A sandwich

You know how sometimes you have to call a friend, and you keep putting it off, for good reasons, then bad reasons, then no reasons other than the thing is spiralling out of control, and you end up resenting this person you’re not calling? So it was with lobstersquad. I was looking for something I really wanted to blog about, and not really finding it, but then, reading the Wednesday Chef, I was led to a flummoxing article.

And then I thought, you know what, I might as well write something after all.

That post, which you can read here if you like, is about someone who has decided not to cook because she forgot to put salt in some galette she was making. The galette came out fine, but it was not the galette to end all galettes, and she had failed to make all her friends wither away in envy of her Instagram feed, and so she’s going to live on olives and prosciutto for ever and ever amen.

I can’t even begin on how crazy I find that. Instead, I will tell you about the lunch I made on Saturday. I, too, had decided not to cook, but just for that morning. But because I am the boy scout of fridge maintenance, and have become, now that I live in the North Pole, an avocado curator, I knew that a world class sandwich was within reach.

First I had to go to the shop and buy some fresh bread. Not mindblowing artisanal bread, of course. Supermarket mini ciabattas, of the sort that look a bit rubbery but come to life with a couple of minutes under the grill.

That, filled with thinly sliced leftover steak, wedges of avocado, pickled cucumber, a squirt of lemon and a dash of hot sauce, was all. A bag of salad was emptied onto a bowl, and dressed with the last of a bottle of vinaigrette I make in batches.

It was very quick, it was beautiful, and it made perfect sense, and if it wasn’t cooking, it wasn’t turning my back on it, either.

So there you are. 

Mars and Venus and the chicken sandwich

Every now and then I poach a chicken. 

It´s very easy: salt it when you get back home, let it sit for a while as you put the shopping away and after, put it in a pressure cooker with a few aromatics and water to

come up to just below the breast. 20 minutes under pressure, 15 for it to come down and there you are. Chicken meat, tender and juicy and delicate, plus a bucketful of jellied broth. No particular purpose in mind, something´s bound to come up that will make good use of it. And if it doesn´t, freeze in pint bags, some chicken and some broth. You´ll be glad to have that on hand.

The first thing we make are usually chicken sandwiches, which can be taken anywhere you like, and made into pop psychology, even.

José makes a chicken version of the classic Cuban sandwich, called habanero in Madrid and bocadito in Cuba. Chicken, ham, cheese, pickles, mustard, white bread, and let the panini press work its magic. Manly.

I tend towards the ladylike in mine. Breast meat, with a little bit of the jelly still on it. Mayonaise, from a jar, with plenty of lemon juice. A few slices of avocado. A suggestion of black pepper. Chopped celery leaves, chives, and parsley. Lightly toasted white bread, or very fresh brown. Green and fresh,  it feels light, although who are we kidding?

Some crisps/chips, for crunch. And if it´s cold, have a cup of the broth, well salted and spiked with Sherry.

Not your basic elemental Pepito

After months of bot being allowed to eat rare red meat, I´m craving a burger bigtime. But I think burgers are best left to professionals, and are best had in greasy, smoky places, and I´m not about to take my precious new baby there, yet, lest he come back smeared with ketchup. A good home alternative? A Pepito.

Ask for a pepito anywhere in Spain and you will be given a steak sandwich.
If you´re lucky, it will be a thin, juicy paillard type thing, and the oil and meat juices will soak into good, crunchy bread. If you´re not , which is more often the case, you will receive a slab of grey cardboard hunkering between two slabs of nothing bread.
This is sad. This is not the sort of sandwich one wants as the namesake for a son and heir. It is a sad testament to the terrible lack of imagination most of Spain gives it sandwiches.
To my mind, a proper pepito should have something sharp, like mustard or horseradish. Something crunchy, like cornichons. Greens, like ruccola. Butter, if J isn´t looking. And some slippery onions, either just made, or in the lovely form of onion jam.
As for the meat, I favour a thick steak, salted, then marinated overnight in whatever´s around. This time it was olive oil, two smashed cloves of garlic, a sprinkling of thyme, a splash of sherry and some fish sauce, but anything goes.
Sear it so it´s black outside and pink within, let it rest while you assemble the sandwiches on a good fresh baguette, and open a couple of beers. Slice the meat thin, and sneak a few slices as you put it inside the bread.
You´ll have to agree that this is a beautiful thing, and I for one would be more than glad to share a name with it.

More sprouts

J and I received another sprouty present yesterday. More mustard, which is sitting pretty until it goes into another avocado salad; and fennel seed sprouts, which I´d never seen in my life and which are so gorgeous.

