the pragmatic chef™

Shauna's "grilled cheese with amaranth leaves and blackberry sauce":

The Sauce:

1/2 pint of fresh blackberries
1/4 cup of water
juice of one lemon
1/4 cup of brown sugar/less of high-quality honey (like the chestnut
from Tuscany)
two teaspoons of cornstarch
pinch of cayenne pepper (for punch)
splash of fig balsamic vinegar

Cook the blackberries and water in a saucepan until the berries are soft and starting to fall apart. Take off the burner and put the blackberries into a sieve. Push through until you have extracted all the liquid. Put the liquid back into the saucepan and bring to heat.

Throw in the lemon juice, the cornstarch, the sweetener of your choice, the chili pepper, and the tiniest splash of balsamic vinegar. Heat until it's thickened, slightly, and you sense it's done.
Immediately spoon over sauteed salmon.

I'm sure it would be good over roasted chicken, or in any kind of sandwich. I even made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with it the day after I made it, and I was happy.

There you go. Try it, if you like. I'm pretty sure it would work with raspberries as well.

The Sandwich:

I toast the bread first, because GF bread can be a little hard to brown. (It's also denser than regular bread, and quite small, about half the size of a regular piece of bread, so this is a condensed sandwich.) I spread the thick blackberry sauce on one side, then piled little slices of gooey brie, some soft goat cheese with herbs made by a local cheese maker, and a half-goat, half-sheep's milk cheese that tastes a little like Havarti, made by the same local cheesemaker.

Add some Chinese spinach (this was quite the find yesterday at the market). Put the other piece of bread on. And then, I just rub a cube of butter over the bread. Because it's already toasted, I use less
butter that way. (Of course, this isn't a low-fat sandwich!)

And then I put it in the sautee pan on medium, and put a souffle dish on top of it to flatten it a bit. (Don't laugh. It was the closest heavy thing.) Eight minutes later, and i had to restrain myself from eating it, because I had to take a picture!