More sandwich reviews coming soon, I promise. Been really busy with all this moving and such.

Anyway, here’s an easy recipe:

1) Go to the deli counter at Fairway. Take a number.
2) After ordering a week’s worth of lunchmeats, notice the delicious-looking knishes in the display.
3) Order a knish. (OPTIONAL: Remember you’re married and ask for another.)
4) Bring the knishes home and put them in the toaster oven at 350-degrees for about 20 minutes.
5) Remove and eat.

Bold Flavors Snack of the Week: Knish

Man, why don’t we eat more knishes? In college, I met a bunch of people who weren’t from New York and had never even heard of a knish. Could you imagine? They’re so delicious, so relatively simple, and yet limited in availability to such a small portion of the country. Why?

If you’re unfamiliar: A knish, in its most basic incarnation, is essentially just mashed potatoes wrapped in pastry. That’s the square kind shown above — billed as “Coney Island Knish” at Fairway. There are a bunch of fancier, round knishes with various fillings in addition to potato, and at high-end knisheries they’ll tell you the square types are nonsense. Whatever. They’re amazing.

As you can see, I served myself my knish with mustard, ketchup and sriracha. It turned out sriracha was no good on a knish, so just pretend that’s not there. Mustard is the traditional knish condiment. I don’t want to get into another whole debate, but I like a little ketchup on there too, for sweetness. Mostly mustard, though.

Point is, you bite into the slightly crispy, chewy, salty pastry part of the knish to reveal a center of delicious molten mashed potatoes, smooth and peppery. It’s tasty enough on its own, but as a vehicle for mustard (and a little ketchup), it’s outstanding.

I just don’t think we’re doing enough with savory pastries in general.

When I started rolling these out I intended for them to come Saturday as a suggestion for a snack to eat while watching football on Sunday. So this one’s late, by those standards. But be honest: Was there really any chance you’d have secured squab by Sunday if I put up the recipe on Saturday?

I doubt it. Squab is surprisingly hard to find given how delicious it is. More on the meat in a bit. Here we go — barbecued squab:

The photo is dark — the squab wasn’t really that badly charred. I chose to focus on eating the bird instead of lighting it appropriately.

You will need:

Squab
Salt
Pepper
Paprika
Olive Oil
Some sort of barbecue grill

Directions:

1. Have your awesome sister get you a whole thing of frozen exotic meats from Fossil Farms for Christmas. Plan to move on Nov. 1, and work toward eating the rest of the food in your fridge and freezer before you do. Find squab in freezer and be like, “hey, honey, you want to try squab tonight?” Thaw the squab.

2. Butterfly the squab and remove any giblets or other unappetizing items from the inside.

3. Brush olive oil over the squab, then lightly season it with salt, pepper and paprika. You could use more seasoning if you’d like, but from this angle it seems silly to overseason a meat you’ve never tried before. Especially, it turns out, this meat. You’re going to want to taste that.

3. Grill the squab over high heat, turning once, until it reaches an internal temperature around 130 degrees. It’s a small bird so it happens pretty quickly — I grilled mine for maybe 8 minutes, and as you can see it got a little charred on the outside.

4. Remove squab from grill using something other than your hands. That’s hot, fellas.

5. Eat it.

I have to be honest, I was not expecting this to be anywhere near as good as it was. Holy crap. It turns out squab, cooked medium-rare — and it’s apparently safe to cook squab medium-rare — tastes more like steak than it does chicken. It’s red meat, maybe a little more tender than most steak, and it comes in an appealing bird shape. My wife compared it to skirt steak, which was a pretty good call.

I know squab is a type of pigeon and I guess that freaks people out. But whatever, if we had chickens roaming our cities as pests I bet we’d be freaked out by eating chicken too. And I guess if you’re not getting it for a Christmas gift squab is pretty expensive. Seriously though, this is a really good meat. Start demanding it at restaurants and maybe we can get it on more menus.

