So every Wednesday, one of us will cook for the house and we have dinner together for (on average) two hours. It's always a highlight of my week and it's so much fun to see what the others come up with to cook. It's also slightly stressful because the others really are excellent cooks and so I always want to try to put something good for the others.
Anyway, this week I decided on sandwiches because:
- I really miss making quality sandwiches at home
- Tomorrow's Thanksgiving so I might as well cook something lighter
- I wanted to cook something that wouldn't take too long to prepare.
The two main sandwiches I wanted to do was:
1.) A variation off the Spanglish sandwich (pictured above) which ended up being a BLT with extra sharp cheese and an egg sunny side up.
2.) A chicken breast, carmelized onions, BLT (for variety and protein, but mainly because I wanted to do carmelized onions).
As with each time that I cook, it definitely takes longer than I plan too. The main thing was just having enough time to marinate the chicken. We don't have a meat tenderizer in our house, so ever since I started cooking here at 22 Upland, I've been using the back of the metal ice cream scooper to pound the meat with, which has worked great.
So first, pounding slicing the chicken breast in half so that I can pan-fry these. Then pounding them to tenderize. Rubbed in salt, black pepper and garlic powder in all; then when I saw dijon mustard in the fridge, decided I also wanted to do a dijon honey chicken as well. Since we don't have cheap honey (the two honey jars are super fancy), I heated up some water in the microwave, added a spoonful of sugar, mixed it together and then add the dijon mustard. End result: it worked. Marinated half the chicken breasts in the dijon, the other half rolled in flour. Then pan fried both.
But first...since bacon has a lot of fat, I cooked the bacon first so that I'd have enough oil to carmelize the onions with. Thankfully Daphne helped out with stirring the onions so that I wouldn't have to keep doing that for the next 25 minutes or so. The fried the egg -- kept it somewhat yolky to keep it with the spirit of the Spanglish sandwich.
Toasting bread with cheese on it always takes longer than toasting it by itself...but it's so good.
End results:
Toasted whole wheat bread with extra sharp cheddar cheese, bacon, tomatoes, baby romaine.
Toasted italian ciabatta, extra sharp cheddar cheese, breaded chicken breast/dijon sugar chick breast, carmelized onion, bacon, tomatoes, baby romaine.
Addendum: I'm a terrible housemate in that I always forget to be conscious of other people's eating needs. In this case, dairy, onion, and pork. Thankfully, there were enough ingredients that the sandwiches were ok without these as well.
Total cost for 6 people (MC & L joined us for pre-Thxgiving)? $20. =)
In the end though, it's not really so much about the food as it is about the conversations, sharing, laughter, and relationships. Eating usually takes only 20-25 minutes. It's the talking and laughing that takes 1.5 hours.
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