Total Time: Just a few minutes
Source: Inspired by this Cook’s Illustrated recipe
Serves: Original recipe serves 4, I made 2
Twas the night after Christmas dinner (so still Christmas), when I sat down to look for recipes for the traditional Swedish gingersnaps I eat around this time every year (I still need to make them… maybe tomorrow). I ended up on Cook’s Illustrated’s webpage, as I often do, and this recipe was on the homepage. I though, “Huh. That’s a really interesting combination of flavors. We have leftover Christmas ham and pepperoncinis and apricot jam and cheddar. We don’t have English muffins, but we have homemade bread.” So I showed it to Sean and he heartily agreed that I should make them.
I didn’t end up doing it the next morning (I think that was the morning I slept until 10:30 or 11:00), but I did do it on Sunday morning. But this is the least I have ever followed an ATK recipe. Because, well, I made do with what I had and was only making it for two people, so some things just had to be changed.
I know the biggest thing about that recipe was how the eggs were made, and I would like to try that one day, but you really can’t make a half recipe of those eggs. So I sliced some bread, then sliced it again (because our bread machine bread is really tall), popped it in the toaster, and got started. I warmed up a few slices of ham in the skillet, tossed it on the bread, and then fried some eggs. I didn’t feel like pulling up the recipe for ATK fried eggs (which are delicious), and I also didn’t want runny yolks because yolk running down my wrist while I’m eating a breakfast sandwich is the worst, so I just eyeballed it. I went to put the jam on the toast and realized we didn’t have apricot jam after all (I think it got moldy in the fridge so I threw it away last time I went through our open jams), so I used peach jam and just eyeballed the amount. I sliced up some pepperoncinis and cheddar and just eyeballed those amounts, too. So, completely unlike me, I made a bunch of substitutions and didn’t measure anything, but the flavors were all close enough, and that’s really what matters with a sandwich.
Reader, it was delicious. Spicy and sweet and savory and filling. So good.
Testing the Test Kitchen 