Three Tasty Sandwiches

Since I shared my olive bread recipe with you yesterday, I want to share three olive bread sandwiches today:  Egg salad, melty asiago, artichoke and tomato, and Greek seasoned braised lamb.

I apologize for the messy sandwiches in the photo but these days my hands are so shaky it's good luck that I managed to assemble them at all! I do hope you'll take my word for it when I tell you they're much more tasty than they look.

You'll notice when you read the ingredients lists for these sandwiches that I don't mention butter.  The bread is moist enough that I felt I could do without it.  If you're assembling any of these to take as a packed lunch, though, I'd recommend you butter the bread to help prevent the juice from the tomatoes soaking into it and making your sandwich soggy.

EGG SALAD

For each sandwich, you'll need:

• 2 slices of olive bread
• 1 boiled egg
• 1-1/2 Tablespoons of finely diced celery
• 1-1/2 Tablespoons of finely diced dill pickle
• 1 teaspoon of mayonnaise (here's how I make mine), or more if you prefer
• salt and pepper to taste
• Thinly sliced red onion
• Thinly sliced tomato
• Lettuce

Peel the boiled egg, put it in a bowl, and use a fork to break it into small pieces.

Add the celery, dill pickle and mayonnaise and mix them combined but not so much that the pieces of egg are broken down. Add salt and pepper if you want it.

Cut two slices of olive bread.  If you want to - and I often do - you can toast them.

Spread the egg salad on one slice of bread.  Top it with the sliced red onion, tomato, and lettuce.

Put the other piece of bread on top and cut the sandwich. 

MELTY ASIAGO, ARTICHOKE, AND TOMATO

This sandwich is an interesting way to use up left over dip (if there is such a thing. 😉)

For each sandwich you'll need:

• 4 x 1/3 to 1/2-inch-thick slices of tomato
• freshly ground pepper
• 2 slices of olive bread
• Asiago and artichoke dip (Mine was purchased at Superstore but there are lots of recipes for it on Pinterest if you prefer to make your own.)
• thinly sliced tomato

Place the tomato slices on an oiled baking pan and sprinkle them with pepper. Put them under the broiler until they're cooked through and have begun to take on a little colour around the edges.

Toast your bread.

Spread a generous amount of asiago and artichoke dip on each slice. 

Place the cooked tomato slices on top of the artichoke dip on one slice. 

Put the other slice on top, with the artichoke dip on the inside of the sandwich.

Put the sandwich in a 350F oven until the dip is heated through and bubbly.

Cut the sandwich and serve it while it's still hot.

GREEK SEASONED BRAISED LAMB

I need to preface this one with some comments about the lamb: 

I like lamb a lot but it's an expensive ingredient. Unless there's a pretty amazing sale price, the only cut I can afford is lamb shoulder. It's a part of the lamb that sees a lot of exercise so the meat is tougher but it's also very tasty. 

Because they tend to be purchased less often than leg of lamb or rib chops, it can be difficult to find lamb shoulder chops. Check the Halal section of the freezer aisle. That's where I usually find mine.

I buy my lamb shoulder chops in packages of four, for about $20/package, so the cost of one of these sandwiches, counting all the other ingredients runs to about $6.00.  That's not inexpensive but, when you consider the price of a fast food sandwich or burger, it's not too bad.  

For each sandwich you'll need: 

• 1 lamb shoulder chop
• Greek seasoning mix (I use this recipe, shared on AllRecipes by Margaret Havenar)
• 2 slices of olive bread
• A good mustard of your choice.  I usually use Dijon or, when I have guests who prefer it, Coleman's hot.
• Thinly sliced red onion
• Thinly sliced tomato
• Lettuce 

Begin by placing your lamb chop in a heat proof dish. Pour water around the chop, to about half its height and sprinkle a generous amount of Greek seasoning mix over the chop. Cover the dish and bake the chop at 300F until the meat is very tender and pulling away from the bone. Typically, this takes about an hour and a half in my oven. 

