Sandwiches for dinner!
Some people may think it is weird to have sandwiches for dinner. That dinner should only be a composed meal of somethinglike chicken breast, steak or other entrée style meat with one or twoaccompanying side dishes or maybe an elaborate bowl of pasta or complex salad. WhileI love all of those things, I think sandwiches for dinner are great since they can be rather filling and even a meal in themselves depending on how many vegetables are included in them. In face the only downside to sandwiches is that they are hard to photograph to show all the great things that are in them.
Here are two sandwich recipes that I think are great for dinner.
The first recipe is for a Curried Chicken Sandwich from Bon Appetit. This sandwich has a nice contrast between the moist chicken with the very crunchy slaw. It is great for a weeknight meal since you can get your chicken set up in the brine and prep the fennel-celery slaw the night before you want to eat it. I skipped the celery seeds in the slaw as I did not have them but I think I would get them next time to punch up the flavor. I liked the slaw but it does makes more than you really need for the sandwiches so you could either cut it in half or make the full amount and eat the leftovers separately with another meal. The recipe calls for grilling the chicken but I could also see broiling it if you didn’t want to be outside grilling say like in the winter. If you have leftover buttermilk after making the brine, check out my recipe suggestions to use it up.
The second sandwich recipe I like is for a Five-Spice Chicken Banh Mi Sandwich. The recipe is by Charles Phan, a well-known Vietnamese chef in San Francisco who runs a famous restaurant called The Slanted Door. The flavor on this grilled chicken is amazing and I’d recommend making some extra chicken to use in salads or rice bowls. The recipe calls for marinating 2-4 hours but I left mine in the refrigerator all day for about 8 hours, which might have given it the extra punch of flavor. Don’t skip any of the additional vegetables and herbs in the sandwich as they help balance it out. If you have a hard time slicing the English cucumber on the length wise into long slices, try cutting a little off one of the sides so it sits flat on your cutting board or just slice it diagonally into thin slices.
