First we start off with some turkey bacon:

Uncooked turkey bacon.

Crispy, cooked turkey bacon.

After the turkey bacon we cut up some cheese, specifically cheddar and gruyère, then we wrapped some of the bacon around the cheese, then we slapped some salami on top.

Cheddar and gruyère wrapped in bacon with salami on top.

So what would you do next? We  added more cheese and wrapped it in more bacon.

Cheese wrapped in bacon, with salami on top, wrapped in more bacon. The bacon is waving hello.

So after the additional bacon we felt we needed even more cured meat, so we wrapped the whole thing in some prosciutto.

Proscuitto on bacon, on salami, on bacon, on cheese.

Proscuitto on bacon, on salami, on bacon, on cheese.

After we wrapped it, we threw it in the pan for a bit.

In the pan.

In the pan, flipped. Lookin' sexy.

So after a quick run in the pan, we ate it.

Complete.

Mid eating.

Conclusion: I would eat it again. I am a fan of every ingredient in the sandwich, and when put together they all taste amazing. If you’re not into salty eats then this sandwich is not for you, everything in this sandwich is at least a little salty. What I liked best about it was the turkey bacon, it added structure to the sandwich, which made it easier to eat. You can’t really tell from the picture above but it was actually pretty easy to eat. If I were to make it again I think I would put a bit more time into it, partially cook the bacon, then wrap it, then cook the bacon more to make it crispy. Wrapping something in already cooked, mostly crispy bacon, is kind of a hassle and makes the sandwich more sloppy than needed. If you have a supply of cured meats and cheese, and are looking for something to eat, make this sandwich.

Thanks for reading, feel free to share this everywhere!

“The Poor Man’s Fancy”

After going 4 months without a full-time job, your budget starts to get squeezed tighter and tighter.  Food is expensive and we are trying to cut back, but you know, sometimes you just want something fancy!!  Necessity is the mother of invention and it was necessary that I eat something delicious and fancy but stay within my financial means.  I pulled out all ingredients I had on hand that seemed to pair well together and hoped that it would be as successful as my imagination believed it to be.

The ingredients:

Store Brand Fudge Bars

JIF Natural Peanut Butter

Store Brand Chocolate Syrup

Store Brand Graham Crackers

Nonpareils, for a touch of fun color

The first trick is to get the fudge bar off of the stick.  The fudge bars are going to serve as the “bread” of the sandwich.  Let them soften a bit and use a knife to slice them along the stick until they loosen and slide off.

Spread your desired amount of peanut butter on the top of the bottom fudge bar.

Drizzle a bit of chocolate syrup.

Set the top fudge bar in place, creating the sandwich.  At this point, the bars will be getting pretty soft.

Editors note: Peanut butter and chocolate between two fudgesicles? FANCY!

Crush up a graham cracker and roll the sandwich in the crumbs so that it is entirely covered.  This makes it much easier to hold on to!  Ideally, you’ll stick your fancy sandwich in the freezer for a bit so everything holds together well and isn’t messy when you eat it.  I did not do this part.  I was too impatient to dig in.   I took my first bite and was very pleasantly surprised!

Editors note: The graham crackers idea is awesome, I am going to have to try this.

If you are also too impatient, this sandwich is best eaten with a fork.  It does not, by any means, mean that it’s any less of a sandwich!  Remember, there’s peanut butter and chocolate in there!  I gave in and pulled the fork out and also let my husband try it.  He originally said “no” at even the thought of tasting the crazy concoction.  But he had a bite and said, “Wow, it’s really good with the peanut butter”.  I agree, and also think that the graham cracker coating really adds nice texture to an otherwise soft sandwich.  The little crunch and hint of flavor goes a long way!

I deem this sandwich a Fancy Success and would recommend to any and all unemployed or otherwise poor to give this a try and serve them to your guests at your next Ramen Noodle dinner party!  You’ll impress, no doubt!!

As proof it was good, here’s the cleaned plate.  Mmmm.

