The Hungry Tiger

Behold, a sandwich.

It's the fifth annual Sandwich Party! We have been eating variations on this sandwich four or five days out of seven since we moved to southern California.

The version you see before you is a little duded up, with those sprigs of cilantro. Occasionally it might instead be topped with a very few slivers of thinly sliced red onion, or slices of tomato. But the basic scheme is:

• Slice of kalamata sourdough bread
• Butter
• Avocado
• A tiny sprinkle of salt
• A drizzle of this here chile oil

That oil is really, really good. (So are these avocados, I tell you what.) I was thinking of making little bottles of it for christmas presents. Is that too weird, do you think? It depends on the recipient, I suppose, as with so many things.

Egg salad sandwiches

Why did I think I disliked egg salad sandwiches?

We have been eating them weekly ever since I found out how much I like them freshly made from nice fresh egg salad heaped on nice freshly toasted bread with nice crisp lettuce. Nice! Fresh!

Further, they hardly take any time to put together, say on a night when I get home late after teaching an evening class. They are pretty, with their pale colors and frilly lettuce. They are both light and satisfying, which is pleasant at lunchtime or late at night. As long as you like eggs at all, what's not to like?

And then I had some at someone else's house not too long ago and was reminded of all I had disliked in the past. What is the difference between the stuff I hated and the stuff I love? Was it a failure of seasoning? Insufficient salt? Am I, in fact, a complete fascist for freshness, such that egg salad assembled more than ten minutes before the sandwich is made is as ashes in my mouth? I don't know. Maybe you have some idea.

An excellent avocado sandwich

Inspired by this Ask Metafilter thread and the sandwich combining avocado with honey mustard that was described therein, tonight I made some avocado sandwiches of my own. We ate them standing up in the kitchen, making adjustments as we went: open-faced, because when you use as much avocado as we wanted to, closed-face versions just slide around; an extra sprinkle of salt; slivered red onions to gild the lily.

Like salads, most sandwiches don't really call for recipes, just descriptions. To make these, take a baguette and split it lengthwise, parallel to the table. Cut the resulting halves into pieces of whatever size suits you. Next, generously butter the cut sides of the bread with nice, soft salted butter. Now apply a good helping of avocado, mashing it slightly into the bread. Because the base of your sandwich is all crust, it will stand up to the pressure with no trouble. Sprinkle a little salt over the avocado and then add a generous (a theme with this sandwich) coating of honey mustard, which you have made by mixing equalish quanities of dijon mustard and honey.

This is very good as it is. But after we'd tried it, Snark said, "Is there any one ingredient that would make this even better?" That is how we wound up adding red onions, and also how I wound up eating quite a bit more than I had planned. In fact, if we hadn't used up all of our ripe avocado I would be eating even more right this minute.

Good cold: open faced sandwiches and two vegetable mezze

We are entering the time of year when I frequently think it would be extremely unpleasant to stand near a hot stove at the end of a working day, but not yet the time of year when we can eat tomatoes every night. So the plan is to have a number of items that can be mixed and matched chilled or at room temperature, maybe alongside something very very quick to cook at the time, like scrambled eggs. Ideally they would also serve as nice components of smørrebrød, the existence of which I have only recently discovered.

Smørrebrød is an open-faced Danish sandwich constructed on that dense European bread that comes in remarkable dark brown bricks, sliced thin -- "health" bread, or that specially bricklike pumpernickel, or whateverelsebrot in that vein. I picked some up from World Market this morning. It is always covered completely by its toppings and always, or almost always, has a sauce of some sort on top (which makes sense when you experience how very dense indeed the bread can be). I found thinned Greek yogurt, a bit of salt, and lemon juice was easy and nice for the purpose.

You always eat these with knife and fork and always butter the bread thickly or spread it with goose schmaltz, to seal it against the toppings. (You will note that the smørrebrød concept is very closely related to the simple, down-home habit of Piling Tasty Things on Top of Toast.) I like this concept and think I will pursue it often, while I also intend to pursue often my more tried-and-true habit of the eclectic mezze. Today's cooking was therefore directed towards suitability for both, with some hardboiled eggs, sauteed mushrooms from the farmer's market, asparagus roasted in the toaster oven, etc. Two other dishes were new for me, and the recipes appear below.

