By Tanya Manus

We’ve been eating a lot of BLTs at our house lately. In a household like ours, where schedules change often and mealtime varies, having all the ingredients pre-assembled - including the bacon - makes it easy to have BLTs any time.

Right now, we’re enjoying fresh lettuce from a friend’s garden. We try to keep lettuce and sliced tomatoes ready to go on a plate in the refrigerator, along with a packet of bacon we pre-bake ourselves.

You could buy pre-cooked bacon, of course, but pre-baking bacon doesn’t take a lot of time and you can use the kind of bacon you prefer. In our house, we like to use the thick-sliced variety. Simply lay as many strips as will fit on your broiler pan. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes, turning bacon after 10 minutes. Remove from the pan and drain on several layers of paper towels.  As it cooks, the fat drains away, the strips of bacon seem to shrink less, and you can prepare more bacon in less time than if you fried it.

When you’re ready for a sandwich, reheat the bacon for about 30 seconds in the microwave. What a great grab-and-go summer meal!

By Jomay Steen

In an attempt to revisit the past and spark some fun memories, the women hosting a book club gathering last week surprised everyone with a “Back-to-School”-themed meal. With a world globe, cup of pencils, boxes of crayons and theme paper as the centerpiece, the women clustered individual sack lunches around the dining room table with the names of participants written on the sacks on the first day of school in the Rapid City School District.
“It’s like in the cafeteria lunchroom. If you don’t like what you’ve got, you can trade,” said Catherine Dimock, one of the geniuses behind the funky meal.
“We’re attempting to lower the bar,” said Margaret Skillman, co-conspirator and top-notch sandwich maker.
“It’s a way to break the ice,” said Pat Clanton Handel, who had created some truly mouth-watering appetizers that had initially hinted at a multi-coursed dinner.
Dimock, Skillman and Handel, all of Rapid City, had gotten together earlier to brainstorm sack lunch menus before agreeing on ham salad or peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, chips, carrots, Little Debbie cupcakes and a juice box. The eagle-eyed of the group were the first to notice the juice boxes were single-serve boxes of Cabernet—“found in Wyoming.” Everything inside the paper bags was swaddled in waxed paper or in its own cellophane wrapper.
These women are excellent cooks, who have lead legions of friends into new territories of culinary delight and foreign cuisine. Three months earlier, the entire club had been fed an English tea right out of the books of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
Yet, they wanted to widen the culinary circle. The sacked meals also signaled to those of us who are less well-schooled in the kitchen to try a simple approach when entertaining a crowd.
“What a great idea,” chorused the crowd.
I traded my Doritos for Ruffles potato chips, but kept the ham salad on white sandwich. The phrase I often heard throughout the house was “I can’t remember the last time I ate white bread.” To me, it tasted like a tender piece of cake!
Opening that sack was like sitting down to a 1964 noontime meal at my wooden desk in a one-room schoolhouse called Turtle Creek. Inside that bag were foods that would sustain me throughout the day made by the woman who truly understood me better than I did.
So like these women demonstrated, don’t get overwhelmed by the logistics of a dinner party for friends. Feel free to tone it down a couple of notches because the point of the gathering is your friends and having a good time.

Catherine Dimock’s Faux Ham Salad
1 pound bologna, chunked
1/4 cup sweet pickle relish or to taste
1/2 cup mayonnaise or to taste
1 loaf white sandwich bread
In a bowl, mix bologna and sweet pickle relish. Fold in mayonnaise to moisten. Spread on slices of bread to make sandwiches. Store in refrigerator in sealed container for two days. Dimock had found ham to be too salty. She prefers using bologna while Skillman uses hotdogs when making this delicious spread.

Pat Clanton Handel’s Chutney Cheese Ball
8 ounces cream cheese softened
2 tablespoons sour cream
2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 cup chopped green onions
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup coarsely chopped dry roasted peanuts
1 cup chutney
1 cup coconut
Crackers
In a medium bowl, combine cream cheese and sour cream. Blend in curry powder. Add onions, raisins and peanuts and mix thoroughly. Form into a ball. Can be made four days ahead, but flavors will intensify. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Roll in coconut. Pour chutney over top and serve with crackers.

