Too…hot…to…cook…
As I lay here gasping and panting on the cool, cool tile of the bathroom floor, my thoughts are far from the kitchen. I am not a hot weather person. Memorial Day marks the start of three months of solid complaining and sweating on my part, accompanied by total refusal to enter the kitchen except to refill my glass of wine.
What to eat when it’s too hot to turn on the oven and you don’t have an outdoor grill? Sandwiches.
I’m a pretty fussy sandwich eater. I’ve had too many conference room meals of slimy cold cuts layered on dry bread with warm mayo to find any appeal in hastily prepared and inevitably dry lunch food.
A meal of sandwiches doesn’t mean you need to settle for bland and mealy. When I read about the tortas in last Wednesday’s Chronicle, I nearly booked a flight to the West coast just to sample one.
Due to financial constraints, I decided that perhaps a trip to the grocery store would be a more reasonable option than a red-eye to Tortas los Picudos. This weekend I had to pack some picnic lunches, so I got the chance to try out some festive sandwiches of my own. I used Whole Food’s Ciabatta bread – it’s thick, but not so crusty that it becomes rock-hard overnight. I split each loaf, pulled out a fair amount of dough from the center, and layered the ingredients inside. I pressed the sandwiches overnight in the fridge to help flatten them and soak some juices into the bread. A six pack of beer makes the perfect sandwich press.
Jamon and Mozzarella Sandwiches
I used jamon smuggled by a dear friend all the way from Spain, hidden inside his laptop. If you don’t have a Spanish friend willing to smuggle you cured meats, just use prosciutto. First, prepare a salsa by roasting red peppers and peeling off the blackened skin, and finely slicing and caramelizing some yellow onion. Put both in the food processor and pulse until chunky and bite size. Layer the jamon (sliced into bite size pieces), slices of fresh mozzarella, and your salsa on each sandwich bottom, just like this…
and then top each with bread and press in the fridge.
Chicken Pesto Sandwiches
First, just grill or sauté a few chicken breasts, and put them aside to cool. Once they’ve cooled, slice them very thin, layer them on the bread, and spread them with pesto sauce (I bought some at Whole Foods), thin sliced Fontina cheese, and alfalfa sprouts.
These recipes were simple, but produced sandwiches that could be made and pressed the night before and stored without refrigeration the next day. They’re not as decadent as tortas, but hopefully they’ll help provide a little inspiration for those hot nights when you can’t bear to turn on the oven.
