Peppermint
May 30th, 2009Filed Under: brie, mint, toasted with 1 Comment
Pre-toasting
We happened to be in Manhattan, so my girlfriend insisted on treating me to a meal at Les Halles. Everything was delicious, other than the somewhat wilted salad greens. Also, it had to have been 90 degrees in there, and I’ve been to nightclubs where the music wasn’t as loud. But I digress — this isn’t a Yelp review, after all.
Anyway, point being, the appetizer we ordered was (a) fantastically tasty and (b) something we thought we could reproduce at home, even without buying Anthony Bourdain’s cookbook. The menu describes the dish as “Croûtons de Coulommiers rôtis au miel et poivre (Brie topped with honey & cracked black pepper, roasted and served on croutons)”, which is a rather apt description. (Yes, I’m making the executive decision of classifying this as a sandwich, albeit an open-faced one.)
Post-toasting
Now, a week or two later, we tried our own hands at it, and decided to use a wedge of brie with pepper right in the crust. As it happened, we also had some mint leaves left over from the previous night’s mint-guacamole (tragically, not itself a sandwich). The end result was pretty goddamn good — as far as I’m concerned, we managed to improve one of Anthony Bourdain’s recipes. Take that! Seriously, though, it’s tasty. Try it out.
Easter Leftovers
April 13th, 2009Filed Under: beef with 0 Comments
The best part of any feast or holiday spread is raiding the fridge afterwards, and Ôstarâ’s spring festival is certainly no exception. So what we have here is a hunk of beef roast on a buttered slice of homemade challah — deliciousness through and through.
Deer Sausage and MORE
July 23rd, 2008Filed Under: meat with 1 Comment
A sandwich I prepared in my kitchen a while ago. The main ingredients are deer sausage and butter on some nice bread. But while some others may have stopped there, I went the extra mile and added some salmon paste, as well.
The result was interesting… I don’t think it’s the type of thing I’d eat every day, but if I ever have excess salmon paste and deer sausage again, might be tasty.
The deer sausage had been cluttering up the freezer, see, so I thawed it out for some tasty sandwiches. Good stuff, that deer sausage. And we apparently had some salmon paste in the fridge, so figured I’d try ’em both at once. No idea where that stuff came from. Does salmon paste just appear in other peoples’ fridges, too? Or is it just me?
Lox
November 27th, 2007Filed Under: meat with 2 Comments
I used to be a lox skeptic. Smoked fish in general is great, I thought, and broiled salmon is a foodstuff of unsurpassed beauty, but lox is just slimy and unpleasant, in addition to being a waste of perfectly good fish.
But that was before Mäuno gave me some lox that was homemade according to a cherished family recipe. I have been converted. In much the same way that I never really liked scotch until I tried a nice single-malt instead of a cheap blend, I was more than happy to do without lox until I had some really good stuff.
Salami
October 30th, 2007Filed Under: provolone, salami with 1 Comment
There’s a Polish [1] meat shop at a farmer’s market not far from where I grew up. They have a lot of great products, like “TV stick” and Weisswurst, but as far as I’m concerned their best offering is the imported Hungarian salami, which is delectable beyond compare. And which, it turns out, makes for a nice sandwich as well.
[1] Yes, they’re Polish. Yes, they also sell Bavarian and Hungarian sausages, and as meats from a bunch of other countries as well. And yes, and most important, it’s all delicious.