For Eating with Ellie this week, our theme is Lunch! Soup or Salad or Sandwich. I made Ellie's Roast Beef Sandwich with Watercress and Horseradish Sauce from So Easy (also online here).
They don't sell bread as pumpernickel here, so I opted for dark rye bread. (Fun fact - pumpernickel means farting devil.) I also didn't find watercress, but I did find micro watercress, so I went with that. I figured the flavour profile would be the same.
This was quite a tasty sandwich. There was just the right balance of zing vs sweet, and the flavours melded well.
To see what the others made this week, visit the LYL section of the EwE website.
This week's French Friday with Dorie features another "stuff on toast" (to borrow from Trevor) recipe. The stuff is breasola or prosciutto (in my case, the latter), walnuts and oil on buttered grain bread.
I added some mustard to spice things up a little.
This tartine was totally serviceable but just not very exciting. Without the walnuts, it would have been downright boring.
To see what the other Doristas thought of this recipe, visit the LYL section of the website.
For this week's French Friday with Dorie, I think it is more descriptive to borrow Trevor's description and tell you that it is "stuff on toast". There - much easier to conceptualise than "two tartines from Le Croix Rouge", although I don't think Dorie's publishers would have allowed her to call it that.
At the top of this post, we have tartine number one, being the Norwegian one - whole wheat bread sliced thickly, toasted on one side, buttered (I used cream cheese) then topped with smoked salmon slices, capers, lemon, salt and pepper.
I loved this - something to definitely make again.
Tartine number two is the St Germain version - whole wheat bread sliced thickly, toasted on one side, slathered with mayo, sprinkled with chopped gherkins and topped with thin slices of roast beef, and seasoned with salt and pepper:
Again, this was a winner. I have negative thoughts about gherkins until I eat them, then I have no idea why I ever thought badly of them. They are sweet and luscious, and add a nice textural element to this tartine.
There you have it - stuff on toast two ways. To see what the other Doristas thought, visit the LYL section of the FFWD website.
I have already told you about my gorgeous lunch in San Francisco with Patty, but thought it would also be fun to share some of the other lunches I had on my US trip, some healthy, some not so much. My conclusion is that the US does relatively healthy lunches to go like sandwich kits and salads really well, much better than here, and I would especially love to see the salads to go of the type available in the US sold in Australia.
At the top of this post is a terrible photo of a great sandwich. It is the curry chicken salad sandwich from The Sandwich Shop at 531 W. 6th Street, Downtown LA. This sandwich is terrific - chicken, raisins, cashew, granny smith apple, coriander, curry dressing, and baby greens on warm naan bread. The sandwich also comes with a small tub of gherkins, which puzzled me, but I ate them anyway. The Sandwich Shop is a small unassuming hole-in-the-wall, with nothing fancy in the decor and only a limited number of tables and chairs, but it provided the perfect lunch for me on my first day in LA, and a temporary respite from the searing heat.
Next, we move into Kingman, Arizona for a lunch stop at Smiths supermarket. Here, they sold 900g of blueberries for $6:
What a bargain! In Oz, blueberries are around $6 for a 200g punnet. I also saw the cutest Idaho Potato advertisement:
My choice and my room mate's choice for lunch at Smiths were these lunch packs:
They contained a sandwich, condiments (mayo and mustard), a packet of chips, an apple "poppa" drink, Oreos and a piece of fruit. The sandwich was a little dry:
However, I hadn't realised that sandwiches to go on the West Coast, at least as far as I could tell, were often sold sans butter or condiments, and you are supposed to spread the mayo on one half of the bread and the mustard on the other half. You might think me quite strange for even mentioning this, but sandwiches here do not usually come with mustard and mayo - it is usually one or the other, if any at all (butter being the most common spread), and condiments are already spread on the bread when you buy the sandwich.
Another stopover for lunch was at Tonopah Station in Nevada:
At the Stage Stop Restaurant, I had this burger with a beef patty, onion ring and bacon and a side of coleslaw:
This was a little lacklustre, and I could not eat the coleslaw drowned in mayo. At $12, this was also one of the more expensive lunches on my trip. However, there was one positive about Tonopah Station:
After spending some time in Nevada, it was back to California, and this time, lunch was at the Sonoma Cheese Factory in scenic Sonoma:
I am a little biased here because I loved Sonoma - it is the prettiest little town you ever could wish for. At the Sonoma Cheese Factory, I ordered what proved to be the most enormous turkey sandwich ever:
Again, the mustard and mayo came in separate packets, but by this time, I had gotten the hang of it and knew what to do. I took my sandwich out into the adjoining park for a picnic of sorts on the grass. I also had this gorgeous bottle of pink lemonade:
It was a perfect summer lunch on a perfect summer's day.
