoop out the seeds and the wet pulp with your thumb, and dice what is left small. Add half a small onion diced fine, one green chilli chopped very fine, a fistful of coriander, and the juice of half a lime.

Salt it ten minutes before you eat and not a minute earlier. Salt pulls water out of tomato with real enthusiasm, and if you salt it at eight for a nine o'clock breakfast you will have a bowl of pink tomato water and a soggy slice of toast. Mix, taste, adjust the lime.

Cashew cheese, the newest arrival

The cashew cheese turned up in our kitchen years after everything else, out of wanting something creamy on bread that did not come from a cow.

One cup of raw cashews, soaked in plenty of cold water for four hours, or in boiling water for ten minutes if you are in a hurry. Drain them. Into the blender with a quarter cup of fresh water, the juice of a whole lemon, three quarters of a teaspoon of salt, and a tablespoon of nutritional yeast if you have it, which adds a savoury note that makes people ask what is in it. I like to add a few small pieces of a boiled carrot or some pieces of sautéed yellow bell pepper to give it colour.

Blend, stopping to scrape down, and add water a tablespoon at a time only if the blades are struggling. Stop when it is thick and slightly grainy, like a soft paneer. Go further and you get a pourable sauce that will run off the toast and down your wrist.

The mushrooms, the avocado, and then the building

Mushrooms are 90 percent water, so a crowded pan on a medium flame gives you grey mushrooms stewing in their own juice. Slice 200 grams of mushrooms however you like them. Get the pan properly hot. Do not add oil. Bring in the mushrooms and let them cook. They will squeak, then release water. Let the water boil off. They may squeak again. Now go in with the oil and whatever seasoning you want to add. I usually just add some garlic and dried herbs. Let them turn that restaurant brown and remove from heat. Add salt at the very end to taste.

The avocado should give slightly under your thumb near the stem end and no more. Rock hard and it tastes of nothing. Soft all over and it has already gone brown inside. Halve it, slice it in the shell, scoop the slices out with a spoon and fan them.

Now the build.

Onion jam straight onto the hot toast, right to the edges, because it seals the surface and the crumb stays crisp underneath. Pesto over the jam. Cashew cheese in rough spoonfuls on top of the pesto so the two darker layers do not muddy each other. Avocado slices laid flat over the cheese, which glues them down. Mushrooms next, still warm. Salsa spooned over the whole thing last, so its juice lands on top and drips down through the mushrooms instead of soaking the bread from below.

Order changes the bite. Jam at the bottom means the first taste is sweet and the last is lime and green chilli, and the sandwich finishes clean rather than heavy.

My fridge that morning already held half the sandwich, made across a few different days in the last week and I had no idea on any of those days that all of it would land on one slice of bread for one particular person.

Five minutes of actual work stood between the bowls in the fridge and the plate.

He sat down, which was the whole objective. Looked at it for a second longer than people usually look at breakfast. Then his face did the thing faces do when they see obviously great food. And he picked the whole slice up with both hands and even though the salsa ran, Gowri being Gowri managed to keep his shirt clean. We packed one more for him, just in case he got hungry on the way.