Getting some friends over to watch a World Cup match? What better to munch on at half-time than a few bite-sized table footballers you made yourself with grapes, cheese and cucumber?
Jenny Böhme, a cookbook author and food blogger, says these little figures are simple to assemble: Grapes serve as the head, large cubes of cheese as the upper body and thick slices of cucumber as the lower body.
Pieces of dried sausage can then be skewered and pushed into the cheese and cucumber as arms and legs. As a vegetarian alternative, slices of red or yellow pepper will also do.
Ingredients
To make 12 figures — enough for a full team plus a coach — you will need:
- 12 grapes
- a 400 g block of cheese, cut into 12 thick slices
- 1 cucumber, cut into 12 pieces
- 240 g of long salamis, cut into 48 slices
How to assemble
The ingredients are then skewered in the order listed above onto kebab or cake-pop sticks — 12 in total. "Toothpicks would be too short for this," says Böhme, who is also a nutritional adviser.
You will still need 36 toothpicks, however: halved, they skewer the salami or pepper slices as arms; whole, they serve as legs.
"You do of course need to tell your guests that the sticks are inside the salami limbs," the mother of three recommended — to make sure guests nibble at the skewers rather than bite straight through them.
The finished figures can be stuck into a football-like head of cabbage, a hollowed-out upturned melon or a block of polystyrene. The display works best when it has been decorated to look like a football pitch beforehand.