Toasted sandwiches

Just about this time, six years ago, I ate a sandwich that changed my life.

I realize that that is a sweeping and melodramatic statement to make about a sandwich, but I’m standing by it. Here is how it happened:

Once upon a time in my younger adulthood, I rarely ate sandwiches, other than tuna. I also had minimal experience of grilled cheese, other than as cheese piled on a slice of bread and run under the broiler until bubbly and crusty. These two facts seem unrelated, but are not.

While in Boston on a holiday visit, DP, Miss B, and I took a little road trip to visit my sister-in-law in western Massachusetts. While there, we made a stop at one of my favorite used bookstores in the world, The Montague Bookmill (also the possessor of the best slogan in the history of business, “Books you don’t need in a place you can’t find”), so I could spend the gift certificate my SIL had thoughtfully given me for Christmas. We had a good long browse for books, and also had lunch at the café.

I selected a sandwich—a sausage and cheese sandwich. The bread was crusty and spread with zesty mustard. The sausage was spicy and flavorful. The cheese was very sharp cheddar. And the whole thing had been cooked until the cheese was oozy and bubbling, elevating the combination from merely tasty to transcendental. The variety of flavors and textures in each bite was a revelation to me.

It doesn’t seem possible that that was my first experience of a toastie—I was well into my 30s at that point—but it was the first one that inspired me. Before I ate that sandwich, I had never made a grilled-cheese sandwich on the stovetop; never made a tuna melt; never combined anything with melted cheese between two slices of bread. Since I’ve had it, I would estimate that I’ve eaten at least one toastie a week without fail. Every week for the past six years. From a food perspective at least (and what perspective is more important?), I would define that as life-changing.

Sausage and cheddar toastie
I make my toasties using one slice of bread, cut in half, in order to satisfy my cravings while not pushing my calorie consumption into the stratosphere. I also use a vegetable slicer to pare off thin slices of cheese, so that I can get complete coverage and good melting.

2 Tbsp/30 g olive oil
1 slice good bread
dijon or stoneground mustard
cooked sausage (I generally use leftover medium-spicy Italian sausage)
the sharpest cheddar cheese you can find

Put the olive oil in a frying pan (I use my medium cast-iron) and put on the stove on medium heat. Spread the bread thoroughly with mustard on one side, then cut in half. Cover one half with thin slices of sausage, then cover the sausage with thin slices of cheese. Top with the other half-slice of bread and place in the now-hot oil. Weight the sandwich to press it together (since my beloved Canberra brick got lost in the move, I am back to using a smaller cast-iron skillet for this job). Cook the sandwich for about 3 minutes per side, or until brown and crispy on the outside and oozing cheese on the inside. Serve immediately, preferably accompanied by some good potato chips and homemade pickles.

Serves 1. Can be multiplied as necessary to feed any number of toastie fiends you happen to have hanging around.

Scavenger hunt

Ever since I read a post on Under the High Chair that mentioned using a brick to make panini, I’ve been longing for a kitchen brick of my very own. When you live in an apartment, however, bricks aren’t so easy to come by. And when you don’t have a car, it’s hard to get to the nearest big-box DIY store. That’s if they even sell bricks. And assuming they would let you buy just one.

In any case, I decided I would have to scrounge for one, and started keeping my eyes open for any unemployed bricks that might be lying around. I don’t know if it was coincidence, or just that I hadn’t been paying attention, but it wasn’t long before I started seeing them everywhere: a pile outside a house; stacked crookedly inside a fenced-off section of pavement being repaired; even one that had fallen out of someone's front wall.

Each of these presented its own ethical dilemma. After all, there is a difference between salvaging an otherwise unwanted piece of masonry, and plain old stealing. And there never seemed to be anyone around who was connected to the bricks that I could ask.

Today I got lucky. Miss B and I were walking home from preschool when I noticed some large, white bricks scattered on the grass verge outside one of the classic old Canberra houses that we regularly admire. As I was examining the bricks, trying to decide if they had been abandoned or what, I heard the sounds of someone doing stonework nearby. I peered over the high hedge and saw a man kneeling in the garden, obviously engaged in laying a brick path. I decided to rebel against my Bostonian training, and engage a stranger in conversation.

“Excuse me,” I said timidly. The man looked up from his work, realized that I was addressing him, and raised his eyebrows inquiringly. “Are these bricks out here available for the taking…?”

