Quick Midweek Supper: Toast Hawaii

If you’ve grown up or lived in Britain, chances are you will be familiar with ‘beans on toast’, that quick stop, put-together-in-minutes supper when you’re short on time and everyone is hungry. My kids loves baked beans – especially the little one, he’ll eat a whole tin if you’re not careful, he doesn’t even wait to warm them up! But today I want to introduce you to what is possibly the German equivalent of beans on toast, in terms of being a quick supper involving a slice of toast, that can be put together in minutes – providing you have a tin of pineapple slices in the house: Toast Hawaii!

Much like Pizza Hawaii, Toast Hawaii includes ham and pineapple as key ingredients. Here’s how to make it:

• Lightly toast a slice of bread.
• Butter the slice of toast and layer a slice of ham, a slice of pineapple, and a slice of cheese on top, in that order.
• Stick it under the grill for the cheese to melt.

Optionally, we like to spread on some tomato puree before adding the layers. You can also season it with salt an pepper as you please, or – and here’s our British side coming through again – a dash of Worcester Sauce also goes very nicely. Apparently, it’s also popular to pop a maraschino cherry on top, which then sits in the centre of the pineapple slice, but personally I’ve never known anyone do that before.

Interesting fact of the day: Toast Hawaii seems to pre-date Pizza Hawaii. The former was made popular in West Germany in the 1950s, while the latter is attributed to a Canadian restaurant owner in the 1960s, though there is apparently some dispute about that. Fact is, Toast Hawaii is a quick and easy midweek supper! Do you have any quick stop recipes to fall back on when caught in a supper emergency?