Deli Sandwiches

Sandwiches have a bad reputation for being a quick, mom-was-too-busy-to-cook meal. That's a shame. I'm a very big fan of a good sandwich.

When I was a kid, I had to bear the horrible task of going grocery shopping once a week with my mother. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the root of my hatred of grocery shopping that continues to this day. Every now and then, however, my mother would buy me a sandwich from the deli. The deli can stuff just about anything into your sandwich – even things you wouldn't eat by themselves – and make it delicious. Since I have a personal rule about never cooking on Fridays, tonight we decided to go the deli sandwich route.

One of the things that made those grocery store deli sandwiches so tasty was the sauce. As a kid, I wouldn't touch mayonnaise with a 39 1/2 foot pole, but I snarfed down the deli sandwich sauce like a refugee. I later discovered that it was just equal parts mayo and mustard. 

You wouldn't think that mixing together the mayonnaise and mustard for your sandwich makes much of a difference, but it really does. 

Toasting the bread is also a good idea if you plan on using damp ingredients, such as tomatoes and pickles. Meat, cheese, lettuce and tomato are a given, but you can use just about anything you have laying around to make a killer sandwich. I do this frequently when I purchase something for a recipe that we don't normally eat. Rather than letting it sit in the fridge and slowly die, I put it in a sandwich. Here is a short list of just a few sandwich-stuffing items you might have around the house that you may not have considered:

• Olives
• Sliced onion
• Apples or pears, thinly sliced
• Sweet or dill pickles
• Shredded carrot
• Fresh spinach or watercress
• Sliced artichoke hearts
• Almonds or pecans
• Chopped nopal 
• Pesto
• Seaweed
• Hummus
• Bean sprouts

Unorthodox is fun. For example, toasted ham, pear and mozzarella sandwiches are divine. Don't be afraid to experiment. You might be pleasantly surprised. Plus, screwing up a sandwich isn't as bad as screwing up a casserole. You can toss a bad sandwich in the trash without feeling like you wasted time and money. 

Fried Cinnamon & Chocolate Bananas

Anyone who knows me well will tell you that there are several combinations of food that I find absolutely repugnant. The combinations are as follows:

1. Coffee and liquer
2. Coffee and chocolate
3. Chocolate and liquor
4. Coffee and fruit
5. Fruit and chocolate

I generally adhere to "fruit and chocolate do not go together" mantra no matter what. I realize, however, that most people – including my family – would not agree. So last night I made them some fried cinnamon and chocolate bananas.

Although I did modify the batter, I would like to note that the original batter recipe was adapted from the fried bananas recipe included on Roti-n-Rice. Thanks to Biren, the blog's author, for such a light and crispy batter. 

Ingredients:

• 1 jar hot fudge (You can make this from scratch or buy it. One of these days I will post my hot fudge recipe)
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• 2 tbsp cinnamon
• 3 bananas 
• 1 1/2 cups granola
• 1 egg
• 1 cup rice flour (regular flour would probably work, but you'd have to modify the amounts of some ingredients before you got the proper consistency for batter)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp water

Directions:

Cut each banana in half and cut a second time vertically. This should leave you with 12 symmetrical slices. Put the slices in a baking dish. Cover each slice with hot fudge and put them in the freezer until the chocolate solidifies. 

Heat up approximately 2 inches of oil in a deep fryer or pot. While the oil is heating, combine the flour, salt, egg and water. Mix until you have a thick and creamy batter. Pour the granola into a bowl. 

Remove each banana slice from the pan. You may need to cut around them with a knife to ensure that they do not break. Dip each slice in the batter, roll it in the granola, and drop it in the pan. Fry for 1 to 2 minutes, or until the coating is golden brown. Remove the fried bananas from the oil with a slotted spoon or tongs and place them on a paper towel to drain the excess grease. 

Top with hot fudge and powdered sugar. Serve warm. 

A Healthier and Tastier Version of the Italian Chicken Sandwich

Everyone is familiar with the Italian chicken sandwich. It consists of a chicken patty slathered with marinara sauce, topped with melted mozzerella stuffed between two pieces of bread. It's greasy, fattening and incredibly delicious. 

Well, you can consider this the Italian chicken sandwich's classier cousin. You know, the one who wears $200 sunglasses, refuses to smile and thinks raising one eyebrow is an appropriate response to a question. Even so, you'd do just about anything to get her. 

And in this case, she's oh-so worth it. 

Sun-dried tomato pesto chicken burger

Ingredients:

• 1 jar sun-dried tomato pesto
• Wheat hamburger buns
• boneless chicken breasts
• soft mozzerella (not the block!)
• Artesian or romaine lettuce

Directions:

Grill the chicken breasts. While the chicken breasts are on the grill, slice the cheese and place cheese slices on the top half of each bun. Toast the buns until the cheese melts. When the buns are finished, slather sun-dried tomato pesto on the bottom half. Place a grilled chicken breast into the sun-dried tomato pesto on each bun. Top with the lettuce and the bun's cheese-smothered other half.

