Squished sandwich!

Paper-thin red onion, roasted red pepper, arugula, Genoa salami, provolone, Black Forest ham, tomato, and brown mustard on a whole wheat baguette


“But why are they squished?” someone asked me today as I rambled on about my lunch.

The truth is, I don’t know the historical reasons to press a sandwich. A cursory search of the Internet and a few cookbooks turned up nothing except the well-known fact that sandwiches do get pressed and that you can buy devices to accomplish this feat.

From my own experience, I can tell you that

• The filling gets denser and the sandwich is much less likely to fall apart.
• The bread does not merely teeter atop a pile of fixings; it is molded precisely to them. Like with German engineering. But you can’t eat German engineering.
• You can have a good time slicing the sandwich with the panini knife your brother gave you for your birthday, if that’s how things happened in your family too.
• Plus it is just a lot of fun to say “squished sandwich.” Squished sandwich!

The foundation, of course, is good bread. It needs to be substantial enough not to break apart, yet soft enough to give a bit, during the squishing process. Choose flavorful fillings, but avoid ones that will weep copious amounts of juice. Use a lot of thin-sliced items rather than equal volumes of thick-sliced items. Wrap the sandwich tightly in waxed paper or plastic film and weight it down overnight.

And, finally, make two of them at a time. The pressing involves balancing a weight on top of the sandwich. This is liable to topple off as the sandwich compresses. I made a little pontoon boat out of two sandwiches and a cutting board. Then I stacked on a case of sparkling water, three ears of corn, a bunch of carrots, some cucumbers, and a sweet potato. The whole pile stayed rock solid!

To serve your sandwich, just bring it up to room temperature, unwrap it, and slice it. Easy and fun!

Pineapple vinegar? The hell you say!

10:00 PM, 29 May 2012

Fail.

I screwed my courage to the sticking point today and tasted the foetid brew. Not pineappley. Not vinegary. Just washed-out, watery, and vaguely beery.

Here is a picture of the pineapple not-vinegar. In the background is the sink down which the not-vinegar is about to get dumped. In the foreground is a beadwork snail who will be the sole witness to the dumping.

“About time," says the beadwork snail. “To the sewers with that nasty crap.”

The experiment was a flop from start to finish. Its fruit-corpse odor never gave way to the clean vinegary tang I wanted. The white scum on the top and the thickening dregs of yeast on the bottom make it resemble nothing so much as... well, if I tell you, I’ll have violated my own comments policy. Maybe, instead of the kitchen sink, this should go down a porcelain drain in a different room.

You know that when even a pretend snail is talking smack about something, it’s time to cut your losses and move on.

4:54 PM, 20 May 2012

There are actually two installments today. Scroll down for the news at the three-week mark.

I skipped taking a picture at the four-week mark because it was just getting grosser and grosser in that jar. But at Week 5, I can't take it anymore. I no longer wish to pretend that the pink and white scum on top is a vinegar mother.

I skimmed off that nasty crap, strained out the solids, washed the jar, and put back the liquid. I don't anymore believe this is turning into vinegar, but I have little to lose and it's hard to shake the effects of the sunk cost fallacy. We'll give it more time.

4:56 PM, 6 May 2012:

After the Week 1 picture, I found a small plate to drop in there. At three weeks, the vinegar was growing a pink and white cap. I surmised the cap was made of mold, yeast, and/or bacteria. Does anyone know what a vinegar mother looks like?

Quite a bit of bubbling going on in there, too. A big old bubble of what can only be carbon dioxide was collecting under the plate:

I do not approve. But rather than make time to deal with it, I left it alone.

11:41 AM, 22 April 2012:

At one week old, the proto-pineapple-vinegar is cloudy. It smells yeasty and sickly sweet. I had to fish some moldy pineapple bits off the top, and I failed to convince the rest of the pineapple to submerge. Maybe I can find a plate or something that will fit inside this jar.

Assessment: This is not fun yet, but it’s no skin off my nose. To be continued.

****
7:09 PM, 17 April 2012:

So.

