hot sando, a very Japanese phenomenon

Go figure...in a country with even Hello Kitty imprinted toilet paper, you can find a kitty hot sandwich maker. (mine is not this one...mine has a cute penguin colour scheme)

I remember a while back Mie and Nao told me about how great sandwich maker is. Despite my skepticism, I gave in and bought a very reasonable one, just to see if I'd be won over by one. To my surprise, I have fallen and fallen hard for it! In just days I made all sorts of sandwiches - peanut cream, prosciutto ham and cheddar cheese, leftover Indian curry (chicken saag and a spicy bean kind), curried minced beef and onions...the possibilities are endless!

Instead of using margarine or butter as instructed by the user's manual, I reached for the big bottle of extra virgin olive oil. (see my previous entry on that) It turned out delightfully crispy! I wanted to try Mie and Nao's second suggestion: using the ends of bread for hot sandwiches. The end crusts are called the bread's ears in Japanese, "Pan no mimi."

You know Japanese bakeries and supermarkets do not sell bread with end crusts?! It did not dawn upon me until that time my friends brought it up. I often ate end crusts because no one else in my family ate it...as was true with pineapple and other fruit cores. In the end I developed a taste for all the things people tended to avoid, how ironic.

I purchased these bread end crusts at the bakery minutes away from our place. It was just 50-yen for a big bag of them. Apparently I was lucky enough to get a bag because usually one has to put in an order for them. Anyway if you ever find yourself with a surplus of sandwich end crusts, why don't you pop it in a hot sandwich maker or make some bread pudding?!

What a walk down memory lane...it brought back memories of using iron hot sandwich makers in campfires during my Girl Scout days. We often used pie or custard filling...ummm, yumm. My next experiment: hot sandwich made with homemade apple pie filling.