Cheese, more cheese!

Today I made a sandwich for lunch that was sort of like a little trip to the Alps. I used Tuscan bread and layered on gruyere and emmthaler on dijon mustard with some spinach. A little French, a little Italian, a little Swiss...not bad! Would have been better on the panini press. I'll have to lug that to work some day for a lunch time panini party!

Prosciutto, mozzarella and fig jam revisited

Oh yeah, it's panini week at my house. Last night I made the prosciutto, mozzarella and fig jam sandwich again. It's the one on the cover of Grilled Cheese:50 Recipes to Make You Melt.
I followed Karen's advice and added goat cheese to the mix.
The verdict? Goat cheese and fig jam do indeed make everything better!

Panini 1-2 punch

I continued my panini party solo yesterday. I mean, the panini press was out and there were still lots of cut up ingredients...
For breakfast I made a peanut butter and banana on whole wheat panini. It was pretty awesome. Next time I will add a little honey and it will be perfect.
For dinner I made the one sandwich I didn't have room for on Monday night: sharp cheddar and country pickle. Yum. Plus I finally finished off the giant bottle of country pickle! Still working on the great condiment clear out. 356 to go.

Cheestastic!

The fancy grilled cheese Sandwich Night was a pretty chaotic affair yet still a great success. We might have set an attendance record--there were 8 of us: Beth, me, Karen, Kate, my friend Laura, plus Beth's co-worker Eric and his wife KJ and son Lyndon. Only Laura and KJ were Sandwich Night newbies. Eric and Lyndon joined us for the grilled veggie sandwich last year. This time, I'm happy to report that Lyndon was old enough to eat a sandwich. Yay! Last time he just got to watch and eat baby food. Boring.
It's a good thing so many people showed up because I went a little crazy at the Trader Joe's cheese cooler. The prices are so good--how could you pass them up? I assembled a great many ingredients featured in the grilled cheese cookbook.

We had sharp cheddar, jack, mozzarella, gruyere, emmenthaler, blue, and chevre. For condiments we had dijon mustard, country pickle, fig jam, green olive mustard, walnut dijon, honey mustard, and some grainy mustard. Add to that chopped tomatoes, sliced pear, radicchio, toasted pecans, cumin seed and prosciutto. On Karen's advice, I stuck to one kind of bread, sourdough, so we could more easily compare and contrast sandwich combos.
As usual, on a night like this, it was everyone for themselves in a frenzied melee of sandwich making. I lost track of all of the mixing and matching. I can tell you that the general consensus was that goat cheese and fig jam make everything taste better.
I had to try too many combinations so I was a bit of a glutton (a Sandwich Night tradition, of course) I made 1)fig jam, mozzarella, prosciutto; 2)pear, emmenthaler, gruyere, goat cheese, cumin seeds; and 3) blue cheese, goat cheese, radicchio, pear, jack cheese, pecans. I also made a sliver of jack and green olive mustard. They were all sooo good!

I even made a salad! I'm not sure whose sandwich this is. Doesn't it look pretty?

#25

I ate a smoked turkey, lettuce, honey mustard on whole wheat for lunch today. Eating light in preparation for our fancy grilled cheese panini Sandwich Night later!

New taste sensations!

#23 was a peanut butter and dandelion jelly on whole wheat. My friend Mel brought the dandelion jelly back from West Virginia. It's very mild--kind of tastes like honey. If you find yourself in West Virginia, you should hunt some up!

#24 came about through a discussion I had with a co-worker about the greatness of Everett's. He claims that Everett's stays in business solely due to sales of polish sausage and beef bacon. Beef bacon? Who knew there was such a thing? I had to try some. They keep a hunk of it by the beef sticks. I ordered a few slices and fried them up for a BS sandwich today. That's a bacon spinach, since I was flat out of lettuce and tomatoes are too scary in January. Beef bacon is salty and sort of tastes like pork bacon, except beefier and chewier. Worked well on toasted asiago cheese bread with mayonnaise and baby spinach!

It's official

Ice cream sandwiches are sandwiches! Now I can count the ice cream sandwich I had at Disneyland on January1. It was a cookies and cream Mickey Mouse sandwich. It was kind of terrible--frozen so hard you couldn't bite it. I gnawed at it for a while, then wrapped it back up and stuffed in my jacket pocket while we went on the Winnie the Pooh ride. After that it had thawed enough to eat. It still wasn't very good--not as good as the cheap ones you get at convenience stores even. Oh well, it still counts!