Cheese and nut loaf

Back when I wrote about the ever-popular red lentil kibbe, I mentioned that I had a retro kind of craving for some kind of stodgy vegetarian loaf. In the comments, Wendy pointed me to what has become a fast favorite in our household, a Deborah Madison recipe for what we now call simply Loaf. We love it ardently and eat our way through one nearly every week.

Hot is just fine, but we prefer it cold, either alone or in a sandwich, topped with brown mustard. It is not pretty. I don't care. No doubt this is precisely the dish our future children will find unbelievably disgusting. Too bad for them. They can tell lurid stories about it on HyperNeuroGullet and get lots of sympathy; we will still know it is great.

I will not lie to you: Loaf is going to be a pain in the ass to make unless you're in the habit of preparing the constituent parts in quantities large enough to provide for multiple batches. There are nuts to toast and chop, mushrooms and onions to saute, rice to cook, cheese to grate (and I will also say that if ever there was a place for pre-grated cheese, this is it). But if you love it as we do, then you will know that you will be making it week after week, and so you will toast and chop several cups of nuts at once, saute mushrooms in bulk, and portion out big pots of rice into little tubs containing one and a half cups apiece.

It is also a fact that a single loaf is quite a lot of food. Two and a half slices is a hearty serving. I have made a few minor modifications to the recipe after finding out what little variations made for particularly successful iterations.

Versatile ricotta and greens

I am sure you all already know the handy fact that wonton wrappers, being pasta, can be used to make ravioli. But what you may not know is that leftover ravioli filling makes an outstanding sandwich when tucked inside a toasty pita. I am feeling like Einstein for figuring this out. So good!

The stuff I am eating right this very minute was made like so: I took 1/2 onion and 2 cloves of garlic minced extremely fine (in the food processor) and sauteed them in olive oil. I then added a pinch of dried thyme, a pinch of nutmeg, a tiny pinch of cayenne, salt and pepper. After a minute, I tossed in some chopped parboiled greens and cooked it all together until it was good and thoroughly heated through. I finally dumped the contents of this skillet in a bowl with 1 cup ricotta cheese and mixed it all up together.

This was enough to fill four large ravioli for each of us with enough left over for a generously filled pita and still more left for tomorrow.

Tofu salad is good for me and other living things.

Today I dragged my sorry carcass over to the local supermercado and bought some produce -- we seem to be in that tragic lull before anything is full grown enough to eat and after all the storage foods are gone. I did obtain some mushrooms, and thus was able to make a batch of this egg salad, in the version where a block of firm tofu pinch hits for the eggs.

By the way, the secrets to this egg salad are as follows:

(1) LOTS of dill.
(2) Plenty of salt and especially pepper -- be sure to taste and adjust.

Nice mayonnaise is nice, but plain old Hellmann's is just fine. As mentioned above, it can also be made with tofu if you feel like being a bit healthier, or if boiling the eggs seems like an irritating extra step; in that case I like to add a quarter-teaspoon or so of turmeric. I imagine it could be made with soy mayonnaise, too, if one happened to be vegan, though I've never had soy mayo, so I can't actually vouch for how well that would work. And if you happen to have some fresh chives around, chop them in, too.

We'll be enjoying it very much with some toasted pita bread in the morning, and for other mornings and/or lunches thereafter. I really can't get over how tasty it is, especially because I am otherwise so uninterested in egg salad and its allies. But this stuff -- yes please, and second helpings.

For tonight's dinner, I have no idea; it's awful hot in here, and I am awful lazy. We'll just have to wait and see what happens. Maybe dinner will somehow arise as an emergent property of the dynamic network with inputs me and torpor.

An unusual egg salad

For Amy, from my mother. This is a superlatively tasty egg salad. It is not quite like egg salads you are used to; it is drier, and more fine in texture. It is terrific on crispy toasted things.

