Best F***ing Sandwich You'll Ever Eat

I say this phrase almost every day:

"When it comes to sandwiches, I don't f***ing mess around, ok?"

Sometimes I say it loudly. You know, when I get excited or I feel like yelling. Sometimes I say it softer. Eyes down, in a kind of a menacing, barely perceptible whisper, until the "ok," when I lift my head and look straight into their soul...

People choose either to be offended or intrigued by this, but I don't let it faze me. I just continue to make f***ing amazing sandwiches, mostly to spite the people who believe that a sandwich is a creation solely for carnivores.

Allow me to explain:

Many feminists have decided to take back words like c**t or p****y or b****h (If you don't know what the *'s stand for, ask your older brother, or maybe it's time to leave your cave). I think in a society in which almost all institutions, societal and linguistic structures, and social norms have been crafted by white males, this is a legitimate undertaking in order to subvert some of these oppressive linguistic structures.

In the same way, I think the creators of the sandwich were most definitely carnivores, and as a vegetarian, goddamnit, sometimes I feel f***ing oppressed!

It's ok, I tell myself. Calm down. A sandwich is just a rubric...a structure within which you can place almost any f***ing thing you want. A sandwich is a man-made creation, not a historical imperative. Hah!

So why not take back the sandwich?

If you're someone who's demanding an alternative to meat that's almost surely come from animals who've been bathed in their own shit, been systematically tortured, and been shot up with antibiotics by transnational agribusiness corporations...the residual effects of which ultimately end up polluting our countrysides and waterways...then this sandwich is for you.

If you're someone who is tired of mediocre attempts at a vegetarian option at a sandwich shop (thing dry, flaky veggie burgers), then this sandwich is for you.

If you want to stop systematic racial, ethnic, and economic discrimination; if you want to stop industry from polluting our bodies and our earth; if you want to close the income gap, stop global warming, create healthy, supportive communities, and save the whales, THEN THIS F***ING SANDWICH IS FOR YOU!!!!

Ingredients:

Homemade pesto:
poo-load of basil (2 cups, chopped and packed)
1/2 c. parmesan
1/3 c. almonds (normally, pine nuts should go here, but pine nuts are way too expensive. Why are they so f***ing expensive? That makes pesto into this elistist yuppie, inaccessible spread, and that's unfair. So use almonds or even peanuts because you're an equitable human)
1/2 c. olive oil
poo-load of garlic (3 gloves, or 4 if you f***ing love garlic)
salt and pepper to taste

Bread (2 slices. duh, it's a f***ing sandwich!)
Cheese (brie or goat)
Sliced green pepper
Sliced tomato

A note about this recipe. Don't skimp on the ingredients. Get fresh basil for the pesto, and get fresh bread. For example, I have a bakery next to my house called Canto 6 that has the most amazing 7-grain bread of all-time. I also recommend "When Pigs Fly" Bakery's bread in Somerville. For those of you outside of Boston, I'm sure you have some awesome bakery close to you. Go there and buy the bread. This sandwich is worth it.

Ok, so here's what you do:

1. Make the pesto by putting everything in a blender and blending
2. Smear that shit all over two slices of your tasty bread
3. Put on the cheese and the sliced veggies
4. TOAST or put in a Panini press
5. Enjoy the best sandwich you'll ever eat
6. Enjoy even more the fact that you just made a sandwich that challenges the very fabric of the universe of sandwich-dom and you've just stuck it hard to our carnivorous sandwich-making forefathers who sought to undermine universal access and enjoyment of sandwiches by all people.

Apple-Butternut Squash Soup

Some days you wake up in the morning and want to rock the "it's fall in New England" thing so hard it hurts. On those days, you may want to eat this for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Ingredients:
1-2 butternut squash
2 apples
1 can veggie broth
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 onion
1 1/2 cups water
1/4 tsp thyme
1 tsp salt
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
1 cup light cream

1. So the first thing, actually, is to figure out how much squash you have. The recipe I was working from called for about 3.5 lbs of squash, so I've been guesstimating their weight using a set of hand dumbells for comparison. I made a full recipe with a ~3 lb squash, and a 3/4 recipe with a slightly greater than 2 lb squash, and those were both good. When I made the smaller recipe, I still used the full can of veggie broth and decreased the water.

