Recently we discovered the joy of smoked salmon on pizzas, and decided to try another one. This is our second pizza from Wendie’s surprise birthday party (of nine total), and also a very popular one amongst our friends. It’s simple in its ingredients, with very subtle tastes. The Sautéed mushroom worked great on the pizza (We used it a few times that night), and on this the avocado brings a coolness to the hot pizza that almost melts with the salmon.
OK, you have a point. This is perhaps not quite amazing enough to be on “amazing sandwiches”… But we liked it. This is a simple, plain garden variety burger, and sometimes that’s all you need to bring you back from a long day at work doing the man’s bidding. Yes, you know what we mean; cubicle work!
We do love smoked salmon in our house, and it makes for great appetizers or snacks. Salmon is also fairly easy to combine with other ingredients, as long as you keep the taste influences light so as not to overpower the subtle fish taste. It works particularly well on fresh bread, or lightly toasted older revived bread.
Continue reading Appetizer: Homemade Pesto, Greens, Smoked Salmon And Grape Tomato
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.
If you are a regular reader of this fledgling blog (Hey who am I kidding here? I don’t even think my dearly loved sister is herself a regular reader. But I can dream, can’t I?), you will note that the sandwiches here have a strong carnivore bent and as one kind reader was astute enough to note, had a bit of a “Dagwood” style. For that I blame Anders as he eats way more sandwiches than I do and so it stands to reason that this blog is populated with his preferred dinner choices. This next one is born of a weekend’s inspiration and my winning the battle in Kitchen Central! I love eggplants, even if they seem to hate the soil in my garden – which must be the reason why although I can get squash and tomatoes to grow in profusion, healthy growing eggplants continue to elude me.
Lucky for me we live close to a well-stocked Middle-Eastern supermarket which never seems to run out of eggplants. Thanks to them I was able to make this tomato eggplant marriage come to life. (P.S. The tomatoes are from our garden). An advanced warning; this recipe is not one you slap together in 10 minutes. It takes a little thought and might be best accomplished over a lazy weekend day. I have been known to do this in the middle of the week but it does take a wee bit of planning.
Continue reading Grilled Eggplant and Tomato Stacked Sandwich with Roasted Tomato Pesto
Roasted tomato pesto, an excellent smear for sandwiches.
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!
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.
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.
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.
