Lunch, Day 1

To kick off my "take back lunch" challenge, I decided that I wanted to try and recreate a sandwich that I know I like very much. Back in 2001-2002 I was working for a small company with its office in the Empire State Building (cool, right?). Since that's a huge tourist destination, the majority of the dining options in and around the building were fast food. So my coworkers and I (and our respective wasitlines) were thrilled when Circa deli opened in the neighborhood. We lunched there at least twice a week, grabbing one of their delicious whole-wheat crust personal pizzas, signature salads, or a quick sandwich or wrap. My absolute favorite thing to have for lunch at Circa was something called a California cheddar cheese sandwich. If I remember correctly (and remembering anything correctly these days is tough with my post-pregnancy, usually sleepy brain), it was baba ghanoush, roasted red peppers, avocado, and cheddar cheese on an onion brioche roll. So delicious.

So I decided to try and recreate this sandwich for my husband and me to enjoy for lunch today.

I have never made baba ghanoush before. In fact, the only time I've ever even eaten baba ghanoush was on this sandwich nearly ten years ago. What I could have done was skipped over to one of the many excellent middle-eastern groceries that pepper our neighborhood and picked some up, but I decided I wanted to try to make it myself. I found this recipe online and it sounded good and relatively simple. It was, and it was. I just blended everything together in the mini-prep. The raw garlic is a bit strong so I'd probably roast that with the eggplant to mellow it out a bit if I were making this as a dip.

If I were still living in NYC, it probably would have been easier to track down some onion brioche rolls. But now that I'm living in the 'burbs, shopping at large chain grocery stores, I picked up the closest I could find - Kasanof's Onion Rolls (which are soft and very tasty). The rest of the ingredients were simple - avocado, roasted red peppers, and cheddar cheese. Vermont extra sharp white is our cheddar of choice, but I definitely recall the shredded cheddar on the original sandwich to be bright orange. One of the things that drew me to the sandwich in the deli case in the first place was that it was pretty to look at.

A delicious lunch for this Friday afternoon.