THE ONLY EGG SALAD I LIKE

6 or 7 eggs
1 large or 2 small yellow onions, sliced thin
6-8 oz fresh mushrooms- pref. cremini, baby bellos, or other dark type, sliced
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
Dill, preferably fresh
Mayo
Paprika, preferably hot hungarian (optional)

In frying pan with a generous double blurb of olive oil, slow cook onions until pale gold; add mushrooms a little later, timing so they will be ready at the same time as the onions.

Put onions, mushrooms and hard boiled eggs, cut up coarsely, in food processor. Pulse off and on, checking frequently, until combined and in small bits, but still fluffy, rather than pasty. (If you have no food processor, this can be instead chopped very finely in a mezzaluna or with a sharp knife -- it is very time consuming, but also very authentic, as this is how the old bubbies did it.) Scoop into bowl. Add several large spoons of mayo, and chopped dill and stir to mix. Taste. Add salt and pepper. Smooth top of bowl and sprinkle with paprika. Chill.

Cucumber sandwiches on Boxing Day

We have returned from the wilds of Pittsburgh, where we ate many fine foods prepared by other people. My mother always throws a big party on Boxing Day, with eight million tasty treats she's prepared over the last week or two up through the day itself: three kinds of cookies and a Linzer torte and deviled eggs and marinated olives and white bean dip and cream cheese with pickapeppa sauce and little sandwiches and homemade bread and savory palmiers and and and. My contribution was some very tasty little cucumber sandwiches.

Normally cucumber sandwiches are pretty blah, I think, but if you make 'em right, they can be really great. They are delicate and ladylike, yet filling. They taste good and have a terrific textural thing going on. They are easy to make in great quantity, and cheap, too. There are 3 secrets to making good cucumber sandwiches:

(1) Slice the cucumbers very, very thin. If you have a mandolin, now would be a good time to use it, though a sharp knife will do the job just as well. A dull knife is hopeless. The object is to have translucently thin and flexible slices, not opaque disks.

(2) Spread the bread with tasty herb butter--on both slices, please.

(3) Wrap the plate of sandwiches in a damp but well-wrung-out tea towel for at least an hour before serving, right up until the moment when you serve them. This makes the bread nice and moist, gives the cucumbers time to give up a little moisture (the salt in the butter will effectively salt your cucumbers for you), and helps the sandwiches to meld properly.

It goes without saying that you should use a thinly pre-sliced white sandwich loaf, and trim those crusts off. Crusts have no place on a tea sandwich. If you like, you can use cookie cutters or a biscuit cutter to cut the bread into pretty shapes. Triangles are also nice. If you are feeling really fussy, you can butter the edges of your sandwiches and roll them in chopped parsley. English cucumbers are nice, because you don't have to peel them--if you wind up with a thick-skinned, waxy customer, though, you'll have to peel it. One decent-sized cucumber will go a long way, because you will be cutting it so thin.

For the herb butter, you will want a stick of nice soft salted butter, or unsalted butter plus a generous pinch of salt, and about 2 tablespoons of very finely minced fresh herbs. I think it is best to include one oniony herb, either chives or garlic scapes. Other nice herbs to include are thyme, italian parsley, and marjoram. Be careful not to let any woody stem bits in. Mash your butter and herbs together thoroughly, and spread every slice of bread with a nice thin (but not skimpy) coat right out to the edge. Overlap the cucumbers about one layer deep (that is, two slices deep where they overlap, one deep elsewhere, no blank spots) in each sandwich, stack the sandwiches in a nice pile on a pretty plate, and then wrap with the aforementioned big damp tea towel. Refrigerate.

Asparagus frittata and a cheese sandwich

Tonight I had a using-up-leftovers sort of dinner: the last of the asparagus frittata I made, a toasted cheese sandwich that finished up the chili-cheese bread, and a dollop of spinach dressed with sesame seeds and sesame oil. I've been saving asparagus butts in the freezer; Red made and froze a batch of stock before she left, but I might tackle making some asparagus soup next weekend, and it'd be a nice touch to have asparagus-flavored stock (although that's certainly not what I'd want on hand for general purposes). It may be a great deal of effort to go to for a marginal improvement in the soup, however. We shall see if ambition triumphs over laziness.