Onion Bread and Veggie Melts

Ok, I know. I'm way behind. Today's post is actually about Sunday's dinner (and the weekend's baking). I'll get to the Sunday night prep for Monday that went awfully tomorrow -- ooh! a teaser! --

I follow Jorge Garcia's (Hurley from Lost) blog pretty avidly. Mostly because he's a fairly normal dude, and he's  into gardening and cooking more than one would expect. Both Jorge and I got the book My Bread this past December, and he also got Artisan Breads Every Day. After checking it out at Amazon and hearing about his success, I had to get that as well. This weekend I made Onion and Wild rice bread. It was/is DELICIOUS! The recipe makes a ton, and while I could have divided the batch, I just made a bakers dozen rolls for my parents and a huge loaf for us. It's softer than I was expecting (no really crunchy crust like the ones from My Bread) but it would be a great thing for us to have more often. I'm already expecting I'll just make hamburger rolls out of it in the future. I couldn't get a pure wild rice blend from my Target, but I bought a mix of various grains, and it seems to have worked out just fine.

Whenever I make bread, I try to make sure I have something that will go well with it to make the effort worthwhile. This time, it was a recipe from the Martha Stewart "Dinner Tonight" emails that I get sent, and boy was it delicious! We cut thick slices from the middle of the round loaf of onion bread to make Portobello, Broccoli, and Red-Pepper Melts. These could possibly be my new favorite sandwich, plus, they're vegetarian! If you try to make them, some notes:
- You'll want to have 2 broiler-safe(ish) baking sheets covered in aluminum foil at the ready. One for cooking the veggies and the other for melting the cheese on the sandwiches. You can do it with one, but you'll run out of room and patience when you try to transfer bread onto the chock-full vegetable sheet that is scalding hot.
- Broil the veggies as long or short as you like. That all depends on your personal cooked taste. This would be fine with raw veggies (the broccoli might be too crunchy)
- Cut down the veggies if you like. We decreased the broccoli a little, and still had mounds of vegetables loose next to the sandwiches.
- I'd also experiment with other vegetables based on what's in season and sounds good to you. Other peppers and mushrooms would be a start, but in the summer zucchini, squash, and eggplant would be good options.