Every once in a while, you may feel hungry. But since you are on your own, and also lazy, you might not feel like cooking a real meal. Perhaps you would, but your kitchen looks something like that – and cleaning up all those dishes before being able to cook… Well, who are we kidding, that’s not gonna happen either.
But when you can’t even be bothered to get on your phone to order some cheap delivery food, you’re in some deep trouble.
Starving is not an option of course.
There are several ways that you might try to survive this situation.
One of my favourite is the Sandwich Maker, sometimes referred to as panini maker, sandwich toaster, or even George Foreman grill.
The simplicity of this apparatus is quite stunning. Plug it into a wall socket, and anything that you put in, comes out at least twice as delicious as when you last saw it.
A sandwich maker generally is very low maintenance, but this can be lowered even furthered by lowering your own standards. I’ve tried to visualise this relation in a small chart:
As you can see, only with high standards you actually have to do something about all that crusty baked cheese and dried out fat drops. Because the smart dude in you knows, that all of this is absolutely sterile, thanks to the heat and no disinfecting agents are required! It’s a win-win. Save costs on cleaning supplies AND kitchen apparel!
My favorite recipe to throw into the sandwich maker is the following:
Take two slices of bread. If you are from Germany: no, not BREAD, take some toast. Real bread won’t squish and toast as efficiently. If you are not from Germany, probably any bread will do, since Germany is to my knowledge the only country to gravitate to making bakery products that can be used as close combat weapons. The dwarfs from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld universe would be proud.
But I digress. Take two slices of soft, squishy, supple bread. Decide which one is going to be the bottom, and which one the top. Make sure the top doesn’t get ahead of itself and keep it aside for a bit, you need to prepare the bottom first. Now dig into your fridge. I hope that there is at least something in there resembling cheese. If there is not, I can’t help you man, even I haven’t stooped so low as to make a sandwich toast without cheese. It doesn’t matter which kind. Bland or spicy, everything works, as long as it melts.
Put a slice of cheese (or shavings, if you fancy a bit of hand-grated Parmigiano Reggiano) on the bottom. That will be the fatty, flavour enhancing base for everything else you put on there. My favourite is some kind of meat. Salami (or peperoni sausage), ham, or any other kind of smoked or salted meat that you usually put on bread. I can’t recommend any kind of boiled meat-puree sausages like Mortadella/bologna. It just isn’t the same.
Now for the not so unhealthy part. I like to chop up any vegetables I can find that aren’t too hard by themselves. I find that bell peppers, onions, tomatoes and mushrooms work fantastically. Maybe zucchini as well, never tried that. Go wild. It’s your life!
Second to last, of course, finish the ingredients with another layer of flavour, or as some might call it, more fat in the form of another layer of cheese. And YES, you can of course add some more shavings of that fancy cheese on top of that sun dried tomato, rucola and authentic Italian donkey salami, Steve!! Don’t be a show-off, nobody likes that.
And then, finally, let the top have its way with all of that delicious stuff beneath it. Press them together, to let all the ingredients get intimate with each other and start spreading their flavours around the sandwich. Carefully place it in the pre-heated sandwich maker. Close the thing. Carefully. If you went overboard with the amount of ingredients, and depending on your type of sandwich maker, you might need to adjust and support the sandwich until it is properly SQUISHED. See figure 3 for risks that you might encounter with a certain type of sandwich maker:
Wait for a couple minutes. When you hear sizzling, you’re on the right track, that’s probably the healthy juices from the cheese and meat developing their flavour. Keep the sandwich in there for some time. If you see black smoke emanating from the device, you have probably gone too far, or you have some twisted sense of taste. Who am I to judge…
Sometimes, those sandwich makers have lights (figure 4), that are supposed to tell you when it’s done. Pro-Tip: They don’t indicate anything, except that the thing has power. Rely on your own senses of smell and seeing. Open the thing every now and then, look at it. Not brown and crispy enough? Press the lid down some more!
Oh yes, one last thing, as an afterthought, actually. Sometimes you want to clean the thing. If you’ve done your best, not too many ingredients will have slipped out and it should be pretty clean anyway. Molten cheese sticking to the surfaces of the toaster just tells you, that you should have left your sandwich in there for longer, until everything is crisp and keeps sticking to the sandwich itself, as you take it out.
But fear not, maintenance is easy: right after you’ve toasted that piece of deliciousness, take a kitchen paper towel, fold it a few times and wipe the surfaces down. Start with the top, it’s less messy. That’s it. Just don’t forget to unplug the beast, unless you want to end up a toast yourself.
