Feta, Pancetta and Basil Mini Toasts

Behold the glory that is the mini toast! Cute and versatile, I happen to think that this Blast from the Past is tasty enough to be used at any social gathering. I seem to recall some very odd things being put on them in the eighties and nineties, but they ain't no cream of chicken and mushroom vol-au-vent (no idea whether I spelled that one correctly, but I think ya'll know the little Filo Baskets from Hell that I am referring to).

And that's a good thing.

I dreamt up this combination on my three-and-a-half-hour Friday night drive back to Melbourne the other week (does anyone else spend as great a proportion of their waking hours as I do thinking about food??). I had already decided to make brother Saul a caramel mud cake and had more or less nutted out how I would decorate it (which, by the way, was blown out of the water by the fact that NOBODY in Eltham seems to stock Jersey Caramels(!!!), so I had to improvise), and my mind then wandered to savoury food as I wasn't quite sure if I was supposed to bring a plate. Well, I figured that even if I wasn't supposed to bring one, that nobody would have trouble polishing off a plate of them.

They're super simple:

1 packet mini toasts

10 thin slices of pancetta

1 thick slice of Danish feta from the deli

1 bunch of basil.

I used a pair of scissors to cut up the pancetta into 4 or so strips (they should be ever so slightly narrower than the mini toast, and short enough to wrap once around a small cube of feta without too much hanging over at the end).

I then cubed the feta into about 24 pieces (they were probably a little small but still tasty), popped each cube on 1 small/half a large basil leaf (tear them, don't cut them), put them, feta side down, on the middle of a piece of pancetta, wrap both sides of the pancetta up over the basil, then flip them on to a mini toast so that the join in the pancetta is on the bottom (i.e. touching the toast). The weight of the filling should hold the pancetta in place. 

Creamy, salty, fresh and crunchy all at once. I insist you try these immediately! And, just quietly, because the basil makes it taste so fresh I reckon you could probably polish off almost a whole batch and somehow convince yourself that you'd eaten health food, and not a great big hunk of cheese!