Ghetto Rice Krispie Treats

Oh yes I did.

My favorite everyday dessert isn't anything complicated or elegant. Nope, a pan of warm, gooey Rice Krispie treats is enough to satisfy me for days. Ok...maybe one day...because after that its gone.

Fortunately for my waistline, I have no clue how to make Rice Krispie treats. All I know is that it involves melting marshmallows painfully slowly on the stove. I'm not into standing at the stove and slowly stirring something for ten minutes. I think butter is also involved in this process somehow. 

Tim is much, much more patient than I am and he makes fantastic Rice Krispie treats, so I never bothered to learn much about the process – except I know that you're supposed to "Spray the spatula with cooking spray so that the Rice Krispie treats don't stick when you press them into the pan." Tim tells me this every time he makes the darn things as if I will one day need this information because I'll be making them myself. 

HaHaHaHaHa

I should have learned more about the mechanics of Rice Krispie treat making because last night when I wanted a midnight snack and there was nothing palatable in the house, I decided to whip up some ghetto Rice Krispie treats. So I tossed some butter and marshmallows into a pot (I think I was supposed to melt the butter first, but oh well) and when that was good and melted I mixed in what appeared to me to be the correct amount of off-brand Rice Krispies. 

My dessert attempts are usually failures and, true to form, my ghetto Rice-Krispie-treats-in-a-bowl looked scrumptious but tasted terrible. I guess I'll leave the dessert-making to my husband. His sugary confections trump mine every time, and if I didn't get to eat those treats I might just be jealous. 

Basic (and easy) Chili

I used to be afraid of chili. Whenever my parents made chili, I cringed (but not quite as much as I cringed when they made stir-fry. Stir-fry was their crack. To this day I won't touch the stuff.). I liked absolutely nothing about chili. I find chili tolerable now. It's not my first choice, but its not one of those things that I'd rather go hungry than eat.

And since every family has their own variation on the old classic, I'm going to share ours. It's gluten-free, but that wasn't intentional, just lucky, especially considering chili is one of Larin's favorite foods. Yes, this is just a basic chili recipe, but Tim always devours it – eating until the point of sickness each time I make it. Thus, I'm just going to have to assume that its tasty. I wouldn't know. All chili tastes pretty much the same to  me. There is one thing I love about chili, however, and that is the fact that, aside from browning the meat and cooking the onions, you can pretty much just dump it in the pot and walk away.

I guess I should have named this blog "The Lazy Cook." Oh well, too late now.


Basic Chili 

• 1 28 oz. can crushed tomatoes
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 2 cans kidney beans
• 1 lb. ground beef (or more, if you like meaty chili)
• 1/2 of a green bellpepper, chopped
• 1 medium sweet onion, chopped
• 2 tbsp olive oil 
• 4 tbsp chili powder
• 1 tbsp California garlic salt with parsley
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 tsp salt

Brown the ground beef in a saucepan. Put the olive oil in a saucepan. Set the saucepan on medium and multitask, cooking the ground beef and onion/bellpepper mixture simultaneously (Not required, but it saves time.) Or better yet, ask your significant other to cook one while you cook the other. Cook the ground beef until it is completely browned and the onion/pepper mixture until the onions are translucent. 

Set a stock pot or Dutch oven to medium low. Add the crushed tomatoes, diced tomatoes, cooked ground beef, onion/bellpepper mixture, kidney beans, garlic salt, chili powder, and water to the pot. Bring the chili to a boil, stirring it regularly. If you're using a Dutch oven as instructed, you shouldn't have to worry about scrubbing burnt bits of chili out of the bottom of a pot later on. 

We're lazy, remember? We don't like scrubbing.

Take the chili back down to a simmer, put the lid on the Dutch oven and leave it for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes stir the chili and add the butter. Stir the butter in well until it melts. Voila! You're done. You get to eat. As for me, I get to spend the next 20 minutes fighting to get a spoonful of chili in my four-year old's mouth. 

Gluten Free Pineapple Chicken

I'm testing my daughter out on a gluten-free diet after several weeks of constant stomach pain. It seems to be working. Because lets face it, man cannot live on Vicodin alone. When I initially suggested that she might need a gluten free diet she looked at me with fear in her eyes and said, "I won't be able to eat delicious foods with you guys anymore?"

Pfft. Ye of little faith.

If one of us has to eat gluten free, we all eat gluten free. Enter the pineapple chicken.