At first I didn´t quite know what to do with them (except munch them out of hand, which I did with gusto). Fennel isn´t very common in Spanish food, that I know of. I toyed with the idea of a Provençal fish soup, but it felt like too much work. And it was J who provided the anser. "That Sicilian pasta with sardines and fennel", he said. What a jewel of a man!

These shoots are tender little things, and I feel won´t stand up to actual heat. So what I did was mash a tin of sardines with some butter and lots of pepper and a dash of orange juice and the merest shaving of zest. This, spread on those Nordic dark crackers, and topped with fennel sprouts, made me feel utterly sophisticated and springlike and healthy and ready for anything.

I daresay thinly sliced fennel bulb might do the trick, but these little tendrils are so pretty, I´m almost tempted to start up a jar of sprouts myself. We´ll see. For now, I still have a few left, enough for another sandwich.

The illustration will be in next mont´s "Viajar" magazine.

Sprouts

Here´s the banner I´ve made for Mary, aka Breadchick. It´s up just in time for the tentative beginning of spring. In Madrid chairs and tables are already beginning to sprout on sidewalks, and one can enjoy frothy little cañas in the sun.

Also, in a suitable springly mode , my friend Mariana, aka MariaGodzilla, gave me a bunch of mustard shoots (sprouts?) on Monday. They´re beatiful, grassy and fresh, with a hot mustardy aftertaste. They´re impossible to find around here, and these were home grown. The first I munched straight out, but after a while I decided to do them justice, with:

a salad- cherry tomatoes, perfect avocadoes, the mustard shoots, a few drops of olive oil, a slosh of sherry vinegar and salt.

and also, a sandwich- very dark rye bread, mashed avocado (they´re all over the place now, fresh from Granada), smoked salmon. Topped with a straggly mess of, yes, mustard shoots.

Lovely.

Cheese and mayonaise?

I feel strongly about sandwiches. I love them, but most of all I hate to see them badly treated. A bad sanwich is an insult. Pies, soups, sauces- they can be tricky. Anyone might be distracted at a critical moment and overcook pasta, or burn a sausage. But to make a bad sandwich requires truly obscene sloppiness. You don´t even need great ingredients for a great sandwich. A colection of packets and jars from the dingiest corner shop will have you more than ready to play.

I have been raised in a sandwich loving family. Each one of us has our different take on the things, but we all acknowledge that my sister Gadea is The One. She can turn the least promising heap of ingredients into a tower of beauty. Never mind that the chicken was dry, the lettuce limp, the tomato a sorry January specimen. Put it in her hands and it´s instant couture.

My only quibble with her was our cheese/mayonaise-tomato/butter argument. I have always held that a sandwich that holds cheese should never have mayonaise, and that tomato and butter have no place together under a bread blanket. She disagreed.

And you know what? After years and years, yesterday I skipped my rule, tried it her way, and o my. We were so happy with our sandwich that we watched the entire Switzerland-Turkey football match, and really, that takes a lot of blissed out unconsciousness.

Surprisingly good Chicken Sandwich

Heat up the panini grill.
Shred the chicken (roast, boiled, whatever you have), mix it with mayonaise.
Slice some cheese that melts well. I had semi-cured manchego.
Fill two slices of wholemeal plastic bread, crusts off, with chicken mix. Top with cheese slices and grill.
Meanwhile, thinly slice a tomato and some good sweet-sour gherkins.
Once the sandwich is toasted, open it (careful with those fingers, you know it will be hot). Try to ignore the rather disgusting way it looks, with all that melted cheese and mayo goo.
Overlap the tomato slices, salt them slightly, arrange the pickles, and top again.

Bliss. Utter and complete. We also had chips from a bag and some cucumber mint raita on the side, just for kicks.

The best chicken sandwich?

