Living in San Diego means being influenced by Mexican cooking. Each street corner seems to sport a Mexican fast-food joint. Our cooking regularly employs cilantro and salsa, bothView Post of which can be tasty new ingredients to familiar meals. In this sandwich, we use both, and with the French bread, this becomes an international affair. Danish meatballs (frikadeller), Italian mozzarella, cilantro and salsa, made by a Dane and a Jamaican living in the US. It is a small world these days.
This past weekemd was rather hectic. For the past few weeks I have been frantically preparing for a licensing examination that required me to unearth knowledge I had lost eons ago – a plethora of arcane engineering knowledge that had gone the way of so many things not used – nearly lost forever. Well having sat through two days of grueling examinations I am much relieved to reclaim my ‘normal’ life, a large factor of which is… cooking or at least thinking of cooking. Still all the household chores left undone were crying out for attention and then I came down with a ghastly cold. We made a trip to Temecula which, as all excursions these days, included a meal with sandwiches. Since this is not our recipe, we can’t speak much about the preparation.
Roasted tomato pesto, an excellent smear for sandwiches.
Few leftovers are as versatile as chicken – the possibilities are (nearly)endless, and if the chicken is at least moderately good, with the right toppings and other accompaniments, you can have as splendid enviable meal in less than 10 minutes. After a long day at work, what’s not to love? Don’t get us wrong, this sandwich is even better if you cook a chicken just for this purpose and make the sandwich the same day, but seriously, who does that? Why a bagel you might ask? Well bagels make for pretty darn good sandwiches. That and the fact that since we buy our bagels at Costco,, we are forced to find innovative ways to use them before they develop freezer burn:-). They defrost in 30 seconds in a microwave. Cut them while still very cold (but not frozen), and proceed directly to the sandwich making. The result, like here, is a perfectly toasted bagel that is neither to hard or soft, but just perfect after toasting.
A Kafta (or Kofta or kūfta, is Persian in origin. کوفتن (Kuftan) means “to beat” or “to grind”, according to WikiPedia. One could say that a Kafta patty is like a spicy meatball. In any case, it’s delicious, and since we recently made some, a wonderful Kafta Burger (ok, maybe more of a sandwich, given the bread) is in order. We made our own version of the traditional yogurt dressing, because we can. We love this Middle Eastern food so in the future expect to see more recipes like this. We think Middle Eastern food should be a food group!
Wendie said: “This is the ultimate vegetarian sandwich. I have been threatening to make this for Anders since our recent trip to Denmark inspired us delve more deeply into the world of sandwiches. While I am convinced that Anders’ Y chromosome predisposes him to a love of all things meat, I was convinced that even he would be wooed by the taste of freshly grilled veggies united with homemade tapenade on a lightly toasted roll. What else could you ask for?”
Anders replied: “Meat!”
That’s how our discussions sometimes goes, but Wendie always wins of course. 🙂 This is, however, a great meal. We highly recommend that you take the time to go shopping for tarragon mustard, as it works much better on this sandwich than regular plain mustard. Anders loved this sandwich, so it’s not just for vegetarians.
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.
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.
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 is an old favorite of mine, going back to my college years. At my dorm, one of my friends’ dad worked for a large company that delivered meats and groceries for supermarkets. As a result, they were sent huge amounts of samples, which they stored in two large freezers. When he visited the dorm, he filled his car with samples for us all to enjoy. This included giant steaks, fast food pizzas, and meats of all types. So while my life up until then consisted of pizzas and chili, this was a challenge. You can’t just plop a steak in the microwave and eat it, so all we could really do was learn how to cook it right. As a consequence, our ‘kitchen’ began evolving some pretty advanced culinary tastes, and soon started to realize that there is more to life than fast-food pizza, and cooking is not really all that hard. One of the results of that time is this dressing, which we made to accompany a batch of frozen falafel. It’s easy, and complements both the falafel, but also meats very well. We will be using it in a few sandwiches soon to be released.
Continue reading Paprika Yogurt Dressing with Red Bell Peppers, Curry, Mustard and Parsley