I was spending the weekend in Ottawa, bracing for an ice storm, ready to celebrate my mother-in-law’s birthday.
Q: Barbara, if I made you a breakfast sandwich for your birthday, what would you want?
A: Lobster roll.
This is why Barbara rocks.
Lobster roll it is. I’ve made it before but I worked with pre-cooked, not fabulous lobster and whatever buns. Challenge on: how to make the very best lobster roll for Barbara’s birthday brunch?
I start with a trip to Whole Foods in search of four lobster tails (frozen) and find a stack of luxe brioche buns right next to the freezer aisle—they know what they’re doing. Here’s my set up.
OK, top shelf buns at the ready. Check.
Fresh chives for colour and flavour, chopped (about 1/4 cup). Check.
Every sandwich requires multiple decisions along the way. The most important decision for the lobster roll is how to treat the lobster? Barbara grew up in the Maritimes and Craig (her son & my love) typically handle the lobster, but I want to be a bit hands-on. Upon consultation, we decide upon steaming the lobster tails mid-way, then give the meat a bath in butter to finish it off, careful to not make it rubbery.
It was definitely a group effort.
It’s her birthday but Barbara’s keen to break open the partially steamed lobster, after cracking some cooked lobster claws that she already had in the fridge. She’s a pro, but partially cooked lobster is a beast to pull out of the shell. She won the battle, but it’s a totally different ball game than fully cooking a lobster tail, so pick your battles accordingly and choose your mother-in-law well.
Lobster goes into the butter (about 1/4 cup) to finish the cooking process.
Chopped steamed, butter-poached lobster—dressed in chives and, once cooled, about 1/2 cup Hellman’s mayo, salt and pepper—at the ready.
Everyone chooses mimosas with fresh orange juice, so we are now ready to eat and we all appreciate that a lobster roll is a very special treat, usually eaten seaside but in this case, in the middle of an ice storm. So here we go.
Simple. Decadent. The food of kings and queens. Should we be so lucky, and we were.
You know the type: roast beef, turkey, or chicken piled in between two squares of squishy Texas bread, smothered with hot brown gravy that probably came from a can or started as a powder. Add a mound of mashed potato and peas on the side and you’ve got yourself good eats, diner-style.
I consume gravy maybe twice a year: at the Thanksgiving feast and again on Christmas day, where we gather around Craig’s mother’s table over turkey (which is fondly referred to as “the frozen fucker” because it’s a Butterball cooked from frozen), green bean casserole, turnip puff, my “diet potatoes” (they are anything but: potatoes, butter, cream, cream cheese, shredded cheddar), and a boat of gravy.
I missed out on the feast this year because I was sick. Now that I’m feeling better, I can’t get gravy out of my head.
So this is the day I make the hot chicken sandwich—something I’ve only eaten in a diner.
A hot chicken sandwich should be the easiest meal you ever make. Break down a rotisserie chicken, buy a can of St. Hubert gravy, pile onto bread.
That is a perfectly acceptable way to approach the hot chicken sandwich, but today I am trying to impress. So I’m going to make everything but the bread from scratch. Every step of the way, there are decisions to be made:
The bread base: A good Pullman loaf would be excellent but that feels a bit too high brow for the hot chicken sandwich. Here I decide to stay true to the diner treatment. I walk 12 minutes downhill to our market strip in search of bread we don’t allow in this household—a loaf of thick Texas bread. Why is Texas bread forbidden in our household? Because you might just decide to wake up in the morning and whip up a toasted Texas slathered with Cheez Whiz.
Oh, would you look at that:
So, because I was sick, we are making exceptions this week.
Now that the bread has been decided upon, what about the gravy? I never make the gravy, so why would I start now? Especially since I have a perfectly good can of St. Hubert gravy stashed away for “emergencies”.
But I’m writing a food blog now and, at least occasionally, I need to impress. So today, I present you with Hennessy’s Homemade Gravy: chicken drippings, a roux of flour, butter, and chicken stock, fresh sage leaves, and a hint of fresh apple cider. Crack some pepper and call it a success.
Craig’s on gravy duty, because that’s his jam, and he executes it perfectly, with the help of a strainer.
Now that the gravy decision is made, it presents another problem: what type of chicken treatment? The grocery store on the corner sells a good rotisserie chicken and if I wasn’t trying to impress, I’d go with that option. The BBQ joint two blocks up makes the most amazing smoked chicken that I have ever had. Now that would make a star of the hot chicken sandwich.
But with either choice, how do I make gravy without chicken drippings?
I decide to roast a couple of large chicken breasts, bone-in and skin on for flavour. Two of them fit into our Pyrex casserole dish, so game on.
