picnic time

Last night Rich and Ashley gave me a bit of a hard time for not updating this site lately. This is fair. I’ve been busy, and it’s been weird weather, and I’ve somehow turned lazy, and this week has been nuts, and I’m going away, yadda yadda I have a million excuses. But, Ashley works 8 hours a day in an office and needs something to read. So! Here is my number one picnic sandwich. My friends are all really into picnics, so we usually bring more appetizer-type foods, but this is a good choice for a solo day in the park (which is where I plan to work this afternoon – see, all those earlier complaints were totally unfounded! I have a great life!).

Anyway, there is this lovely café in New York, called The Grey Dog, and they have excellent sandwiches which took me wayyy too much thought to recreate.  Anyway, I love this brie and apple sandwich, easy enough, with raspberry mustard, which was the tricky part.  I’m not sure why it took me a trillion years to realize that it was just dijon and jam, mixed together until it tastes perfect, but I spent a lot of time remembering this sandwich and trying to imagine where they got this delicious mustard.  In short!  Mix jam and mustard for excellent results.  I also always make this sandwich on pretzel bread, which is so so dense and sadly means that I can really only have half a sandwich because it’s the most filling thing ever, but really, the pretzel bread is key!

Also, in the interest of aesthetics, I try to wrap these sandwiches in wax or parchment paper, but that is a totally unnecessary touch.