Ok, here´s a confession : I´m a pathetic roaster of chickens.
There, it´s out, and I feel much easier.
I can roast a bird with enough decency that it´s edible, of course. I would even rate myself in the "not bad" bracket sometimes.
But that plump, juicy bird, tender and flavourful, burnished like blonde mahogany and oozing pints of gravy? Hardly.
I blame my oven, which is the easy way, and have learnt to live with chickens in which the breast is delicious and not dry at all, and some of the dark meat is still slightly underdone.
We eat one of the breasts, both legs, the crunchy skin and the roast onions. I save the carcass for stock, pick the pinky not-that-good-looking dark bits for later use in creamy sauces or risottos, and jealously guard the untouched breast and the leftover gravy.
Because if I make indifferent roast chickens, my chicken sandwich is second to none, I think, and it´s what keeps me coming back to the oven to roast birds. Rotisserie chickens taste great, but I shudder to think what dodgy farm they grew up in, and what exactly is in that sauce.
If the chicken I have to play with has been poached, not roasted, then I go for all the heavy artillery of bacon, avocados and tomatoes. If the bread is only so so, then I toast it.
But when I have proper bread, from La Tahona, then I just lay a crisp lettuce leaf on it, and top it with the chicken.
Which, if it´s good, just needs some mayonaise, Helman´s for choice, perked up with lemon juice and a bit of olive oil, and the essential touch for it to be really sublime: a couple of spoonfuls of jellified gravy.
That gravy is full of chicken flavour, and of oregano and lemon and garlic and pepper, too, and it´s the touch that elevates the sandwich. I beleive it to be the secret ingredient in the ones they make in La Marina, and so am always careful to save the last drop of sauce and juice, even if it means smacking J´s hand as he mops everything up enthusiastically.
Of course if your roast chicken is amazing, then maybe you won´t have enough leftover for sanwiches, and that´s something you´re going to have to live with.
Unless your oven fits two chickens.

Jet lag and how to feed it: a beautiful sandwich.

Hardcore fans of Laurie Colwin will recognize that as the title of one of her essays. I´m going through a particulary strong LC phase right now, reading all her fiction. Her food writing I know by heart, almost.

Last week J came back from a congress in Vienna. I didn´t pick him up at the airport, tut tut, but I did compensate by having a good meal waiting for him. Sure, a Vienna-Madrid flight is hardly a Lindbergh-esque exploit, but I find that any sort of waiting around airports takes its toll these days, and well deserves a treat.

Now, Laurie says that someone just off a plane should be given soup and a sandwich. But J was arriving at 5, and that´s mots emphatically not soup-time in Spain. All hours are good for a sandwich and some cake, though, so I made a cute little Victoria sponge, complete with strawberries and jam, and prepared all the ingredients for this awsome sandwich, which has now entered my files as the

"Welcome back from Vienna awsome sandwich":

Crusty bread, baguette or good oldfashioned "barra"
Balsamic sausages
Onion jam
A perfect avocado
A tomato

The assembly is as simple cutting a good sized portion of bread, taking out some of the white crumb, smearing one side with onion jam, topping with slices of the avocado and tomato (and salting them a little)- and then finishing off the job with the sausages cut into thick wedges.

This sandwich has everything: the crunch from the bread, the fatty cloudy factor from the avocado, satisfying and savoury protein from the sausages, oomph from the onion jam and freshness from the tomato. Per-fect, good at any time, and just the thing to get you ready for a slice of cake, a shower and a long walk admiring spring in the Retiro.

Grilled cheese sandwich

The article in yesterday´s New York Times was a lot of fun. It may have been that which made have grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. Or maybe it was the sight of three small mishappen abandoned lumps of cheese in my fridge, and the knowledge that there was some seriously good bread nestling in the freezer.

Out came the panini grill. This is a gadget I try to use as little as possible, for obvious reasons. But every now and then, when it´s raining and you´ve had a long day, why not?

The beauty of these sandwiches is that bread and cheese are a blank canvas for anything you might think of. The versatility is infinite, as long as the contents of your fridge are.

Mine were not too good, but not too bad. I settled for the nearly defunct bottle of caramelized onion chutney, dolloped on the sliced cheese. Once the sandwiches were out, I prised them open, burning my fingers, of course (as the article says, sweetest pain) and put in a layer of thinly sliced plum tomato.

That way I had crispy bread, gooey cheese, a sweet-sour kick from the chutney, and freshness and zing from the tomato. I don´t butter cheese sandwiches. It´s enough for me to see them oozing fat from the cheese when they come out of the grill, thankyouverymuch.

Scavenger mackerel sandwich

I am going to be in Sevilla this weekend, celebrating the wedding of two very dear friends. Since they asked me to illustrate their invitation and the little menu cards for the tables, I know what the menu will be. Takes such a load off my mind. Otherwise, I spend all the time at the church wondering if it´s going to be a fish or meat wedding. Idle thoughts, you´ll say, but it´s hard to be entertained by a wedding mass, at my time of life. I get to hear St.Paul´s epistle many times every year.
Not that I needed the privileged info this time. The groom is allergic to shellfish and strawberries, which rules out all that traditional part of the wedding feast.
And anyway, this post is about the sandwich we had yesterday for our dinner. There was also chicken consomé, because it´s been raining like hell all week, and I´ve been communing with my inner five-year-old and stepping in puddles, and rather fear I´ve caught a cold.
But the sandwich? It was excellent, and surprisingly so, since it started from really scavengy beginnings.
Pan de leche buns, which are rather sweet and soft, were spread with a mayonaise made better and pinker with lemon juice and chili paste. The remains of the mackerel escabeche, carefully de-boned, were laid on top. Black olives were then dotted around tastefully, and the whole thing covered with a crunchy lettuce leaf.
I loved it. All the tastes seemed to meld into a very harmonious whole, somehow, which I never thought they would. Just what I wanted for dinner.

