Cooking Show: Sandwiches!

We filmed another cooking show last week.  It wasn't hard to come up with a theme.

Sandwiches! We made lots of fabulous sandwiches.

Grilled Cheese Panini with Avocado & Prosciutto

We also added roasted red peppers, pesto, tomatoes...fill your panini with whatever makes you swoon.

Here's the printable recipe.

Lemon-Marinated Chicken Sandwiches

These are my favorite.  Layered with pear slices, prosciutto and arugula with a lemon-parmesan dressing, these are the sandwiches that disappeared after we finished taping the show.  The plate was emptied of sandwiches, the extra slices of chicken along with the fixings were demolished, the extra rolls "just in case" were put to use...if you only make one sandwich from this list, let this one be the one.  Here's the printable recipe.

Apricot Chicken Sandwiches

So. Easy. Really!  Soooooo easy.  

I wish we had set a timer when we made these, just to show how quick they came together.  Chop up the meat from a rotisserie chicken.  Make a dressing out of apricot jam, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper & chives.  Open up a bag of broccoli slaw.  Toss it all together, toast some rolls and then load 'em up.

Here's the printable recipe.

 And finally, Grilled Chicken Sandwiches with Satay Sauce.

Grill up some chicken cutlets, layer them with lettuce and crunchy shredded veggies and then douse them with a sweet/soy/peanut sauce.  So many different flavors competing for attention, but they all blend together perfectly.  Here's the printable recipe.

Grilled Cheese Panini with Avocado and Prosciutto

Today I decided to snap a few photos of the flowers that are blooming in my yard.  Everything is blooming so early this year, I wonder if it will continue at this early pace?

I snapped this photo a split-second before Gus came and dropped his frisbee on these daffodils and flattened them.

These daffodils were facing downward so I held my camera on the ground to get this shot.

These white daffodils with the pink centers are my favorite.  I'm thinking that I might have to cut them and bring them into the house where I can enjoy them.

The inspiration for today's recipe came about when I was standing in line at the deli yesterday.  The deli clerk was slicing prosciutto di Parma for the woman in front of me.  He was slicing it so thin and perfect.  I bet you could've read a newspaper through the slices, they were so transparent.  It was out of my control.  I had to buy some.

Then, I had to figure out what to do with the prosciutto.  My favorite thing would be prosciutto/mozzarella asparagus wraps , but unfortunately the rest of my family doesn't share my enthusiasm for asparagus.     

So I just started pulling some of my favorite things out of the fridge (fresh mozzarella) and the fruit bowl (avocado.....I'm still obsessed) and the bread box (awesome ciabatta) and decided on panini instead.

It was sooooooooo good.  In fact, it was such a perfect combination of salty/chewy-crunchy/melty-creamy that I made another one just like it today.

Prosciutto and Mozzarella Panini

With the 100-degree heatwave last week, I was running out of oven-, stove- and grill-free cooking methods.  I'm so glad I had my panini press to rescue my family from the salad-and-rotisserie chicken rut I was falling into! 

The inspiration for these flavorful panini came from my local farmers market.

It's usually the fresh fruits and vegetables that inspire me.

Last week, however, it was the fresh mozzarella and the bread from Clear Flour Bread that were the catalysts for this recipe.