sandwich

Note to self: midday sun does not make for flattering lighting.
Another photography related note: my room gets a brief period of beautiful afternoon light, how does one go about capturing that on camera?

Had a short conversation with my YNCN mentor about not cooking from recipes. Personally, it's out of laziness, it's too much work referring back to a recipe everytime (which is why I rarely bake the same thing twice, even though I loved it the first time). Instead, I want to focus more on ingredients and techniques, which are more versatile. I'll attempt to write future food posts with a focus on those two.

Today's feature is how to construct a sandwich.

This is a successful example of a sandwich. Successful for the following reasons:

• Bread with substance: aka not homogeneously textured bread from a plastic bag. This bread is via budgetbytes and was a tad overbaked due to my carelessness. Despite that, it still has a fluffy interior and chewy crust.
• Complementary primary and secondary ingredients: this is a roasted beets sandwich complemented with slightly pickled cucumbers. I'd describe roasted beets as soft, sweet and warming, where fridge pickled cucumbers are the opposite: crunchy (cause homegrown :D), sour and cooling. One bad thing about beets is that it literally stains everything and anything, one must exercise the utmost caution when eating this.
• Brighter notes of flavour: which is the basil and heavily pickled radish (which is intensely spicy thanks to the pickling jar being filled with chili). A change I would make in future iterations is to arrange the radish and basil in a grid, because the radish easily overpowers the basil, which actually goes quite well with the beets. Previous iteration had mint as the herb, which wasn't as good.