It’s sugaring season, and Tuesday marked the second boil over at Danny’s place. Sunny and mild, the day couldn’t have been better suited to the occasion. Per normal, he started the fire and filled the pan early in the morning and I rolled in later to stoke the furnace and monitor progress while he did some work in the studio. Also per normal, I brought food to cook.
Category: Sandwiches
For the last entry in this here contest, I received a bag of clams (already cooked and eaten here) and some ground lamb. Half the ground lamb became the kofta from a few posts ago, and the rest was the basis for this extremely gratifying dinner: 100% homemade gyros.
The burger is an archetypal American food, and it’s even more prominent in the warmer months. In my ongoing and intermittent series of from-scratch sandwich adventures, here’s a very good burger made entirely from scratch (though, as Milo pointed out, we did not in fact raise the cow).
The other night I remembered the venison our neighbor had given us just before Christmas. He’s a bow hunter, and did well this year, so we got two nice bundles of meat. I defrosted one of them, and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it: gyros.
So this month’s binding project got me thinking about the head terrine I made with Rich a couple of years ago, and how I wanted to try it again with my new knowledge and aim it at a specific goal: bánh mì entirely from scratch. It’s one of the great sandwiches of the world, and since it’s a bastard offspring of French colonialism with many established variants, it’s ideally suited to remixing and tinkering. Ironically, it was my new level of comfort with baking bread that actually spurred me to choose this project; head cheese by itself is not something I would make just to have around since it takes a fair amount of work to yield something that to me is less sensually delightful than a good pâté. But in combination with crusty bread, roast pork, mayo, and pickles, it attains greatness. And since I had all those things on hand–all lovingly homemade–I knew these were going to be winners.
I had a hankering for Korean-flavored beef skewers grilled out on the porch, but lateness as always altered my plans a bit. The result was less elegant than it could have been, but sure tasted good. Plus, it’s a safe bet that nobody has ever made Korean-flavored water buffalo meatball sandwiches with ramps, charred green onions, pak choi, and homemade feta-yogurt-ramp sauce before.