Lila’s Incredible Tuna Salad Sandwich
2 (6 ounce) cans tuna
1-2 hard-boiled eggs
1 rib celery, minced (about 1/4 cup)
2 tablespoons sweet or red onion, minced
2 tablespoons dill pickles or sweet gherkins, minced
3/4 cup Miracle Whip
8 slices whole wheat bread
Open cans, drain well. Break up clumps of tuna using a fork until it has a fine and even texture. Put tuna in medium bowl and mix in celery, onion and pickles. Fold in Miracle Whip until mixture is evenly moistened. Salad can be kept in covered container in the refrigerator for up to three days. Spread salad on bread, cover with remaining slices for sandwiches. Recipe yields 2 cups. Serves 4

Garlic, how can it taste so good but make your breath smell so bad?

I brought in some dip to work today. Tastefully Simple Garlic, Garlic dip. It tastes awesome. But I only had one bite — two hours ago – and my breath smells bad now. Really bad. So bad that I can smell it!

All the experts say that smell and taste are definitly linked. But in that case, how can something that tastes so good make your breath smell so bad? Onions are the same story. And vinegar. In fact, my friend Jackie made me dinner a few weeks back and she concocted a sherry vinegar and onion sauce for the meal.

As soon as I stepped into her apartment I was afraid. In fact I was regretting the fact that I had said yes to her cooking me dinner. The entire apartment smelled kind of pickled — because of the sherry vinegar in the sauce.

At first I thought the apartment smelled funny because, well she has a male roommate and young men are just notorious for being bad house-keepers and a little smelly to boot. But when I realized that the smell permeating the place was actually the food that Jackie expected me to eat I was afraid.

I briefly tried to think of a bunch of excuses that might allow me to go home. I had nothing. I was going to have to eat it. So we sat at the table, prepared our plates and as I lifted the fork to my mouth to take the first bite I was getting ready to fake a polite response.

But it was actually great! I enjoyed the meal and even got over the smell. That is until I left the apartment. The smell had permeated my clothes. Kind of like when you eat at Subway and when you leave you smell like bread for a couple of days. I hate that. And how is it that the scent of baking bread smells disgusting when it’s in your hair or t-shirt?

Anyway, after my garlic, garlic breath I just had to go on about how smell and taste baffle me.

While I was working on my panini part 2 blog I decided I would do a little more research into one of the sandwiches my sister suggested: the muffuletta.

Muffa-what-a? Well, personally I’d never heard of it before my sister mentioned it. But apparently Martha Stewart loves them and Emeril Lugassi has made several on his show. Okay, so what is a muffuletta?

Primarily, and originally, it was just a type of bread – kind of like panini. But it has evolved into a special type of sandwich. According to my research, this sandwich is very popular in Louisiana and other southern locales and it features several types of meat, several types of cheese and the main attraction to the sandwich – olive salad.

Traditionally served on a loaf of muffuletta bread it is also commonly served on a foccaia or another type of sturdy bread loaf. The loaf generally contains marinated olive salad, capicola, salami, mortadella, emmentaler and provolone.

Confused? I was too after my sister told me the ingredients. I’ve heard of salami and provolone, but what’s even in marinated olive salad (besides olives)? And where can I get some? Plus, even though I thought I might know what capicola was I had never seen it before and I certainly had no clue where to buy it. Furthermore, mortadella and emmentaler sounded really unusual.

But I sucked it up, did a little research and ran over to the west side Safeway – if figured that at the very least I could get some quality olive salad, or a facsimile thereof, at their olive bar. (Mmmmm, olives.)

My initial plan was to just see if Safeway carried all of the ingredients needed to make a quality muffuletta, but I got a little carried away. I don’t know if it was the olive bar, the exotic meats or just the fact that the staff was so helpful that night, but I bought enough stuff to make two huge muffuletta. (It ended up being 12 servings in all and I was just planning on feeding my parents for the night. Oh, and it cost like $30 for all of it.)

So, the olive salad was easy to find. In fact, Safeway carries some lovely olive salad that comes in a jar – Boscoli Family brand Italian Olive Salad (New Orleans Recipe). That sounded authentic to me, so I got a jar. I also tried some ‘artichoke medley salad’ while I was scouting out the rest of the ingredients and it was amazing – so I bought a pound of it.

Now the salami and provolone were easy – as I had suspected. Safeway had some cooked hot cappicola and it turns out that emmenthaler is just Swiss cheese – so that wasn’t too hard either. The mortadella was the tricky part. It truns out mortadella is kind of like bologna. Only it has chunks of pistachios and pig fat in it. Gross right? I mean bologna seems gross enough to start with, but chunks of pig fat.

Well Safeway didn’t have the mortadella, so I substituted it with some high-quality beef bologna.

