Gastronomy 101

Grilled Cheese with Fig Jam, Kale and Fontina This sandwich was on the cover of Gourmet magazine several months ago and it looked so pretty I had to make it. Click the sandwich name above for the recipe. As you can see, I changed the ingredients a bit, based on what I could get my hands on, but it still turned out yummy. The combination of the fontina and the fig turned out to be so good, that I've used it a couple of times since then. And the leafy greens make me feel more healthy so that I don't feel quite so bad about eating a grilled cheese sandwich.

These pictures are from Breadbar on Third Street, a combination restaurant/bakery serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner and selling fresh bread and baked goods. This is kind of a bad picture, but the food was good. This was from a lunch where I ordered their chilled beet gazpacho, and my friend and I shared some sweet potato fries. The service was outstanding that day - our meal was maybe five minutes delayed and they brought us a whole bread basket and a foccacia to make up for it. We hadn't even noticed anything was wrong! So we ended up with a lot of leftovers, which this is a picture of. This is from 4th of July weekend, when they had "build your own burger" weekend. We took the bus over to be good citizens for the holiday. For that weekend only, they had a deal where they offered a checklist of buns, meats, toppings, etc. and you could create your own burger from the ground up. Above is a skirt steak burger with chimichurri sauce. Mine was a chicken sandwich with moz...