A little olive oil, salt and pepper on those breasts and roast at 350 F for 40 minutes. At the 40-minute mark, I add a couple of ladles of chicken stock and tent with foil for the final round (10 minutes or more). This keeps the chicken moist and that stock will add depth to my drippings, since I’m not doing a whole chicken in a roasting pan.
It’s starting to smell really good in here, so it’s time to think about what goes with our hot chicken sandwich. At the diner, I distinctly recall a mound of basic mashed potatoes and green peas. So we are going full diner-style.
I boil red-skinned new potatoes because that’s what I have and I like to see the red skins in the mash. Once tender, they’re drained, mashed, and kissed with a tablespoon of butter, a splash of cream, salt and pepper. Using an ice cream scoop, I scoop a mound of the mash onto the plate.
I couldn’t find peas at the store; not even in the freezer section. But they had corn, and that felt diner-style, so that got boiled, drained, bathed in a teaspoon of butter, and sprinkled with kosher salt.
Now, to build the sandwich: bread down; generous chunks of chicken piled on the bread; capped with a bread lid; gravy pooled on top. And you know what’s the star of the show. Nothing can compete with gravy.
A sprinkle of chopped chives because you’re always supposed to have something green on the plate, even on a hot chicken sandwich.
And there you have it. The most diner-style meal I have ever made in my life. Yes, the bread and gravy are added calories and we’re just starting out in January, the detox month. But one of us is going to the gym this month, and by that I mean you.
When I was a kid, I loved flipping through the Archie comic books—not for the plot, but for the inevitable picture of Jughead with a giant sandwich platter.
When I became old enough to help in the kitchen, my favourite activity was preparing sandwich platters for parties. Totally 1970s fare: open-faced squishy buns topped with egg salad and a slice of green olive or ham salad and a slice of pickle.
All these years later, I still adore a good sandwich. So this year I’ve decided to build 52 sandwiches—one a week—and document the fruits of my labour here.
There is a philly cheesesteak sandwich in my future, I guarantee you that. A lobster roll. A simple tomato sandwich at peak tomato season. And more.
I’ll go high brow some weeks but the sandwich is mostly a comfort and convenience food, so the grilled cheese will absolutely make an appearance or three. I’ll experiment with great picnic sandwiches. And I’ll seek the best ingredients, sampling different bread styles, cooking treatments, and condiments.
For my first entry, I wanted to start with the trusty breakfast sandwich. A Tim Horton’s just opened on the corner and I’ve been tempted to zip in and order a cheese and egg breakfast sandwich on a biscuit but that’s so boilerplate.
I’m only allowing myself one sandwich a week, so I need to make each one count. I also don’t want to start my morning with a calorie and sodium bomb, so I want my breakfast sandwich to give me energy, look and taste great, and to be reasonably healthy.
I start with a thin slice of Fred’s Bread batard, because that’s the bread I have in the house right now and it lends itself well to a tartine, an open-faced sandwich that showcases the toppings.
I get the oven going to 350F, place a sheet of parchment paper on a baking tray, and set my sliced bread down to start my creation. With a big spoon, I make an indentation in the middle of the bread, slice one piece of lean ham (mine came from Rowe Meats) into ribbons, and drape those ribbons around the bread indentation to create a frame for my egg. I crack an egg into the centre, season with salt and pepper, then dust everything around the yolk with a small handful of grated emmental cheese, which brings a nuttiness that is the perfect foil to the sweetness of ham. Bake for 10-12 minutes and serve. This isn’t a knife and fork situation; it’s a hand held—just as a breakfast sandwich should be.
Variations on a theme: If you want a runny yolk, bake it for about 8 minutes. Don’t want ham? A few slices of avocado or tomato would be great here. Any type of hard melting cheese works, even government cheddar.
My partner and I were trying to agree on a list of our top 5 sandwiches, but once we hit a list of 37 possible contenders (with more that could be added to that list), I decided this would make for a perfect kitchen challenge.
Build a new sandwich once a week, experimenting with ingredients and preparation treatments, document it here, and rank that list at year’s end.
Why blog about the humble sandwich for a year? Because I love sandwiches that much, and I’m betting many of you do, too.
I also think the sandwich is undervalued. Many times people treat the sandwich as a quick and cheap lunch, filled with cheap processed meat, peanut butter and jam, or a mayo-laden boring tuna sandwich. But make a great sandwich with excellent ingredients for someone and it can transform what they think about a tuna sandwich. So this site is an ode to the sandwich and its full potential.
A Year in Sandwiches 