Safeway didn’t have muffuletta bread either, but they did have an amazing selection of fresh-baked focaccia. I picked an Italian-seasoned focaccia because I thought it would compliment the other ingredients in the sandwich.

Whew, that was a lot of shopping for one sandwich!

So, I got all the ingredients over to my parents’ house and started assembling the muffalata for their dinner. I made 2 different versions of the sandwich – one with the olive salad and one with the artichoke salad (diced up). Mom and I decided to make our muffuletta panini-style. So we heated up her stovetop grill and her flat cast iron griddle pan and I started assembling the muffuletta.

The only mistake we made was starting with cold ingredients. It was really difficult to get the cheese melted through our panini process. In fact – and don’t tell my mom this because she hates microwaves – I had to nuke mine to get it warm all the way through.

Mom and dad both liked the muffuletta and I had so many leftovers that I brought some to work the next day. It was definitely a hit. My boss dubbed it, “quite tasty” and I think it was better the second day after all the flavors melded together. I will definitely go on a muffuletta adveture again.

Muffaletta
One loaf of foccacia (or equally sturdy bread)
½ lb. Olive salad (or atichoke medley salad)
¼ lb. Salami
¼ lb. Cappicola
¼ lb. Bologna (or mortadella if you can find it and feel like taking a chance on pig fat)
1/2 lb. Provolone
1/2 lb. Swiss

We layered ours: bread, salad, cheese, meat, cheese, meat, cheese, meat, cheese, salad, bread. I know, it’s a lot of layering, but the cheese binds everything together nicely this way and – well I love cheese.
Then eat – or grill – or nuke – or marinate for a day. It’s just good stuff.

I’ve made it pretty clear in my prior blogs that I don’t have all of the kitchen equipment a person might need. But, I make due. And sometimes I have to use items for something other than what they were designed to do. (Ice cube trays for candy molds, coffee grinder for cuisinart, blender for … well, everything else.)

But I was recently reminded of the famous grilled-cheese and French fry scene from the movie “Benny and Joon.” In the scene Johnny Depp’s character, Benny, used a tennis racket to julienne his French fries and an iron to make his grilled cheese sandwiches.

Now that’s what I call a pannini in a pinch.

And I can’t help but wonder if it would work. When I was a freshman in college the hall that all the soccer boys lived in had an iron in the kitchen. Those guys always joked that they used the iron to make grilled cheese sandwiches, but I just think they all ironed their clothes in the kitchen.

Well, I’m guessing that if you really wanna do a panini up right a bona fide panini press is the way to go. But I’ve see Rachel Ray and others use two cast iron pans a to press up a panini. Rachel heated both of the pans and then she put the sandwich on one pans and used the bottom of the other pan on top of the sandwich.

My mom actually assisted me with this panini technique on Monday night when me made a huge muffalatta panini (which I plan on telling you all about next week). If you go with this two-pan technique and you want to get nice grill marks on both sides of the sandwich you will have to flip it. So, it’s nice to have tongs or a nice big spatula.

So this blog has two purposes today. First of all have some more classic sandwiches that might make nice paninis for you folks. These ideas are a bit more complicated, but if I can do it you can do it. Second, I was wondering. What kinds of items do you use in a pinch in your kitchen when you don’t have the right specialized item?

Patty Melts
Hamburger
Garlic
Worcestershire sauce
Vidalia Onions
Whole wheat bread
Cheddar Cheese
Swiss Cheese
Butter

The first step here is to make up your meat patty the way you like it and get it and the onions cooking. I like to put chopped garlic in with the meat for my patty along with a little Worcestershire sauce.

Okay, I can never time this sort of thing. The onions should be cooked before the sandwich, if they are put them aside. If not, well, put the burger aside and wait for the onions to finish.

Once you have the onions cooked and burger almost cooked to the temperature you want ( the burger should be a little under done because it will keep cooking in the panini press) butter the outside of your whole wheat bread (I use whole wheat because it’s sturdier and because it make me feel better about eating all the butter and cheese).

Then assemble the pieces of the sandwich and grill.

Monte Cristos with Raspberry Chocolate Sauce
Sturdy bread (sometimes I like to use raisin bread)
Turkey
Ham
Swiss Cheese
Cheddar Cheese
2 Eggs
½ tsp. Nutmeg
½ tsp. Cinnamon
1 Tbsp. Sugar
1 C. Raspberry jelly
1 oz. Hershey’s dark baking chocolate (I use the 1-oz. Pouches)

Okay, first of all, this is one of my favorites. The raspberry chocolate sauce rocks and it works great as a ganache between cake layers too.