Created by Megan Van Sipe for FancySandwiches.com

Megan blogs and sells fancy things at www.lilacsaloon.com

The first ingredient: Whole Foods Chocolate Chewies. These little beauties are crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, loaded with chocolate chips, and wonderfully rich.

The second, and final, ingredient: Jeni’s Queen City Cayenne ice cream. The description on the side of the pint is as follows:

“Rich chocolate slowly reveals hints of spice. Finish is pleasantly tingly.”

The description is dead on. This is probably the most innovative flavor of ice cream I have ever had, not only is it real creamy and wonderfully chocolaty, it has a nice cinnamon undertone, and a spicy finish. If you’re looking for something new, or love spicy food, you should definitely find a way to get your hands on some of this. Jeni’s is sold all over Columbus and you can order it online (No I am not being paid to tell you this).

Above is the sandwich mid and post-construction. Undoubtedly full of chocolate.

Conclusion: This sandwich is really simple, yet very delicious. It took very little time to create and eat, and was still wonderfully delicious (and fancy!). I would definitely eat this again, although next time I might add more ingredients. This sandwich definitely makes me want to try out other Jeni’s flavors.

On a side note, do you want to see more content on here? If you do, don’t be afraid to submit a sandwich. Too lazy to make your own? Find a local restaurant near you that makes awesome sandwiches, take pictures, write a description, and submit it. If you’re submissions are fancy enough I will post it.

The idea was so good that it made me want to adapt it to a fancy ice cream sandwich, so I did. My idea was to have two slabs of ice cream with some ingredients in the middle, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I needed a way to get the ice cream in nice retangles. Multiple people told me to just cut the ice cream container into sections to get the pieces I wanted, the problem is I can only find Ben & Jerry’s in pints. So what did I do? I used Ziploc bags!

The idea is to use a sandwich sized bag and fill it with the ice cream of your choice and mold it to the size rectangle you want. The sandwich bags are not the same dimensions that I was looking for so I didn’t fill the whole bag. Construction is below:

For this sandwich I used Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra and Mud Pie, both very good. This was my first time eating Mud Pie, I highly recommend it.

When putting the ice cream into the bags I highly recommend that the ice cream is in a softer state, I put mine in the bags right after bringing it home from the grocery store so it was real soft but not soupy. The Karamel Sutra was a bit harder to work with because it has a giant center of caramel.

Next I put the slabs of ice cream in the freezer between two ice packs. The ice packs are probably optional, but if you have them I would use them. I let these sit in the fridge for a few days because I wanted the ice cream to be real solid and prevent it from melting right away. With Ben & Jerry’s ice cream it is impossible to actually get it to become completely solid, they use a lot of cream in their ice cream, which is also why their ice cream is so much better than most other brands.

So for my ice cream “Double Down” I needed something to substitute for bacon, and something to use as a “special sauce”. I chose a blueberry muffin pop tart and Reese’s Magic Shell. When I was ready to make the sandwich I put some of the Magic Shell onto the pop tart.

Next I cut the first slab of ice cream out of its bag and put the pop tart on top of it, I also added some Rice Krispies because they add a nice crunch to the sandwich.

Next I cut out the top slab of ice cream, put more Magic Shell on it, put some Ovaltine on it, then put more Magic Shell on it.

Then I ate the delicious sandwich with my hands, for the most part. I started to eat it with my hands like I would any other sandwich but that quickly proved to be extremely cold. My hands started to get so cold they burned. I had to rinse them under warm water then continue to eat the rest of the sandwich the fancy way, with a fork and knife.

Conclusion: The hardest part of this sandwich was figuring out how to make it. Overall the process of making it isn’t too time consuming, but you do need to let the ice cream sit in the freezer for a while in order to get it solid enough to eat without becoming a giant puddle of ice cream too fast.

