Total time: 1 hour 45 minutes (including rising).
Will make enough dough for 4 pizzas, of which we will just make one below. The remaining dough can be frozen until your next pizza craving demands satisfaction. Continue reading Easy Pizza Dough in 2 hours
“Pizza!” you may be saying with increduility as you wonder at the seeming incongruity of providing pizza recipes on a sandwich blog. Well, please bear with us while we provide this rather plausible and very convincing rationale.
In Scandinavia, there is a long tradition of open-faced sandwiches (or smørrebrød as they are called in Denmark). Open-faced sandwiches are essentially bread, with layered toppings. So it’s not much of a stretch to call a pizza, a sandwich. After all, it is just that: bread with layered toppings. For the pizza purists among the readers, this might seem like too much of a stretch, but we say that pizza by any other name is still an open faced sandwich. Convinced yet?
Continue reading Smoked Salmon Pizza – The Way My Mother Never Made It
A simple appetizer, but not cheap due to the tuna. However, well worth the money if you like us love seared tuna. We got a few nice steaks at Costco and decided to make Tuna Sandwiches, and appetizers from the leftovers. This is one of them, and it belong in the very tasty food group 🙂
The day before we made this sandwich, Wendie cooked an amazing pork tenderloin based on an Alton Brown recipe. It is perhaps the best tenderloin I’ve ever had. Having also recently visited a Chinese grocery store, we had a few king mushrooms in our refrigerator, so we thought they would go brilliantly with the pork. We chose the pecorino romano cheese to add a little saltiness, the vinaigrette dressing to make it a bit more moist. And so, one thing led to another, and we ended up with this fantastic sandwich. It’s messy to eat, but it really brings out the best in the leftover pork. Enjoy.
This is one of the three appetizers we plan on serving for Thanksgiving. The secret is to use freshly-made ingredients, and so we made our own pesto and used Super Sweet 100 tomatoes from our backyard garden. We used goat cheese, which blends very nicely with the tomato and pesto. For bread, we stuck to a baguette.
Continue reading Appetizer: Goat Cheese and Pesto Bruschetta with Cherry Tomatoes
During a recent weekend getaway to San Francisco, we ran into the very nice Cowgirl Creamery, which is an actual real cheese shop. These are a rarity these days, as the business of cheese has been largely delegated to supermarkets, and somehow the rather bland cheddar has been the victim of a marketing blitz turning it in to the star of California cheeses. Not that we don’t enjoy a good cheddar, but there are soooo many more fantastic cheeses that the general populous are missing out on. At the Cowgirl Creamery, we found the Red Hawk, “… a triple-cream, washed-rind, fully-flavored cheese made from organic cow’s milk from the Straus Family Dairy. Aged six weeks and washed with a brine solution that promotes the growth of a bacteria that tints the rind a sunset red-orange…” Indeed, this little gem is very tasty, and forms the base of the taste experience with this simple sandwich. A warm gently toasted baguette, Tuscan bean paste, Red Hawk and Genoa salami. That’s it.
Continue reading Italian Genoa Salami Sandwich with Red Hawk Cheese and Tuscan Bean Paste
Wanting desperately to create something fantastic, our recent endeavors into the world of pasta-making inspired these two sandwiches. Well actually, it was perhaps one part inspiration and two parts madness (at least, according to Wendie). She thinks that this was a waste of perfectly good ravioli but I was not to be deterred on this quest. The sandwiches were both reasonably tolerable, but they were neither great nor amazing. However, in the interest of full disclosure, they do warrant a cautionary mention on the blog.
Perhaps some of you have ideas for improvements, or just need a extreme discouragement from taking this culinary road less travelled. In either case, I present the result of two days of making homemade pasta (an otherwise fantastic butternut squash reduction inside our own ravioli) that resulted in these two extra extra large raviolis on sandwiches.
Continue reading Butternut Squash Ravioli Sandwiches – an Experiment in Futility
We recently discovered a great food store in Little Italy in San Diego. It should be noted that Little Italy is very aptly named, since it’s basically just one street. You blink, you miss it. If you are of Italian descent, please move to San Diego so we can add a couple more streets. In Little Italy, we found Assenti’s Pasta, a wonderful little delicatessen shop where you can get fresh pasta of all shapes and forms. Arriving there at 5:59pm we were simply happy traffic had not delayed us more, and positively exuberant that Assenti let us in. Yes, we had a rushed 5 minute shopping spree, but it was great. Here we found muffaletta and tuscan bean spread as well as fresh pasta (which weren’t really for sandwiches, although Anders tried and failed).
This sandwich is our first using the muffaletta, is was delicious. It fell a bit apart due to the iceberg lettuce, which became very slippery with the oil from the muffaletta and the melted cheese. We had to add toothpicks to hold it all together long enough to take pictures.
There’s something to be said for simplicity, and when we cook it is usually Wendie saying it. After we baked our Lingonberry bread, Wendie made this sandwich and I made the “Turkey Sandwich with Creamy Garlic Paste, Avocado, Red Bell Pepper and Onion on Lingonberry Bread“. Both were good, but given the exuberant amount of toppings on mine, it should have been 4 times better. However, this simple construction proved to be a worthy contender in our internal struggle for sandwich supremacy. The slight chewiness of the mushroom goes really well with fresh bread. Wendie’s genius is of course to sauté the mushrooms in olive oil with a hint of chili, which really pops out your taste buds so they can pick up the flavors of the wonderful Roquefort.
Continue reading Sauteed Mushrooms and Roquefort Sandwich on Lingonberry Bread
Since his birthday lunch of seared tuna at Blue Water Seafood Market and Grill, Anders has been dreaming about making a tuna sandwich. But the price of fresh tuna and our relative inexperience with cooking it has served as a big deterrence. You don’t want to ruin a $14/lb tuna steak! Anyway, this weekend he could not be stopped. We finally succumbed and bought a ginormous ahi tuna steak at Costco. This was one fantastic looking steak – probably big enough for 4-5 tuna rolls. So the plan was to sear the tuna, and, borrowing inspiration from Blue Water Seafood, serve it on a soft bun, rather than the artesan-style breads and rolls we typically use.
With a game plan in mind, the search was on for an acceptable roll. Anders just happened to be shopping at Lucky Supermarket – one of the 6 supermarkets that we just had to visit this weekend to satisfy our finicky grocery needs – when he happened upon: Pandesal rolls. Slightly sweet Filipino bread rolls which are very soft. Getting home with the unexpected find, it was time for the searing. A quick Google search, and a plan were laid to do one steak with sesame seeds, and one with a spice rub. From this point on we basically improvised the recipes below based on the content of our pantry, and the rest was… well see for yourselves.
