Just a Tuesday evening with Tricia

Hello Barrys (and fans of the blog),

Whenever I am home for breaks I enjoy catching up with my good friend Tricia. This break, all she has been talking about is The Barry Table (she is it's number one fan) and how she longs for the good food while at school.
We were chatting away about life and food when we realized that it was approaching 9pm and neither of us had eaten dinner! I know that my mother would be horrified if I skipped a precious meal, so quickly we began going through her fridge.
"How about sandwiches?" I asked (of course).
"Great!"
So we pulled out the lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, onions, several fancy mustards, two kinds of hummus, mushrooms, carrots (?), and a variety of nice cheese. I have to admit, I was getting pretty excited seeing all of these great ingredients come out.
"Uh, we might be low on bread..." Tricia said sadly holding up one end piece in a bread bag. "But I have been wanting make some!"
"Okay!"
So we put the sandwiches on hold and pulled out the computer, to look up a bread recipes, and Tricia's bread maker to (duh) make bread. While piling in the ingredients we realized that making bread in a bread maker takes 3+ hours, so we wouldn't have our dear sandwiches until about 12:45am.
This was no good.
Back to the fridge, and ah, glory, english muffins!
We ended up eating fried egg (with mushrooms) sandwiches on toasted english muffins. The sandwiches had orange pepper, tomato, red onion, lettuce, and garlic chili pepper cheddar cheese (slightly melted, to add a gooey warm goodness that complimented the fried egg nicely).
Mustard was tough decision because Tricia had a wide spectrum of mustard types, from sweet to spicy. Organic whole grain from france went on Tricia's sandwich and organic dijon from Whole Foods for me (both of which Tricia kindly pointed out earned the USDA organic seal of approval).
While I was perfecting the art of the fried egg Tricia took the anitiative to make ours a well rounded meal and busted out her organic roasted red pepper and tomato soup. She chose to heat it up in the microwave, adding salt, pepper, and parsely at precisily the right moment in the heating process. Her specialty.

We chowed down on our fantastic meal while listening to the bread machine continue to knead our precious whole wheat bread, now not needed for sandwiches.

After a few more hours of chatting we enjoyed a nice snack of warm whole wheat bread with seedless red raspberry butter (not organic!) and tazo red apple tea at 12:45am.

Sandwich Wars: the side dishes

Okay the grilled eggplant sandwich with arugula, avocado and smoked caciocavalo cheese could have been made in December, but the side is truly Spring.

First I steamed the fresh fava beans, baby artichokes and new potatoes. Then I tossed them together in a sauté of onions and garlic in a lemon zest sauce.

What sides are you creating?

Sandwich Wars, Part Three (Airplane Food)

When you're making sandwiches, you have to work with what you have, and when Pam went into the mostly empty fridge the other morning, to make sandwiches for the plane ride to Sarasota, FL, the ingredient that made the difference was boiled beets. She sliced them up along with some green onions (the long way), lettuce and green peppers, added a slice of pepper jack cheese and a light coating of French red pepper mustard (thanks Carolyn, for leaving it behind), and put it all between darkly toasted bread to keep things from getting soggy. We ate 'em somewhere over Tennessee, I reckon. They filled us up a bit more than that tiny bag of "gourmet" pretzels.

And then today Pam went into Janet and Freddy's fridge (they'd gone off to work) and found some bottled roasted peppers, hot giardiniera and cheese, plus good whole-grain bread, and added a handful of fresh greens mix (arugula) from the balcony garden. We ate that out at Myakka River State Park, where the birds of the day were black vultures, scores of them that had converged on the park to pick clean the invader species tilapia that had died off during the recent 26-degree cold snap. It smelled pretty bad along the water's edge, where the carcasses were washed up by the dozens, but a volunteer ranger told us that it smelled a lot worse a few days ago, before the vultures provided their ecological services.

Tomorrow or Sunday we'll probably go kayaking, with Pam and me in a rented boat and Janet and Freddy in their new inflatable kayak, below. Yes, that's Doctor Lepore wearing his dress white shirt pumping up the thing; it arrived the day we did and he couldn't wait to see what it looked like. It's a very impressive piece of engineering, complete with "military style" valves that must be what the Navy Seals can manipulate with their teeth even when under heavy fire and pulling a few fallen comrades to the boat through 10-foot waves.

Sandwich Wars Part Two

Mozzarella, tomatoes, olives, parsley, red pepper on a whole wheat bun. And a big old marinated artichoke on the side.

Sandwich Wars

In light of our busy schedules, Janet and I decided to pass on the macadamia encrusted Mahi Mahi and construct one of our Eggplant Dagwoods. I doubt Mr. Bumstead would make his with Kalamata tampenade or salt from the frigid waters of the Bering Sea, but we're sure he would still enjoy this little piece of heaven crafted from fresh baked Cuban bread. We also threw in some greens from our garden as well as the date breakers on top... garlic stuffed olives. We just hope that the two of us can down this puppy ourselves. Nos Vemos!

Holding off a food rut

Work for both of us started off with a bang on Jan. 2 and shows no signs of letting up for months to come, so it would be understandable if our culinary ambitions trailed off from the high points of the recent holiday.

But we have to keep our strength up, so Pam is making sure we eat our vegetables.

Last night, she put together a couple of dishes from the new cookbook that Kevin got us for Christmas, The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. The first was Aloo Sak, or potatoes and spinach, and the other was Baigan Simla Mirch Tarkari, sauteed eggplant and bell peppers.

A couple of surprises here.

The eggplant dish involved steaming the eggplant first, then combining with a giant mound of peppers (three large ones, sliced thin) that were sauteed with mustard seeds until they were blistered and shrunk down to little shreds of their former selves. Add freshly mixed garam masala according to Lord Krishna's recipe, and you have a remarkably dense and flavorful dish that is served with yogurt and cilantro.

Potatoes and spinach? That one you start by making French Fries! Once nicely browned in a thin layer of oil, you pull out the potatoes, dump a hot red spice mix into the oil, sizzle away the moisture, add the spinach and a bit later add the potatoes back in. Squeeze on some lemon and eat with some garlic nan (from the frozen food case at the wildly popular Fresh Farms International Market, 2626 W. Devon), and you have yourself a decent meal.

To keep the momentum going, Pam made some toasted mango, avocado and mozzarella sandwiches for brunch today with Granny and Carolyn. The sandwiches were marvelously light and clean-tasting, almost bland, but the side dish of fiery chipotle potatoes balanced things out.

We'll see how long we can keep this up before falling into the inevitable food rut.

Just an Average Meal for The Sandwich Sensei

Well, it was 4 pm and my stomach started grumbling so I knew what I had to do: forfeit my appetite for dinner and make myself a sandwich.



That’s provolone cheese, green onion (sliced the long way), avocado, tomato, and lettuce on toasted whole wheat with a thin layer of mayonnaise and a generous portion of “French Hot Pepper Mustard,” courtesy of the Stark n’ Barry’s.
Served with a couple of sliced kosher dill’s and followed by one of my mom's apple cupcakes, I’m stuffed.