What I wanted was to be able to give my daughter that crispy fried chicken taste that she likes. Grilled chicken just isn't the same, and baked chicken? Gag me with a washcloth dipped in Lysol. No 13 year old girl should have to strike fried chicken from her diet (unless she's one of those 300lb. children from daytimie talk shows. Those girls can skip the chicken). 

Given that flour is a no no, we start out by washing the chicken, dipping it in whole milk and rolling it in cornmeal. I usually fry with a mix of flour and cornmeal, so this isn't quite so different. I forgot to salt the cornmeal, but you should. You totally should. 

Heat up about 1/2 inch of vegetable oil in a frying pan. Heat it until it starts to pop lightly on its own. It's important to get the oil very hot so that the cornmeal sears to the chicken skin immediately. Cornmeal has a greater tendency to slough off during cooking than flour, and we want to make delicious gluten free fried chicken, not wet, crustless, fail chicken. You can turn the oil down slightly after searing. 

While your chicken cooks, toss 1/2 a can of chunk pineapple (this will work with crushed pineapple too) into a saucepan with 2 tbsp of apple cider vinegar and roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar. It just depends on how sweet you want it. I'm not sure exactly how much sugar I added. I don't really measure things. 

Word to the wise: No matter how funny you think it may be, do not ask your four-year old to taste test the pineapple sauce before you add the sugar. Two things will happen: One, he will spit it out on your nice, clean floor. Two: he will refuse to eat the finished version. 

Bring the pineapple mixture to a boil. Mix 2 tbsp water and 2 tbsp corn starch in a small cup. Pour the cornstarch mixture into the pineapple sauce. This will thicken it. 

Turn the heat down to a low simmer. Add 3/4 tsp ground ginger. Remove the chicken from the pan and pour a generous amount of pineapple sauce over each piece. If you wish, you can serve this dish over rice. The pineapple sauce and the rice go quite nicely together. 

My goal isn't to work around my daughter's dietary restrictions, but to make her forget that she even has dietary restrictions. The pineapple chicken suited that purpose quite well. It's a keeper. 

Grilled Salmon in Spinach Cream Sauce

I am always surprised whenever I hear someone claim to dislike fish.  When a person says  he doesn't like poultry, that's pretty straightforward. After all, a bird is a bird and the flavor doesn't differ that much. The same is true of beef. Whether they're free-roaming, grain-fed or stuffed in a corral for the duration of their short lives, cattle taste like cattle.

But fish? Surely you jest. There are literally thousands of different types of fish out there, and each has its own distinct texture and flavor. There are similarities of course, but generalizing and claiming to dislike all fish is like saying you don't like anything with salt in it – as if pretzels had anything in common with vegetable soup.

Tim used to be one of those fish-haters. But, like most fish haters, what he hated wasn't the fish – it was that "fishy" taste. Get ready, because here comes an impromptu science lesson: fish aren't supposed to taste fishy. That "fishy" taste and smell is bacterial growth. The goal, of course, is to get to the fish before that bacteria has time to replicate and create the characteristic unpleasant odor and flavor that so many people associate with seafood.

Salmon in spinach cream sauce

Long story short, we're a fish-eating family. 

Now, you'd think after my less-than-wonderful experience with that onion soup that I would toss my Quick & Easy cookbook into the trash and move on. But no. I am a giver of second chances and ole' Quick & Easy got a second go tonight in the form of grilled salmon in a spinach cream sauce. It sounded perfect. We all like salmon. We all like spinach. We all like cream. 

But we did not all like this dish. Before I go any further, I'll post the recipe and you can take a good long look at it and see if the same thing jumps out at you that jumped out at me. 

Spinach Cream Sauce for Fish

• 1 1/4 cups sour cream
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh dill
• 2 tbsp unsalted butter
• 1 garlic clove, chopped
• 1/3 cup dry white wine
• 1 bunch spinach, finely chopped

Pour the sour cream into a saucepan. Heat to simmering. Remove from  heat. Stir in dill. Set aside. Melt the butter in a second saucepan. Add the garlic and cook for one minute. Add the white wine and bring the mixture to a boil. Cook until reduced. Add the sour cream mixture. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes or until thickened. Pour over fish. 

I'm all about some good sauce, but sour cream and wine? Together? I felt like a moth must feel when its headed for the bug zapper but can't seem to stop. I know for a Rock.Solid. Fact that I am not capable of pulling off that combination, yet I went ahead and did it anyway because the book told me to. This is the same book, mind you, whose authors seem to feel that soups do not require seasoning. 

Tim actually liked it. I would have assumed he was just being polite if I hadn't sat and watched him devour every bite of that fish. In my opinion, the flavor created when one mixes sour cream with wine is retch-worthy. I think Logan put it best when he crinkled up his nose and said: "I do not like this strange chicken."  

Feel free to try it if you must, but don't say I didn't warn you.