Tag: recipes

This isn’t something you need a recipe for, but I just made a
minor adjustment to the way I make them, so I thought I’d blog
about it and maybe it would inspire you to make an adjustment to
yours. (Or to comment about how you do it instead.)

Short of incinerating the bread, there isn’t much you can do
wrong, after you’ve bought or baked the right kind of bread and
cheese.

The bread should be sliced, or sliceable, into even,
sandwich-depth slices. The cheese has to be the hard kind that
can be sliced with a knife, and the kind that melts. Some
people think it’s more fun if it’s the kind that elongates into
a string when it’s melted and you pull on it. Otherwise, just
make sure that both the bread and the cheese are something you
like eating — if you don’t like them raw, they aren’t going to
get any better cooked.

These days, I’m using When Pigs
Fly New York Rye bread, and whatever sharp
cheddar cheese was on sale the last time I shopped for cheddar
cheese.

Take a slice of bread out of the freezer. You do keep your
bread in the freezer, don’t you? Unless you have a large family
that eats toast for breakfast and/or sandwiches for lunch every
day, your bread usage is probably small and erratic enough that
you should.

Turn the heat on medium under your favorite skillet or frying
pan. Butter one side of the bread and put that side on the
skillet.

Slice enough cheese to cover the bread, and put it on the
unbuttered side of the bread in the skillet. (If you’re adding
something like slices of apple or onion, put them on before the
bread, but I usually make grilled cheese when I can’t stand the
idea of cooking complicated enough to need slicing things.)

Here’s my new innovation: put the cover on the skillet. Before
I started doing this, I often had a fair amount of burned
surface on the bottom of the bread before the cheese
melted.

Leave it until the cheese is melted, maybe 5 minutes, but keep
checking. If you smell the bread burning, it’s gone too far.

You will notice that this is an open-faced sandwich. I decided
a few years ago that it was a lot easier to get the right ratio of
filling to bread that way, and I make all my sandwiches that way
these days. I would change this if I needed to pack them, but
nobody packs grilled cheese.

I originally got this recipe from the Cuisinart Bread Machine
cookbook. The bread machine died, but the cookbook is much
better than the one that came with the cheaper machine I
replaced it with.

I made it last night for the band, and everyone really liked
it. I’m including the original proportions, but last night I
only had 2 cups of Semolina flower (so I used an extra cup of
bread flour), and I used dried cranberries
instead of golden raisins.

Water, room temperature	1 2/3 cups
Sea salt	2 teaspoons
Fennel seed	2 teaspoons
Granulated sugar	1 teaspoon
Semolina flour	3 cups
Bread flour	1 cup
Yeast	2 teaspoons
Golden raisins	3/4 cup

Place water, salt, fennel seed, sugar, semolina flour, bread flour and yeast, in order
listed, in the bread pan.
When the mix-in tone sounds, add the
raisins.

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I’m expecting 8 or 9 people at my place for Thanksgiving
dinner. I do Thanksgiving every year for my family and whatever friends
don’t get to their families and want to come.

I have a schedule worked out where I go buy the turkey on Wednesday
afternoon so it only has to take up refrigerator space for less
than 24 hours, until it goes in the oven on Thursday.

I was freaking out a little when I realized yesterday that the
farm share vegetables are right now taking up the space that I
would normally put the turkey in.

I evolved a plan while walking the dog this morning where the people who are coming on Tuesday for the Cantabile Band
rehearsal would all take some of the vegetables home and
come back on Thursday afternoon with side dishes.

I may still do that, but when I looked at the vegetables I
realized that a lot of them are beets, which I’ve been getting
all summer and fall, but not using because they’ll still be good
for Borscht in the winter. They’re going to last until winter
because they’re in the refrigerator, but it won’t hurt them to
be out of the refrigerator for a day or two. But if you want to
come to Thanksgiving dinner and cook a beet side dish, you’re welcome.

The item in the farm share I picked up last Saturday that
seemed most seductive (even more so than the two giant stalks of
brussel sprouts) was the bunch of dark green pebbly textured
tuscan kale.

The recipe I read before making the salad was this one.

Then I chopped up the kale in thin ribbons, made a vinaigrette,
using my usual oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and mustard.
I increased the mustard from half a teaspoon to a full teaspoon,
and added some honey and a couple of cloves of garlic.

Then I added walnuts and grated parmesan cheese. I dressed the
salad before the band rehearsal — this was a good idea. Even
doing it earlier in the day wouldn’t have wilted the kale.

The eight people at the rehearsal demolished the salad from the
quite large bunch of kale very speedily. Everybody said it was
good, and there weren’t any plates that had remnants on them.