Semana Santa and a montadito

I´d forgotten how much I love Semana Santa in Sevilla.
People often think that Holy Week processions are gloomy and spooky, what with the pointy hoods and the crosses (not fiery, though) and the parading of images of torture and death. But somehow it´s not like that at all. Instead, the whole thing feels like a mixture between an ancient festival and an open air opera. The bands play music that is solemn, but is only a couple of cymbal clashes away from being downright jolly. Add to that that the images of the Passion are carried on guilded baroque floats, full of candles, that rose petals are thrown, and that the air is thick with incense and orange blossom, and you have yourself a pretty heady experience.
Hungry work, you can imagine, chasing the different processions all through the old town, dashing from one to the next, slithering through the massive crowds, finding a shortcut that will let you see the first paso of this one in the famous place, and then maybe the second of the other one in the little square with all the trees, and then dash to the bridge to see a third one crossing.
Luckily, unlike other places that shut down completey for Holy Week, Sevilla´s bars are all open, and packed. So don´t be fooled if it looks like we like to celebrate the more harrowing aspects of Christianity. This is as much a party as all the pagan spring stuff, and don´t you forget it. Have a beer, have two. As for food, if you´re mindful of the lenten rules, you´re in a town proud of its fried fish. I´m particulary fond of cazón en adobo, a type of shark marinated in lemon, paprika and herbs and then battered and fried.
If not, the thing to have is a montadito de pringá. This is a small panini type of grilled sandwich, filled with all the meat that´s left over from a cocido.
So next time you do a cocido, cassoulet, bollito misto or cholent, remember this. Even if you only have a few scraps, cut them up, mix them well, drizzle some olive oil inside a bun, and put it inside a sandwich press. Heaven.

Fish-on-friday tuna sandwich

It´s Lent, it´s Friday, it has to be fish. I could enthuse over the baked mackerel we had on Wednesday. Or talk about my favourite salmon rice. But not today. I have a poltergeist cold that refuses both to go away and to manifest itself clearly. I have deadlines. I want something simple and comforting, and even the thought of defrosting some chicken stock seems like a challenge, so I´ll go with that old friend, the tuna sandwich. And before anything else, please let´s agree to not give the holy name of tuna sandwich to those pale foamy wet flabby sacrilegious things that lurk in chill-cabinets.

Recipes for sandwiches aren´t really recipes, but only lists of quirks and fads and phobias masquerading under the name. There´s a lot of sandwich hectoring, plenty of huffy condemnation of certain ingredients, and always rules. Everyone has them, and they can be as weird as my father´s firmly held belief that pork and mustard don´t go together.
The only answer to this is a Rule to end all rules : Do it yourself. It´s the only way to avoid nasty jolts like finding mayonaise and cheese nestling under the same slice of bread, which I, for instance, hate, and my sister Gadea loves.

My version, which is, naturally, the best in the world and the one and only one for me is as follows:

Wholemeal loaf bread, crusts off.
One small can of tuna in olive oil.
Mayonaise from a jar, tricked out with a drizzle of olive oil and a good squirt of lemon juice.
Several drops of tabasco.
A couple of gherkins, the sweet and sour Polish or German kind, chopped very small.
A whole lettuce leaf, cut to the size of the bread, but not chopped or sliced.
I am not averse to some boiled egg going in, but I think it has to be the sort of forlorn boiled egg that comes back uneaten from a picnic. If you have to start boiling eggs the simplicity of procedure is broken and the whole experience ruined.

Serve with potato chips, preferably salt and vinegar, and either ice-cold beer or ice-cold Diet Coke. I think the bubbles complement it nicely. Must try it with Champagne sometime.

Easy sandwich

I´m not enjoying this week too much. Enjoyable things are happening, but I´m just too manic and stressed to enjoy them. I have no less than eleven sepparate projects on my list for this week and the next.

I´m also eating out all the time. It´s lovely, sociable, expensive, and fun, but dammit, I just want to curl up in the sofa and have somebody bring me a bowl of soup. And then pass out, while an efficient clone finishes off all my work.