He got up hurriedly and came towards the gate. “No, no, they’re not. They were out there to weigh something down, I hadn’t realized they were still out there.” Noticing my crestfallen expression, he said, “I’m sorry, but they’re special fire bricks….”

“Oh, no, that’s okay,” I said. “I wasn’t interested in any particular bricks. I’m just on the hunt for a brick….I only need one.”

Tactfully refraining from asking what anyone needs only one brick for, he said, “Well, if you just need a brick, you can have one of these,” and, leading the way back through the gate, picked up a brick that was sitting near the wall of the house. “It’s a real old Canberra brick…from 1927.”

So it turns out he was the owner of this beautiful old house (not a contractor, as I had originally thought), and he cheerfully gave me an antique brick. Miss B, having none of my reticence about conversations with strangers, told him why I wanted the brick, admired the brick path that led out back (which I’m sure he had also built), and generally charmed him into giving us a tour of his garden, which was as wonderful as the house. She particularly admired the collection of pottery, ceramic, and metal ducks scattered around; I was more interested in his plantings, particularly the line of flourishing citrus trees (tangelo, lime, grapefruit and more) growing along the sunny north wall of the house.

Eventually we let him get back to his work, with many thanks, and continued on our way. We’d had an adventure, met a neighbor, and acquired a brick. Thus proving that virtue is in fact its own reward.

Things to do in the kitchen with a brick
- Weight down your cabbage for Croatian cole slaw
- Make a very flat tuna melt
- Cook chicken under a brick (I haven’t done this yet, but I’ve been wanting to for ages and now I can!)

Luxury lunch

After I made the lunch pictured here for the second time in four days, I thought I should come clean and admit it: this combination was pretty much my sole motivation for last week’s foray into bagel-making.

I came up with it sometime last year, when I was looking at packages of smoked salmon in the supermarket and fondly remembering a smoked-salmon-and-bagel spread unexpectedly encountered at a cousin’s bridal shower a few years earlier. (Yes, I’ve said it before and now you know it's true: basically, all I ever think about is food.) Pretty much everyone there gave the salmon a wide berth, preferring the usual offerings of baked ziti, cold cuts and such…except my mother, my sisters and me. We ate so much of it that I don’t think the caterers even noticed that it had not been a smashing success with the vast majority of the guests. (So you see we were really being charitable, as opposed to just piggy.)

Anyway, as well as wishing something like that would happen again so I wouldn't have to shell out for my own smoked salmon, I was thinking of the accompaniments that you usually find alongside a smoked salmon spread—cream cheese and bagels, of course, but also lemons, chopped red onions, tomatoes, capers—and realized that I already regularly made a salad that included many of those things. I thought it might make a good accompaniment to a smoked salmon/cream cheese bagel. Then I had to buy the smoked salmon so I could try it out.

I was not wrong. In fact, I love this lunch so much that I wish I could afford to eat it about every other day. Luckily, once you have invested in and opened a package of smoked salmon you can’t leave it sitting around for too long, which means you actually have an excuse to eat it about every other day, at least for a little while.

Smoked Salmon Spread Lunch
Sandwich
1 bagel
A few good shmears of cream cheese
1-2 slices smoked salmon
Lemon juice

Salad
8-10 grape or cherry tomatoes
¼ of a red onion
2-3 basil leaves
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Extra virgin olive oil
Balsamic vinegar

Slice the bagel in half and toast. While the bagel is toasting, quarter the tomatoes in a salad bowl. Dice the onions and shred the basil leaves. Season with salt and black pepper, then drizzle the olive oil and vinegar evenly over everything. Toss briefly to combine.

When the bagel is toasted, spread liberally with cream cheese and top with smoked salmon. Sprinkle lemon juice over.

Serves 1.

Friday lunch

My mother never really got the hang of Vatican II. I suppose it is difficult to adjust your habits when you’ve spent 30+ years of your life believing you’ll go to hell if you eat meat on Fridays. Add a houseful of kids to keep track of, not to mention feed, and you can see why, by the time I arrived on the scene, eight years after the Church Fathers had first gathered, the tradition of meatless Fridays was still going strong, and continued to do so throughout my childhood. And why, as a result, I ate a tuna-fish sandwich for lunch every. single. Friday. of my life, at least until I graduated from high school.