Remove the chop from the cooking dish and let it cool to room temperature.  If you're not going to use it right away, store it in a covered dish in the fridge.

Don't throw the cooking liquid away!  It'll make a flavourful foundation for a soup, stew, or sauce.

When you're ready to make your sandwich, trim the meat away from the bone in your shoulder chop and trim away most of the fat. Cut the meat into very thin slices. 

If you want a hot sandwich, put the sliced meat in a bowl with a little of the cooking liquid  and reheat it in your microwave. Drain the liquid before assembling your sandwich.

If you want a toasted sandwich, toast your bread now.

Spread a thin layer of mustard on each slice of bread.

On one slice, stack the sliced lamb and season it with salt and pepper to taste. 

Top the meat with the onion, tomato, and lettuce, then put the top slice of bread in place.

Over-Salted Food? Here's What To Do About It

 

The other day, my friend Donna told me she was mad at herself.  She'd made a huge batch of tomato soup and, because she was really tired, she'd accidentally over-salted it.  We've all done this at one time or another, right?  It's so easy to do: A moment's inattention or a misread recipe and there you are.

The last time I over-salted a batch of soup I went on Pinterest in search of solutions. I found lots of ideas there, some of them quite outlandish. The one that made the most sense to me was adding potatoes, the idea being that the potatoes would absorb some of the extra salt as they cooked. I tried it. Maybe I didn't put in enough potatoes, but the potatoes alone didn't fix the problem. 

If I'm honest, I already knew what needed to be done with the soup, I just didn't want to do it. I could add more ingredients until I arrived at a balance I liked, or I could use that salty soup to season other dishes. I didn't want to be eating soup for days and days so I opted for the second choice.  

I strained out the veggies and refrigerated them then ladled the liquid into small jars and froze it.  

I used the veggies in a cottage pie and, infused into the pie's gravy, their extra salt seasoned the entire dish. It turned out really well.  

Over the following weeks, I used the frozen liquid from the soup to cook rice and to poach chicken.  I used the poaching liquid from the chicken, diluted with some unsalted veggie stock, to make a new soup.

Because I usually don't realize my mistake until after I take them out of the oven, finding a way to use over-salted baked goods can be challenging.

If I've added too much salt to bread or biscuits, I usually reduce them to crumbs in my food processor. I use the crumbs as breading or as a topping for casseroles or gratins.  

If I over-salt a batch of pastry and realize my mistake before I've put it in the oven I'll roll it out into a sheet, dock it, score it into squares, brush it with an egg wash, and bake it without a filling. Because I don't add sugar to my pastry dough, I can either use baked pastry sheet for crackers or, if proves too salty for that, I can process it into crumbs as mentioned above. Unfortunately, if I've made a pie with that pastry before realizing my mistake, the best I can do is save the filling. The crust is, sadly, destined for the compost bin.

If a sweet baked good is too salty I often look to either caramel or chocolate to help restore balance.  I'll portion out some cooked fruit and/or ice cream, top it with a caramel or chocolate sauce, and then crumble my oversalted muffins, cake, or cookies over the dish. 

Dealing with an excess of salt in pie filling or pudding is more problematic. Really, the only thing you can do with the pudding is set it aside, make another - unsalted - batch and mix the two together. 

Salty pie filling is much the same. Scoop it out of the pie crust into a bowl, cook a second batch of pie filling on the stove top with no salt at all, and then mix the two together.  You can use the adjusted filling to make new pies but if you do that, having been cooked twice, the filling will have less texture. I prefer to use the amended pie filling between layers in a cake, or as the fruit layer in a trifle, or to mix it into my breakfast oatmeal over the course of several days. You can also fold it into a muffin batter if you first cut the fruit into smaller pieces.

I hope some of these ideas are helpful to you. I'm always pleased to learn new ways of reducing food waste so if you have a remedy for over-salted food not mentioned here, please feel free to share it in the comments. I'll look forward to reading your suggestions.