Using a vintage bread recipe (see the bottom of this post), I put together the dough and then seasoned and roasted a chicken.
Next, I made some delicious mayonnaise in just five minutes, using the ingredients below. One *should* hand whisk the oil, but I did it all in the blender and it was perfect.
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| Using the best quality ingredients -- like this olive oil (axiomia.biz) and Edmond Fallot mustard (from France) -- will make for an excellent mayonnaise. |
Finally, at about 6 p.m., all the elements were in place and the sandwiches were ready to be made. (But it's not like I spent all those hours in the kitchen -- I went to the gym when the bread was rising, shopped the farmer's market when the chicken was roasting and worked on a freelance job while the bread was baking.)
I halved the bread recipe and got two smallish loaves. The kitchen was perfumed with the aroma baking bread for hours.
I let the roasted chicken cool before slicing it. Only white meat for DH.
Once you see how easy and delicious homemade mayonnaise is, you might never go back. I used a modern recipe I found on the internet.
These sandwiches were wonderful; the addition of farmer's market tomatoes and lettuce only made them better.
Of course, chicken sandwiches can be made in five minutes with store bought bread and mayonnaise and a supermarket rotisserie chicken. But there's something quite satisfying about going back to the very basics, to the elemental building blocks to create something -- that kind of activity is too often lost in our swirling busy world. (Of course, maybe it's lost precisely because making a chicken sandwich takes eight hours, and we have better things to do with our time.)
The bread recipe I used is below, but I wouldn't recommend it. I much prefer this recipe, if you're going to make the effort to bake bread.
