Resistance is useless

I'm very attached to my treats. I'm a chocaholic, a caffeine fiend (in a small way), and I like a glass of wine now and again. I'd be very reluctant to give up any one of these.

If you ask me do I prefer chocolate or bacon, obviously I prefer chocolate. Especially if that's Lindor 60% cacao you're half-hiding behind your back.

But if I absolutely had to give up one or other other, forever… that changes things. I'll keep the bacon thanks. Especially if it's Waitrose smoked streaky back bacon. Which goes very well with rosemary infused portobello mushrooms and a cafe latte. I'm just sayin'.

The mojo of the sandwich - part 2

So many sandwiches, so little time... further random musings on what makes a great sandwich.

Part of proportion is getting the layering right. The order of the ingredients matters. So does the format of the ingredients: is the ham shredded or in slices - and are they thick slices or thin? Is the avocado sliced or puréed? Sliced avocado will need an extra 'glue' ingredient to hold it in the sandwich, whereas avocado mash will act as a glue (the Goldilocks principle applies here - neither too much and too little will work). I encourage you to experiment in the privacy of your home: tomato and avocado and spinach is a delicious sandwich, but a very different beast made in different layers. For example if the tomato goes straight on the bread, even buffered by butter, it makes the bread wet and sloppy.

Did you realise that a great sandwich, more than just cuisine, is a significant feat of engineering?

A salad sandwich may just be the great test of the sandwichier's art - getting a salad bowl to stay between two slices of bread (or slabs of ciabatta, as the case may be) is not for the faint-hearted. For this reason, I'm inclined to call the genuine salad sandwich more of a private than a public sandwich. By the time you have tomato, greens (iceberg, mignonette, cos or radichio lettuce, rocket [aka arugula] or spinach leaves, bean sprouts or watercress to name but a few), cucumber (or celery, or zuchini, or radish - they occupy roughly the same niche), avocado, spanish onion [or its more pungent brethren] and grated carrot, you have a lot going on, and all of it slippery, even if you're obsessive-compulsive enough to actually dry the greens after washing them.

A word about mayonnaise: basic 'salad cream' is a mostly regrettable necessity, which seldom adds to the flavour. A good 'real' mayonnaise (hint: it contains actual egg product) is far superior. Taste your mayonnaise or 'salad cream' and if you don't like the taste straight, don't add it to your sandwich. Similar rules apply to mustard and other condiments. Just because a chutney is 'home made' doesn't mean it is nice.

Butter or margarine? Please, always offer both.  Spreadable butter by all means - I don't like my sandwich with holes ripped it in from ice-cold, rock-hard butter either, but given no choice but margarine I'll usually choose bare bread. I'd rather have the delicious cholesterol* than the chemicals, any day. If you include cheese and/or avocado, you may not need spread at all. It is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Toasted or fresh? Here in Australia, I feel we need to Stop the Toasting Madness.  Once, toasted was an extra to be requested. Now I have to remember to beg the sandwichier not to toast. Call me opinionated, but salad - featuring iceberg lettuce! - in a flatbread wrap was never meant to be toasted. (Or not unless you're prepared to disassemble the wrap, remove the greens, lightly toast the open flatbread under a grill, then put the fresh greens back and re-wrap it. No, I didn't think so.) Some cafes even force toasting on me by chilling the pre-made sandwiches so they're nasty eaten 'fresh'.

A focaccia too far? I love bread in most of its manifestations, but novelty in breads leads to regrettable results.  As with mayonnaise, the bread needs to be good to eat. I've attempted to eat many so-called focaccias, ciabattas and turkish breads that in texture and taste could be the bastard offspring of concrete and cardboard. They looked wonderful, lying there all golden and seductive... to tempt you from the path of sandwich righteousness. Always try a new form of bread 'solo' before you commit to a sandwich together.

A sandwich should satisfy various senses: taste is about smell and 'mouth feel' (aka texture), and a public sandwich should look good and (when it gets close enough) smell good too. So there is it is: even the humble sandwich can be elevated by the care, attention and sheer relentless search for perfection we apply to it.

* In the public sandwich, one should always have bread with butter: butter with a side of bread is for private sandwiches, where it goes very well with a glass of good champagne (or is that just me?)

This is post 9 of 43 posts.

Food for thought

We've been cooking up a storm today, or at least some scones and hearty winter stews. There is enormous satisfaction to be had from several tupperware containers full of delicious and healthy food. Especially warm food that can quickly reheated and still taste 'just cooked' on cold Melbourne winter weeknights!

The delight Mr O and I took in the sight of our bounty had me thinking about our forbears. If we are thrilled by knowing there is food in our cupboards and freezers (even though the shops are just a few hundred metres up the road), how much more intense must have been the feelings of the local goodman and goodwife when the crops were in the barn, the pig slaughtered and salted, and the fruits preserved against the winter to come? Not only would the sight of all that food delight the eye (and eventually the stomach) but they would have the satisfaction of knowing the family would make it through the winter.

That is an intensity of feeling I am unlikely to experience, but then I'm not likely to experience famine either, so that seems fair - you can't have one without the other. I recall that in some famines, you couldn't buy bread with a gold bar because there was no bread (or grain) to buy within reach. Lacking modern transportation, a famine which affected an area of a couple of hundred miles was affecting the whole of your reachable world.

It must have been meaningless to many of our forbears to even dream of 'life satisfaction' or 'self-actualization' (in whatever terms they would have used) with the possibility of death from starvation a real and present danger. Food for thought, that.

This is post 97 of 100 posts in 100 days.

Young kids are better at mimicry than following orders

Very young children are better at doing what we do, than they are at doing what we merely say.

Today I was at a shopping centre, and we stopped to have some dim sum for lunch. It was crowded, and a family of 3 (Mum, Dad & toddler) sat opposite. Mum wasn't eating, Dad had finished, and the toddler had a large half a sandwich before her, which she'd begun to ignore in favour of looking around. Mum and Dad were a bit bored, but patient, and didn't try to coax her into finishing (gold star for that).

I smiled at the toddler a couple of times, when our eyes met, and she smiled back. When Mr O returned from the queue with our food, she watched covertly as we began eating. Mr O is partial to a prawn dumpling, so he ate with evident enjoyment. I had chicken pie so I was happy too.

After perhaps 30 seconds, the toddler began to tackle her sandwich. Mum and Dad were delighted, but had no idea what had started her eating again.

It made me think how odd it must be to the child, when a parent sits them down and tries to feed them at what is self-evidently not an eating time.

I guess in the 'olden days' when it was the custom that children ate early and usually separate food as well, there was a Nanny present whom the children were used to obey. It was a different dynamic, and not one our society is keen to resume.

So, all things being equal*, if you want a small child to eat, the best thing to do is eat yourself.

*the child must be hungry, the food must be something they like or are prepared to try, and don't bother trying this in the middle of a tussle of wills!

This is post 38 of 100 posts in 100 days.