If there is only one culinary accomplishment you aim for, let it be to convince the family that sandwiches are a plausible, substantial meal. If you go back in time (before Subway), sandwiches were regarded as a snack,
or ‘picnic’ food — a.k.a. not a real meal and nothing that ‘standing kho-kho’, motion sickness and mild sunstroke could send into “repeat.”
But we’ve come a long way from the sliced cheese, tomato and white bread constructs (admittedly, a beautiful, nostalgic flavour, forever sweetened in my mind with the taste of slightly warm apple juice and the smell of ‘the bus’).
Now, within ½ km of where I live, there are at least three, non-franchise sandwich places where you can build-your-own proscuitto, brie and arugula on multigrain bread, tuna salad on rye or buy bagels laden with goat cheese and honey.
Some days, for friends, family or fusspot kids, we bring the toaster into the hall, butter, olive oil, meats, cheeses, olives, leaves, sliced tomatoes, onions…. A slice of ham here, a smudge of mustard there, everyone constructs their own dinner and perhaps reminded of picnics, the mood invariably turns celebratory and there is always much laughter at the table.
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R’s Favourite Sandwich
It is said, to make the perfect sandwich, you must start with the perfect bread. At home or abroad, my naturally fit husband will challenge my usual carb-o-phobia, by going exploring post-dawn, looking for the freshest local bread which he brings back, still warm, to the room — chunks missing from eating on the way and sharing them with the kids. Salty baguettes from a tiny village bakery in the French Alps, crumbly gutlis in Mumbai, naan in Leh, buttery croissants in Paris and in Goa he’d run after the ‘poi’ man to buy those gorgeous, husky, wholegrain pockets of deliciousness.
We first ate this sandwich in Goa and so believe it is made best with ‘poi’, but you can substitute with brown pita or a nice multi-grain.
Ingredients:
1 ripe avocado sliced and brushed with olive oil and salt
½ cup of black olives crushed and bruised
Basil or arugula leaves
Bacon, fried till crisp but moist (you get beautiful chicken bacon in many deli stores now and some big supermarkets even stock a veggie-mortadella that lacks the texture but will provide the smokiness)
Thinly sliced tomato
Salt, pepper, Tabasco
Roast Chicken and Balsamic Sun dried Tomatoes Sandwich Spread
For Balsamic Sun Dried Tomatoes:
ingredients
½ kg tomatoes, sliced into 1 cm wedges*
4 pods of garlic
4 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon rosemary or parsley chopped
½ tsp of salt
(*I used 250 gms of orange cherry tomatoes which I bruised, 2 normal, red tomatoes and about ½ a red pepper that I found skulking in the back of my vegetable drawer)
Method
In a bowl, stir all the ingredients around, except the tomatoes and the salt. Now brush the bottom of an oven-proof tray with olive oil (if you’re using a regular oven and metal tray, you may want to put a sheet of foil down). Arrange the wedges of tomato so that they’re not really overlapping and pour the oil, vinegar, herb, garlic mix over evenly. Sprinkle some salt.
Put the tray into a warm oven — (I’m afraid I’m rubbish at telling you what temperature it should be. When my oven was working, I’d put it on 1 — that’s less than 100 degrees) and keep the tomatoes gently dehydrating in the oven for about 5 hours.
Or, for this recipe, I put the tomatoes in the microwave oven on the grill setting and left it there for 1 hour. They were far from sun dried but had a deliciously sweet-roasted-slightly charred flavour to them.
For the Spread:
Take equal parts sun dried tomatoes and plain roast chicken, about half a part of black olives and a big bunch of fresh parsley and puree roughly. You will get a gorgeous mix of colours — red, black, green, gold — that has the texture of country-style pate and some of the smokiness as well. Now spread on toast or crackers with a simple leafy salad on the side.
I first made this when we lived in Scotland. R was at university there and a combination of being on a student budget and having nothing better to do resulted in me packing him a lunch everyday. I thought I’d invented this fantastic way of making a tuna salad in a baguette ‘behave’ on a bicycle ride to the university. And to be honest, most people I fed this construct had never encountered it before either. Turns out, one version of the New Orleans Po’Boy does the same thing — scoop out the bread from a baguette and pile it up with a filling — in their case, creamy, crumbed oysters. No pity, (great minds think alike and all) and it’s great and looks very pretty.
Ingredients
1 portion tuna salad (check the blog for the Salade Nicoise recipe) — ingredients chopped roughly
1 baguette
Method
Decide how big you want each sandwich to be — I’d suggest half a baguette for a packed lunch, 4 inches for individual servings at home. Hollow out the baguette, being careful not to hollow ‘through’ (it takes a couple of tries to get it totally right and even if you do tunnel out, it’s really okay). Now, simply spoon your salad in.
Links:
[1] http://loveinthekitchenlaughteratthetable