I also saw this very cool number plate on a car near the Cheese Factory:
Back in San Francisco, there was plenty of cool things to see and do. It is such a beautiful city:
I adore this street art that I found on a traffic light control box near our hotel:
My room mate chose In-N-Out Burger (333 Jefferson St) for lunch on our first day in San Francisco. It was pretty standard burger joint fare - I think I had the grilled cheese burger:
Kids would love it, but Mum and Dad, not so much.
Moving right along to San Luis Obispo, I saw this tree outside a craft shop wearing a sweater saying "hug me":
This tree will forever remind me of our tour director, Craig. He is a tree of a man, very tall with a broad trunk, and at the end of the tour, when he asked for a hug, I had to stand on tippy-toe to hug him - and I could not get my arms right around him. In San Luis Obispo (and in Las Vegas), my lunch spot of choice was Chipotle, a Mexican food chain. I adore Chipotle, and I am glad that we now have Mad Mex in Melbourne, which is very similar, minus the super-sized Cokes. This I believe is a chicken burrito:
with a tortilla, cilantro-lime rice, pinto beans, salsa and salad. Delish, and costs only around $6.
Next stop on this lunch tour is Solvang, where I saw this van for a rather unusually named plumbing company:
I had this Danish almond biscuit from Olsens as a snack rather than a lunch:
Unfortunately, although very pretty, it was rather dry, but only cost around $3.
Towards the end of our trip, we visited the Santa Barbara Mission, where there were many fabulous chalk drawings on the pavement:
before heading down to Santa Barbara Pier, where no high heels are allowed (what would my colleague Lee do?):
There are not many food options around Santa Barbara Pier, but I stumbled across a cafe that sold a fabulous salad to go:
I had previously bought similar salads at supermarkets along the way for dinner. These salads, with their Mexican elements like black beans, corn and ranch dressing, are super tasty - I so wish we could buy them here.
That concludes my journey through lunches, West Coast style. Hope you enjoyed it!
Hooray! I am so excited, because my blogging buddy, Kayte of Grandma's Kitchen Table, and I are going to be making Donna Hay recipes together this year, and posting the results on Wednesdays. Kayte is from Indiana in the US, so it will be double the fun to watch her post exactly the same thing as me all those miles away and approximately 16 hours or so apart! (As I write this on a Tuesday evening, it is currently an obscenely early hour on Tuesday morning in Kayte's part of the world - hopefully she is still asleep.)
Kayte first suggested last year that if I had the same Donna Hay book as she did, we could both make things together out of it. I didn't have the book, so time ticked by, but the end of Tuesdays with Dorie gave me the kick I needed to raise it again with Kayte. In time, we may go to one of Donna's fabulous books, but for now, we have decided (Kayte's suggestion) to cook recipes from Donna Hay's website. For the uninitiated, Donna Hay is a phenomenal Aussie foodwriter, food stylist and cook; you can read more about her here.
On to the recipes!
Week 1 is breakfast, and was actually last week, but I was away from my own kitchen, so I am catching up this week. Kayte chose Roasted Pistachio and Honey Yoghurt - you can see Kayte's post, which includes the recipe, here.
My version is pictured at the top of this post, served in a martini glass a la Mad Men (I would love to look like Joan Holloway in another life!). I used roasted pistachios and passionfruit yoghurt. I may have been a little heavy on the honey, as my nuts sank right into it. (See Kayte's version for nice layers.)
My Christmas present to me was a DSLR camera - you can see from the yoghurt shot that although my photos should get better, I have a way to go. (Gotta love the auto-focus though - makes life so much easier.)
This week's Wednesday with Donna Hay (it rhymes!) is lunch - and I chose Smoked Ham and Cheese Toasties:
You can't see it that well in the photo, but these decadent toasties have Dijon mustard, smoked ham and grated cheese on one side, and cheese sauce on the other side - oh so good! I had to flood the pan with the leftover cheese sauce, because I kept dipping my finger in to eat it as is! I used light Coon cheese instead of Swiss cheese, but otherwise made the recipe as suggested.
The only catch with these toasties is that you need to make my nemesis, the roux, to make the cheese sauce. I tried to use an ordinary saucepan first up to make the sauce instead of a heavy bottomed pan (because I didn't have a small one). This was a disaster - the roux burned. Luckily, I was making this recipe for one and didn't get past the first step, so there wasn't any harm done, and I ended up making the tiniest amount of cheese sauce in a whopping great pan.
Go visit Kayte in a few hours time to see what she thought of these toasties - and check out her fab nutty honey yoghurt.
Next week: Dinner - Sticky chicken parcels
