Tasty dinner this evening! 🙂 today we went to one of our favorite shops in Budapest, and we found a nice Porchetta and, joy to my eyes, a real Fontina DOP! 🙂

I bought Fontina to make a traditional recipe which I’ll cook in the following days, but I thought that it was a good idea to use some of it also for a nice sandwich! If you don’t know it, Fontina is an amazing cheese typical of Valle D’Aosta region (the smallest and most mountainous Italian region), made with raw milk from cows grazing at high altitudes, so it has really the taste of the mountain in it 🙂 if you find it take care, as for Parmigiano Reggiano there are many imitations also for Fontina, the original must have “DOP” written on it…in alternative choose another good cheese (also some local cheese), but I suggest not to buy imitations with “italian sounding” names, they are always completely different than the original ones.

INGREDIENTS (2 people):

• bread
• 120/150 g of Porchetta
• 4/6 slices of Fontina DOP (but also a not too much aged Pecorino can fit well)
• 1 eggplant
• 1 zucchini
• 1 bell pepper
• 1 shallot (or spring onion…in spring 😀 )
• extra virgin olive oil
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 chili
• 2 good beers (optional 😀 )

To make a good sandwich it’s also a serious thing 😀 so we grilled the vegetables one hour before dinner, and we let them to season in extra virgin olive oil, with some sliced garlic and chili.

Then we cut the bread in half (a good bread it’s better), we added some extra virgin olive oil on both the internal sides of the sandwich, then we put first 2/3 slices of porchetta, then the grilled vegetables (eggplants, zucchini, bell pepper and shallot), and for last the Fontina cheese.

Then we put another drizzle of extra virgin olive oil on the top of the bread, and we put in the pre-heated oven at 160/170 °C fan-assisted, for just about 6/7 minutes, the time to get crunchy and to melt a little bit the Fontina.

What to say, it was really tasty! The “porkiness” of the porchetta 😀 the juiciness and sweetness of the grilled vegetables, the distinctive flavor of this high mountain cheese, and the gentle touch of the oil, everything matched perfectly…a nice beer next to it, and our dinner was perfect 🙂