Raspberry Chocolate Sauce: Start with 1 cup of raspberry jelly in a microwave safe bowl. Heat the jelly for 30 seconds, then stir – continue heating and stirring until jelly is liquid. Careful the jelly and the bowl it is in will be super hot. Combine one pouch of Hershey’s dark baking chocolate and stir until well combined. Set aside.

Egg wash: Wisk two raw eggs together with sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg. I always use 2 eggs even if I don’t need that many. Set aside

Sandwich: Next, just assemble the sandwich – bread, Swiss cheese, turkey, cheddar cheese, ham – and dip it in the egg wash. Then grill until the egg wash is cooked and cheese is melted. Serve warm with raspberry chocolate sauce.

Chuckwagon
Kaiser Roll
Ham
Salami
Bologna
Cheddar Cheese
White American Cheese 

Because this sandwich is on a roll you don’t need to butter the bread. It should grill up nicely without butter, but if you want butter go for it. I like to alternate cheese and meat inside this sandwich, but you can assemle it any way you like. That’s part of the fun of the sandwich.

What’s buttered on the outside, has melted cheese on the inside and is grilled all over?

Well, that’s a dumb question — grilled cheese, duh.

Wrong-ola.

I was referring to one of the newest food fads, the panini.

If you’re a cook, a chef, a restaurateur, or you just like to watch the Food Network, you’ve probably been hearing about panini’s like crazy in the last few months. Personally, I first heard of a panini this past November while I was Christmas shopping with my mom. My sister had asked for a panini press for Christmas and as a result mom and I were left confused and bewildered in search of this specialty item. (By the way we found a great one at Kohl’s.)

Well, ever since I learned what a panini was I feel like I’ve been hearing the word every time I turn around. In fact, I just Googled “panini” and got 9,240,000 results. Now that’s a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches.

Yes, I said it, and I’ll say it again: paninis are just grilled cheese sandwiches. Now, to be fair, it is clear that these are the fancy version of this old-fashioned favorite. But let’s be honest and call a rose a rose — or at least call a sandwich a sandwich.

Well, whatever you call them, this food fad has some great appeal for several reasons. One, we love to grill everything here in America. Two, the charm and versatility of the sandwich is impossible to deny. Three, melted cheese is the ultimate in comfort food.

According to Wikipedia the panini (or panino if you’re going to use the real Italian word for this snotty version of the grilled-cheese sandwich) is a sandwich made from a small loaf of bread, typically a ciabatta. The loaf is often cut horizontally and filled with salami, ham, meat, cheese or other food and sometimes served hot. A grilled panini is buttered on the outside and grilled in a press.

Now, if you’ve been watching the Food Network you know that to qualify as a panini on TV it has to be hot, grilled and include cheese. Plus, no one seems to care if you use ciabatta, rye, frech bread or even sour dough. That means there are a lot of classic sandwiches — some are even my personal favorites — that can be reinterpreted into panini-style yumminess.

So, now that I’ve insulted this food fad it’s time to give you some of the panini ideas I got from my sister — who is both a Food Network junkie and panini-press owner. Remember, one of the great things about making any kind of sandwich is the fact that you don’t have to be very precise about the amounts of ingredients you use.

Panini Reuben
Rye Bread
Corned beef
Sauerkraut
Swiss cheese
Reuben sauce or Thousand Island dressing
Butter

Assembly couldn’t be easier. Put the amounts of each ingredient that you want into the sandwich, butter the outside of the sandwich and grill. If you don’t use a panini press or similar device you’ll have to flip it on the grill — just like you do when you make a grilled cheese.

Cheesy BLT Paninis
Sour dough bread
Cooked bacon
Sliced tomatoes
Swiss Cheese
Spinach
Butter

Again, put the ingredients on in the proportion you want and grill until the cheese melts. You don’t have to butter the outside of the bread, but butter is just good stuff.

Pizza-nini
Crusty garlic bread
Spaghetti sauce
Mozzarella Cheese
Other pizza toppings (like pepperoni)
Butter

Spread the sauce on the bread. Put cheese on the sauce. Stick any other toppings in there you want, butter the bread and grill it!

Bruscetta Panini
French bread
Mozzarella
Sliced tomatoes
Basil
Butter

By now you get it right? Assemble to your liking and grill.

I’ve got more panini goodness for you all next week!