When it comes to the taste you’d be hard pressed to make something more delicious than this sandwich. The Mud Pie and Karamel Sutra ice creams blended together very well, you could clearly taste both, and it was delicious. The Reese’s Magic Shell added a very nice flavor, but nothing overpowering. The biggest surprise of this sandwich was how much more delicious the pop tart made it. When you first bite into the sandwich you can’t taste the pop tart at all, but after you keep it in your mouth and chew it for a bit the taste really comes through and makes this sandwich truly amazing. My brother and my friend were here to witness this and they each had a bit of it and we all agreed, the pop tart really made this thing shine.

NOW GO FORTH AND MAKE ONE!

First I started with the dough

Then I added the jam filling, I used Kroger brand raspberry jam.

I applied the top layer, poked the holes, and stuck them in the oven.

I read the newspaper

and I took them out of the oven.

When my girlfriend came home from work she decided she wanted to hit up Whole Foods to get some materials for some homemade sushi.

It was delicious.

While I was there I picked up some Jeni’s Brown Butter Almond Brittle ice cream. I decided to get Jeni’s because I figured it was something different than Ben & Jerry’s but just as fancy. Another neat thing about Jeni’s is that it’s a local ice cream place near my girlfriend so it adds to the home made feel of this sandwich.

Above is the constructed sandwich.

And that’s what it looked like mid consumption.

Conclusion: This sandwich was rather awesome, but very time consuming. Making the pop tarts was surprisingly hard because the dough was pretty hard to work with, especially since it was really hot and humid out, it was a good thing that there was a warning about this on the recipe page.  The crust of the sandwich had a very buttery taste to it which blended well with the buttery flavor of the ice cream. The almond brittle in the ice cream also added a nice crunch to the sandwich.  There was also a nice contrast in flavors between the buttery-ness of the crust and ice cream and the tanginess of the raspberry jam. I definitely plan on trying this again but taking it to the next level, whatever that may be. Also I apologize for the poor picture quality, I do not own a real camera at the moment, just my crappy phone camera with a cracked lense. If you have a camera you’d like to donate just hit me up at submit@fancysandwiches.com

This is the type of gourmet sandwich you are capable of making if you have a struggling career and a healthy appetite to drown your sorrows.

To start off I’ve selected a loaf of Rosemary Olive Oil bread that you can find at any Costco and sliced it in half as shown below.

Since the bread has a slight olive oil taste and we’re going for totally fancy I’ve decided to add more olive oil, I’m using extra virgin olive oil because the taste is much more fresh.

Below you can see how I’ve spread some of the olive oil onto the bread. You’ll want to spread this out like you would butter on bread to get an even flavor and allow the extra ingredients to stick to the bread.

You’ll need to get some Italian Seasoning, Garlic Salt, Paprika cheese for this next step.

You’ll spread these across the bread however you see fit, I’m a fan of the Italian seasoning so I’ve used it a bit more generously than the garlic salt, I’d prefer to use garlic powder or fresh garlic to spread on, but we’re working with limited resources.

It’s starting to look fancy, but since this is fancy sandwiches we need more.

Since we’re looking to go fancy don’t go with plain old Parmesan cheese, go big get the extra Romano to go with it (remember we’re from Career Purgatory, so we’re sticking with Kroger Brand, for you guys in the boonies that would be an IGA, Winn Dixie, maybe Piggly Wiggly).

Now we’ll add more olive oil and make sure it is spread into the bread nicely.

As you can see here the bread is fully oiled up. We’re going to grill this to get as fancy as we can with it.

Here are all of the ingredients for the bread in one spot for everyone to see.

Set the bread on the grill like so. Let the grill heat the bread up and put your chicken on the grill at this stage too. If you’re using fresh chicken start the chicken first.

The chicken is looking pretty tasty.

Put the 4 cheese blend on the bread after about 5 minutes or so since it does not take long to melt it on the grill.

The bread is almost done and the reheated chicken is looking about done as well.

Here is the finished bread, just cut it up to your liking.

Damn that thing looks fancy!

Yum!

Be sure to check out the Gas Station Chronicles or find out how to get a Minor in MARVIN at www.careerpurgatory.com