Diana Kennedy, one of my food heroes, writes in The Art of Mexican Cooking that I can and should try to make pineapple vinegar. That Mexican cooks make escabeche (lightly pickled things) in it. That a fair substitute is half wine vinegar and half rice vinegar, but it’s not quite right.

She says it takes six weeks or more but that it is well worth the wait. A likely story. We’ll just see about that.

This is actually my second attempt. The first time, I stuffed the pineapple and liquid into a half-gallon juice bottle with no headroom and then screwed on the cap. On the fifth day of fermentation, I opened the cap and most of the liquid fizzed up and out of the bottle. FAIL. So I got a better jar.

It occurs to me that, for a person acting all skeptical and dismissive, I am investing rather a lot of resources in this idea.

Pineapple Vinegar
Peelings and core of 1 pineapple, plus some chunks of the good part
4 T brown sugar
1½ qt water

We mix it in a vessel. We set it in a sunny spot. We wait. Fizz happens, then stops happening. A viscous disc is to form, and then firm up, at the top of the jar. This is mother of vinegar and should be retrieved, then put in with the next batch to hasten the process. The other solids should be strained out and discarded. The liquid is supposedly the deliciousest thing ever.

I’ll keep you posted.

Curried Red Dal

Culinarily, I think this time of year is beyond boring. It’s too early for the farmer’s market. It’s too late to make wintery things.

This year I’m working on cooking up the odds and ends of stuff that turns up in the back of the freezer, forgotten in the cupboard, or lolling around on a pantry shelf. This dish knocked out three freezer things and two cupboard things! Plus it was tasty and interesting to eat.

Curried Red Dal
2 c red lentils
2 qt water or stock (I used one of each)
2 T red curry paste
1 can coconut milk
2 kaffir lime leaves
1 bucketful of fresh spinach or a block of frozen spinach
Salt to taste
Cooked rice

Rinse the lentils and pop them in a pot with the stock or water. Bring to a simmer and cook them 15-20 minutes. Stir in the curry paste, the coconut milk, and the kaffir lime leaves. Cook another 15-20 minutes or until everything is tender.

Meanwhile, I hope you have already started the rice.

While all that is happening, cook the spinach in as little water as possible. Steaming it works great. Drain it in a colander, squeezing it against the sides to make the spinach as dry as possible.

When the lentils are tender, stir in the spinach and season to taste. Serve over rice.

Easy and fun! And soon there will be REAL spinach: market spinach, CSA spinach, homegrown spinach that lives in the same zip code as me! I can’t wait.

My New Toy

The 7" straight carving fork from Wusthof is finally mine.


2001 A Space Odyssey - 02. Richard Strauss - Main Title - Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
Powered by mp3skull.com

Straitened Circumstances

For the next four weeks or so, this will be my kitchen:

My house is a foursquare built in 1908; the original kitchen was most likely a tiny, dark, and utilitarian 19th-century cubby. At some point, someone rearranged a few walls and added four feet to the back of the house to create a galley. If the style of cabinets is any indication, this might have been done sometime between 1967 and 1978. In 1999, a hasty do-it-yourselfer slapped on some quarter-round molding and vinyl flooring to prepare the house for sale to me.

I cook in an awkwardly designed kitchen with a four-foot-square work triangle. The unvented stove is in a corner. The fridge is directly opposite. They share the end of the narrow room with a defunct radiator. The sink is eighteen inches to the left of the stove. It’s impossible for more than one person to work comfortably.

Over the past few years I’ve been feeling increasingly grumbly about the kitchen. The final straw came one morning this past November when I made pancakes. My bedroom upstairs smelled like an IHOP for three days afterwards. OH! That was IT!

So I’ve been working for a couple of months on figuring out what I want and whom to hire. Demolition starts this coming week. I won’t get to cook anything meaningful in my own kitchen until April. But when it is finished, I will have new cabinets. I will have hardwood floors to match what’s in the rest of the house. I will have more light, a new sink, a dishwasher (for the first time!), a better workspace configuration, and more countertops. The materials, style and colors will be appropriate to the era in which my house was built.

Meanwhile, though, I will be eating like a college student out of the microwave that lives on a cart in the basement. I'll keep you posted.