Sunday, December 24, 2017

Ham and cheese

Eastside Road, December 22, 2017—
IF YOU PLEASE, grilled ham and cheese.

Well, not grilled, really, more toasted under the broiler. I just shaved some Gruyère onto buttered slices of bread, placed sliced ham on top of the cheese, smeared a light coating of good mustard on the ham, set the top piece of bread on, and toasted them on a sheet pan under the broiler.

Well, Cook toasted them — kept an eye on the time, flipped them at the right moment. Ham and cheese: one of the Hundred Plates.

The oven was on anyway, because Cook had previously baked a Black Walnut Cake. This is a delicious thing, baked in a loaf pan, a yellow cake studded with bits of black walnut, which arrive every year a little before Christmas, always as a complete and very welcome surprise, from a cousin I hardly know who lives in St. Paul. Thanks, Mike! Let's share this cake one year!

After the sandwiches, and before the cake, green salad.

     🍷zinfandel, Preston of Dry Creek, 2014

RESTAURANTS VISITED, with information and rating: 2016      2015     2017

1 comment:

louann said...

Re Black Walnut Cake. My grandmother, also from the Minnesota/Canada line of immigration, made this. It wasn't easy to get black walnuts in Montana - they came from her Canadian cousins. She particularly made it for her son Scott. One year when I was walking into her kitchen, as was Scott, she told him she had made him his favorite- black walnut cake. He looked at me (he generally wasn't a very cheerful person) and said, "I hate black walnut cake". For some reason I thought this was both funny and illuminating.