Somewhere out there, people are making meatballs with no meat, which seems oddly disturbing to me. At least call them something else :-). This sandwich, however, has genuine meaty meatballs (danish Frikadeller), plus no less than two cheeses, and a bit of the brilliantly hot Chinese black bean chili sauce which we have found really useful for sandwiches when used modestly.
When all you want is a quick snack, this is a tasty in-between meals treat. The yogurt cheese and the capers make a nice pairing for the smoked salmon, and that’s really all there is to it. Very easy to make if you are hosting a party, or have friends dropping by, as long as you have prepared the yogurt for the yogurt cheese the day before.
Continue reading Cracker Topped with Yogurt Cheese, Smoked Salmon and Capers (Appetizer)
After making Parmesan crisps a few days ago, I had a visions of sandwiches all somehow incorporating the crisps. Well, some turned our better than other, and here we stick to what we think are the amazing ones. This one is with a favorite ingredient, mashed potatoes, topped with a bit of sun dried tomato pesto we threw together (recipe to come), green onions, a few leaves of sweet basil from the garden, and of course the Parmesan to top it off.
By the way, if you have read a lot of our recipes, you’ll notice quite a few are on ‘rustic white bread’. For us, this means homemade bread made from more than 90% white flour. It may have extras, such as olives, cumin seeds, blue cheese, etc, but it’s essentially a white bread. What makes it rustic is that it looks, well, rustic. We’ll post a recipe later, but it’s quite involved and usually takes between 1-3 days to make, including sometimes pate fermente, biga or levain.
This sandwich we have named “Bambi” because she seems to be strutting her stuff all over the place, hoping to get picked up.
We love lavash crackers, and I mean really love them, and we’ll typically eat them just plain. Sometimes though, it’s good to add a little extra, and since we were grilling vegetables yesterday, we thought this little appetizer would be a great way to use the lavash. In this case we didn’t score the lavash before baking so instead we broke it into large rustic pieces. That’s another great way of presenting them, and of course with bigger pieces comes the opportunity to layer other ingredients on top.
Continue reading Lavash Cracker Appetizer with Olive Tapenade, Grilled Squash and Roasted Garlic
What do you do when life gives you fried chicken? Well, our answer is to make fried chicken sandwiches of course (What else would you expect from this blog). This is a great ‘leftover’ sandwich for the day after, and as you can see we added a little bit of everything (including pasta, which we can consider optional, but we had to try). If you wonder why the cheese is melting up, it’s because we toasted the bread opened, and then put the top on :-). This is also one of those sandwiches that require an extra hour on the treadmill afterwards, so proceed at your own risk.
This kafta sandwich is very spicy due to the black bean chili. We wanted to create something with more ‘umph’ to it, but also something fresh. So we came up with adding lemon and yogurt dressing to take the edge of the chili, and the combination really worked well. This sandwich will make your hair grow long and strong, and turn boys to men and men to sheep. It also goes well with any episode of Law & Order.
Open faced sandwiches can be beautifully stacked creations, but when squeezed into a lunch-bag, carried by 10-year olds biking to school in a backpack and thrown in a community refrigerator, open-faced sandwiches may not be the first choice of lunch.
Not so for my mom. She was a firm believer in open-faced sandwiches and made them as if I was eating at home, except, she wrapped them tight in cellophane wrap before stacking them in my lunch box.
As you might image, the end result was not always… appetizing. Cod roe sandwiches with remoulade and fried onions turned into cud roe salad with wet soggy onions. A once tantalizing potato sandwich with mayonnaise and green onions turned into something wet and soggy, almost like paste.
This sandwich, a cod roe creation, is my own personal rebellion against my childhoods school sandwiches. I reject the cellophane wrap method, and embrace exuberance.
Continue reading ‘The Hallelujah’ Cod Roe Sandwich with Parmesan Crisp
Excited about the prospect of making paninis, and after holding out for a few weeks, we finally decided to get a panini press (well, Anders decided :-)). So down to the nearest Target and what do they have? Shelves up and down stacked with George Foreman grills. Now I didn’t grow up in the US so I don’t really know George Foreman, but he is certainly a very prolific grill maker. So, without a choice, we got a George Foreman grill which we put up next to Alessi wine bottle opener and the Georg Jensen beer bottle opener. After all, if you can’t name your kitchen equipment by name, how will you tell them apart?
Well, the grill is clearly no panini press. The bread barely got any of those distinctive grill stripes, despite a very long grilling session. It did taste great however, so we decided to add it to our growing sandwich collection anyway. You can’t argue with good food. However, we also decided it’s a borderline panini, hence the name.
There are times when a full sandwich is too much, and no sandwich is too little. Thankfully, for those times there are appetizers such as this. To justify adding this to the blog, I call it a ‘cracker sandwich’ (For which I received a scowl from my fellow sandwich maker). Anyway, the Saint Faron is a cheese we got at Costco this weekend. It’s very mild (So make sure to enjoy it at room temperature), and brags being a ‘French Triple Crème Cow’s Milk Cheese’. At the risk of being labelled uneducated, what is ‘triple crème‘ exactly? I mean, does it come from three different cows? Can I have their names? Someone explain this to me.
Continue reading Saint Faron Cheese Cracker “Sandwich” with Blueberries and Yellow Pear Tomato
Growing up, I believe I had ham and cheese sandwiches maybe three times. My mom had found a recipe in a cookbook, and one day she announced she was going to make me a Hawaiian sandwich (The recipe included a piece of slices pineapple from a can, thus Hawaii). It was great, but once you open a can of pineapples you are committed to doing something with the remaining 9 slices, so my mom quickly stopped making the sandwich. A couple of weeks ago I had a dream about it (the dream also involved Jay Leno having purchased a personal Nuclear Missile painted bright red with warning signs, which was bolted down in his back yard with chains. Don’t ask, it was a dream). As you can imagine, it got stuck in my subconsciousness. I know, dreaming of sandwiches probably means we’re spending too much time writing this blog. Anyway, here is my variation of a Ham and Cheese Sandwich, without the pineapple.
