fancy (verb)
1. to have a fancy for; like
2. to form a conception of; imagine
3. to visualize or interpret
Since "food" comes first in the title, I'm starting this blog with a post about food: the shooter's sandwich.
Your arteries aren't prepared for this.
This is an Edwardian (1901-1910) snack taken on hunting trips. Considering the weight of this thing when it was done, "snack" is a misnomer.
Ingredients:
1 round loaf of bread (crusty bread is best, but even a soft whole wheat loaf will do as long as you don't mind some grease soaking through the crust)
2 cups diced mushrooms
1 cup diced shallots
3/4 cup butter
2 rib eye steaks
Salt
Pepper
I got a fairly large loaf of wheat bread from a local bakery, so I ended up using about 3 cups of mushrooms and 3 rib eye steaks. Yes, three steaks in a sandwich.
For anyone unfamiliar with shallots (I had to Google it), it's an onion. A really small, hard-to-cut onion. They're milder and sweeter, but if you want something that's easy to cut and cheaper, just get a sweet onion.
The overrated shallot.
Firstly, dice the mushrooms and shallots. I used 2 boxes of mushrooms and about 8 shallots.
You will learn to hate mushrooms.
Shallot carnage.
Melt 3/4 cup of butter in a large pan. Finally, this recipe gets good!
Holy heart disease, Batman!
When the butter is melted, add the mushrooms and shallots. Stir to get them nice and coated in all that...delicious...butter...
Every time you say "butter", a baby panda is born
Cook until the whole mix is reduced and most of the liquid is gone. This can take a half hour to forty minutes, so feel free to wander off and do other things, returning every 10 minutes to give it a stir. I played Minecraft.
If you have a cast-iron skillet, use that for cooking the steaks. If you only have one large pan like I do, dump the mushroom mixture into a bowl and keep it warm somewhere.
Things get epic: get your rib eyes.
Gaze upon its majesty.
I trimmed the edge fat off the steaks, but kept the rest. Put the steaks in your searing-hot pan. At this point you can salt and pepper them as much as you want. Cook them to whatever doneness you want. Medium is great for this kind of sandwich, but I cooked mine all the way through and it turned out alright.
Note: if the steaks are of different thicknesses, you have two options. 1: Carefully monitor each steak for doneness. 2: Even them out by smashing the thicker ones thinner. If you don't have a meat tenderizer, you can cover the steaks with plastic wrap and roll over them with a rolling pin. Or press them down with a cutting board.
Meat-evener.
Get the loaf of bread and cut a bit off the top. Rip out the insides and do whatever you want with them.
Cooking is violent.
At this point, you can smear condiments around the inside of the hollowed-out loaf if you want. I left it dry.
Don't let the steaks rest. Jam the first one in so it lays as flat as possible on the bottom. If you have a large loaf like mine, cut bits off your extraneous steak and use them to fill in the gaps. Spoon in the mushroom mixture and spread it out evenly, all the way to the edges of the bread. Put the second rib eye on top of everything and fill in the gaps. Put the bread lid on top.
First steak layer.
Mushroom, mushrooms.
Second steak layer.
Bread lid.
Wrap the whole thing in greaseproof paper. The internet says wax paper is greaseproof. The internet lies. Parchment paper is supposed to be greaseproof. If you stick a paper towel or two (or five) under the wrapped sandwich, it doesn't matter if grease soaks through. If you don't have paper, plastic wrap should do fine.
If you do use paper, wrap it up in butcher's string like this. Or any string you have lying around.
Stick a cutting board (or any other flat, sturdy object) on top of the sandwich and weight it down. Really weigh it down.
No, seriously.
Smashed sandwich.
Now the bad news.
Let it sit, under the weight, in a cool place for six. Whole. Hours.
Let me explain. The sandwich needs to be smashed together to keep it from falling apart when you cut into it. The cohesion is helped along as the sandwich cools.
A "cool place" can either be a cool room or, if the idea of meat at room temperature gives you the jibblies, put it in the fridge. It'll probably be harder to weigh it down in a smaller space.
If you're desperate to eat this glorious sandwich, I found that mine had been pretty well smashed at about an hour and a half later. I went crazy with the weights and had it in a cool room.
And how did it taste?
If you burst into tears of joy, I understand.
This was the best sandwich I'd ever had in my entire life. Save for one.
This is an incredibly heavy, rich, flavorful sandwich. It weighed three pounds. I cut out slices like a cake, but only managed to eat one.
Happy cooking!
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