2. Cut onions (small), peel and cut apples (small slices), peel, cut, and de-seed squash (1/4 inch pieces). Butternut squash, incidentally, are Not Fucking Around as a vegetable--that's some seriously laborious chopping.

3. In the bottom of a 4 qt saucepan, sautee onions in vegetable oil for 10 mins.

4. Add everything else. Cook for 30+ minutes.

5. If you have a blender, you could pull out some of the mix and blend it, but who has a blender really? I used a strainer and a fork to mash up some of the bigger squash bits. It will be pretty textury soup, but that feels right to me.

6. Eat. Serves 8 if you made a full recipe. I recommend eating it with other summery tropical dishes like potatoes and brussel sprouts.

I've realized that I write recipes tailored to people who have the exact same stuff in their kitchen that I do (strainer but no blender, hand dumbells but no scale). (Technically the hand dumbells aren't usually in the kitchen.) I'm okay with this.

Apple-Cinnamon Pancakes with ZUCCHINI!?: Are you f***ing crazy!?

The subtitle for this post ("Are you f***ing crazy!?") is geared towards people like my roommate, who, this morning awoke to the sweet, sweet smell of fall (cinnamon, nutmeg, apples) creeping into his room. He entered the kitchen, leaned over the pan where I was flipping my flapjacks, and remarked about how incredibly delicious my f***ing pancakes looked. He then inquired as to the ingredients of said flapjacks.

When I told him that zucchini was one of the main flavors of the dish, he wrinkled his nose and exclaimed boldly (I thought, since I was cooking him breakfast, goddammit!) that the pancakes were ruined and that I shouldn't have ruined good pancakes with zucchini and that I was an idiot and possibly a jerk.

Despite the rudeness (I excused him because he looked tired and maybe a bit disoriented), I served him four of these pancakes, and I'm proud to say that he f***ing loved them. Maybe because I'm a really f***ing good cook, and he should thank his lucky stars that he has such a cool roommate who spends an hour making him brunch and then doesn't bat an eye when he openly insults his painstaking efforts to deliver nutritious, scrumptious food every Sunday almost precisely at noon, which is obviously the best f***ing time to eat brunch.

Anyway, here's to zucchini, and here's the recipe. Enjoy, and don't let the naysayers bring you down!

Apple-Zucchini Pancakes

Wet ingredients:

1 c. milk
1 egg
2 tbsp maple syrup

Dry Ingredients:

1 c. all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1 zucchini, grated
2 apples, peeled, cored, and chopped

Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl, then fold in wet ingredients. Mix until smooth, but as a general rule, pancakes are better if not overmixed. Let mixture sit until you see bubbles on the top. This means that the baking powder is doing its thing and the pancakes will be fluffier.

Heat up a skillet or griddle and coat with vegetable oil. Get it good and hot, then add 1/4 c. of the mixture for each pancake. As per usual with pancakes, the first couple will be shittier than the last. This mix should make about 12 solid-sized pancakes.

One thing to note about this recipe is that it's CHUNKY and MOIST, which is great but can pose some difficulties for the novice pancake maker. I would just follow the rule of waiting until the edges of the pancakes start getting hard and testing the bottom of the pancake with your spatula to make sure they're fully-cooked before flipping.

Serve with maple syrup and butter, or just straight-up. They're incredibly delicious either way...

P.S. (Do you have to P.S. in a blog post, or can you just keep typing?), my friend Joost from the Netherlands told me an interesting story last night about nutmeg. Nutmeg is indigenous to Indonesia, which used to be a Dutch colony. Thus, old Dutch people put nutmeg on f***ing everything! Another interesting tidbit is that, if used in excessive quantities, nutmeg can be a powerful hallucinogen, lasting up to 72 hours...If used in even more excessive quantities, nutmeg can be downright DEADLY.

Anywho, recently, an old Dutch couple accidentally spilled an entire jar of nutmeg onto their mashed potatoes. Nutmeg is a standard way to spice up mashed potatoes in the Netherlands, apparently. Instead of scooping out the excess spice, or scrapping the entire dish, as most people would do, according to Joost, "because they were old," they decided to go ahead and chow down.

And, you guessed it, they croaked.

If you're as interested in nutmeg as I became after this story, read on.