Cheese & Football Feast day 10: France

For day 10 of the Euro2016 football tournament my cheese feast moved back to France, but with a hint of Switzerland in the cheese itself. It is of course the Croque Monsieur.

The two games for the day were Switzerland vs France, and Romania vs Albania, both playing at the same time. We had a Romanian beer with the Croque Monsier, but I did not manage to include an element from Albania.

Croque Monsiers seem to come in many different forms with the name being used for many a version of a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. I took my recipe from the Guardian newspapers online article How to cook the perfect croque-monsieur. This is quite a detailed account of all the permutations, so zoom down to the bottom for the actual recipe. It was the first time I had made this with a bechamel sauce topping but I would recommend keeping that in your recipe as it really made the dish more interesting to eat. But it did mean you needed a knife and fork to eat it with. I used a mixture of Gruyere and Comte cheese, and a soft white sandwich loaf  but cut the butter down to 40g.

You could make the sauce in advance and cover with cling film to make this a really quick dish to put together. My ham was a tad thinly sliced so I used more than 1 piece.
The Romanian beer was also very good. We have had a lot of fun drinking our way through our mixed case of european beers, and this is the Romanian 'Timisoreana'.

Next up on the cheese feast is Welsh Rarebit, which is another version of the somewhat universal cheese toastie.  Wales play Russia and England play Slovakia. My toasties will have some English cheese in to mark the occasion.

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This week I shall be voting for the UK to remain in the EU. Membership of the EU has given our young opportunities to freely choose to work and study throughout this large community. I have also been able to work and study alongside citizens of other EU countries who have opted to come to the UK; and that has greatly enriched my life.  I cannot comprehend why we would want to risk taking these opportunities away by leaving the EU; even less can I comprehend how this risk can be justified in the name of freedom.