Yes, well. In the meantime, I´ll just be glad that I still have consommé in the freezer, and that yesterday I managed to get to the market just before they closed at 8, to stock up on some vegetables.

Not that I can face the chopping up that soup would entail. No. I´ll stick to a cup of the broth, and a sandwich that is as simple as it is invigorating. It´s from Deborah Madison´s The Savoury Way, of which I have a very strange copy I picked up a few years ago at a discount bookshop on c/Goya. It has no page numbers, or index, and the cover is thin green paper, no pictures. It´s falling apart, and it´s annoying to have to rifle through the whole book when looking for something, but I love it anyway. She sounds like a really nice lady, does Deborah (read an interview with her on Culinate).

The sandwich is just brown bread, with butter, chopped parsley and chopped celery leaves. Salt and pepper in considerable quantities, and that´s it. Just make sure the brown bread is good, with plenty of different cereals and maybe a hidden cache of nuts somewhere. It feels good to munch on all that greenery, and yet the butter keeps it just this side of healthy, which makes it coomforting, which makes it just the thing.

Amsterdam panini

I´ve struggled against having a sandwich press for a long time. My kitchen is big and airy, but doesn´t have a lot of cupboard space, and what there is is very cluttered. There´s really no room for anything else, and it doesn´t help that I buy so many little gadgets and jars and tins of exotic ingredients.

But one day I gave in. There was a spare little press at my mother´s house, just begging to find a new home.It´s not the fancy kind with removable plates for easy cleaning, and it´s small, only for a single loaf-bread sandwich.

But already I love it.

There´s no end to the combinations. My golden rule was anything goes, as long there´s a lot of cheese to melt and go stringy. But even that can be ignored, as in these excellent  olive paste and tuna panini by the Wednesday Chef.

However, the house favourite is still what we call the Amsterdam Sandwich, which is as un-Dutch as you can go.
Last summer we spent a long weekend in Amsterdam, where we fell in love with a little hole in the wall italian sandwich bar. It was on a broad street in the museum quarter, and had a couple of benches where you could munch your food and watch the leisurely bicycle traffic roll by.
You made your sandwich to order, and of course J doesn´t know the meaning of restraint, so his usual was a delicious hotch potch of ingredients.
This is the approximation I make here, and a pretty good ersatz panino it is.

White loaf bread
serrano ham (doesn´t have to be the all-out amazing stuff), sliced very thin
fresh mozzarella (ditto about amazingness)
 roast tomatoes
 black olives
pesto

It´s quite a mess, but because this kind of machine presses the edges, nothing is allowed to escape from the sandwich. When you take it to the plate, you can´t tell what´s inside until you slice it, and the mozzarella oozes all over, and the basil and tomatoes aroma wafts up.
A winner.

The drawing is a sketch from a trip to Amsterdam in 1998.

Everything tastes better outdoors

Aren´t picnics the best?
Any kind of picnic, wether it´s a full dress affair, with champagne cooling in the river and a wicker hamper, or a simple sandwich savoured on a park bench while reading Vogue. The best.

This spring has been quite picnicful.I´ve had a Retiro park picnics of cheese and gazpacho. Freesbee tossing and tuna sandwiches, plus ice cold beer on the beach at Cape Trafalgar.An elaborate meal for six, with the dogs, in the country, under the encinas.

Maybe I´ve been brainwashed by all the Enid Blyton I read as a child. In her books, the phrase "everything tastes better outdoors" is mentioned at least twice. Always followed by the same litany; ham sandwiches, chocolate cake, hard boiled eggs and ginger beer.

So it may be brainwashing, or maybe things really do taste better outdoors. It doesn´t need much for a meal to be memorable. The setting is doing most of the work for you, and bread and cheese, a few cherries and some wine will be more ambrosial than a meal you´ve slaved over for hours.

However, sometimes a little more is called for. This is what I make. High-impact, low-effort sandwiches that travel well,but will also do if your mother´s friends are coming over for tea to check out your wedding china.

You´ll need
20 slices of brown bread, crusts off.
300 gr. smoked salmon
200 gr. (one package) cream cheese
Chives, parsley, black pepper, a lemon
Butter

Mix the cream cheese wiwth the chopped herbs ( quantities up to you. I like mine pretty green), the zest and juice of the lemon, and lots of freshly ground pepper.

Spread on 10 of the slices, all laid out on the table. Top with the salmon. Spread a minimum of butter on the other 10 slices, if you like.
I cut these sandwiches in triangles, with scissors.

The picture is from a book I illustrated a couple of years back, called "Marcela". The title role is a little girl who loves to eat cauliflower when on a picnic. Takes all kinds.