I made hot sauce last night. It’s outstanding. I’d prefer to never again use the term “complex” to describe food, but it’s certainly that. It tastes like a smokier, slightly spicier version of Sriracha. I typed out the general recipe for a friend this morning, and since I’ve got some meetings this afternoon I figured I’d re-post it here. I don’t have a picture, but it looks like thick, deep red, delicious hot sauce.

I based the recipe on a bunch of different ones I found online. Excuse all the parenthetical asides. It was an email. I’d edit them out if I had more time:

It’ll be hard to use the exact recipe since the peppers came from my garden. I used about 15 hot Kung Pao peppers, about half of which I had smoked in my smoker. I imagine Cayenne peppers would work as a substitute. I also used one sweet-hot Mariachi pepper for sweetness -– you could probably replace that with a red Anaheim pepper or even a red bell pepper. The only reason you’d want it to be red is for color, so I guess orange or yellow would be fine too.

None of this is an exact science, obviously. You might just try mixing a bunch of whatever hot peppers you can find (and which taste good) and one or two sweet peppers. The Kung Pao peppers are, I believe, about 10,000 on the Scoville scale (which measures the heat of peppers), and the sauce is every bit as hot as I need it to be. It’s definitely spicier than Sriracha, but not so spicy it destroys you or anything.

You could probably remove the seeds if you want it to be a little less spicy (and without seeds). I was too lazy for that though. I put all the peppers (minus their stems) in a Pyrex container, poured in just enough vinegar to cover them, and let them soak for about three days. Then I poured it all into a small pot, added about four cloves of chopped-up garlic, and heated it (covered) to a simmer.

I let it cook like that for about 20 minutes, then used a slotted spoon to transfer the peppers and some of the garlic (without the vinegar) into a blender. I added maybe a tablespoon of the vinegar (reserving the rest in a separate container) to the blender and liquefied the peppers.

When that was done, I poured the pepper-stuff back into a pot over low heat and added enough of the vinegar to get it to the consistency I wanted -– roughly that of Sriracha. After the soaking and simmering, the vinegar is hotter than the pepper paste, so if it feels like it needs to be spicier you can add more vinegar. Then I added sugar and salt until it tasted how I wanted (about three pinches each).

This one’s pretty involved. The recipe is as follows:

1) Make plans to go to the zoo with your parents and nephew on a Sunday. Emphasize that you’d like to be home in time for the Jets game.

2) Go to the zoo. How awesome are elephants?

3) Before you head home, stop by your parents’ car to pick up the bag full of awesome fried Italian things your mom bought for you at her local farmer’s market, and the Tupperware container full of pizza sauce she made so you have something to dip the fried things in.

4) Go home and fry those bastards up. My wife heated hers in the toaster oven but screw that. I heated about an inch of oil in a big pot and threw some in. I went with four mozzarella sticks, three fried artichoke hearts and two “fried mini calzones.” With the sauce on the side, of course.

Here they are:

The so-called calzones are the big winner here. And I imagine you could figure out how to make them at home pretty easily. They’re just large shells (as in the pasta shape) stuffed with ricotta, mozzarella and ham, presumably dipped in egg then rolled in bread crumbs and fried. And they’re awesome.

I know most of the time when I eat a calzone I think, “man, this tastes way too healthy.” To think, all this time I could have been frying them!

I don’t know that it’s actually proper to call these calzones, since to me the word calzone implies there’ll be pizza dough involved. But whatever they are, they’re great. There’s a nice, seasoned crunchiness to the outside from the breadcrumbs, and then of course the soft, creamy ricotta and chewy mozzarella on the inside. I was not expecting the ham, but hey, bonus ham!

Oh, and the mozzarella sticks and fried artichoke hearts were pretty great too.

On the note of this webcomic, what is the proper way to cut a sandwich (in this case, clearly not including heroes)?

– Ben, via email.

Triangles, and it’s not even close. Anytime you’re working with a sandwich made on two square pieces of bread, it should be cut diagonally.

A sandwich cut into two rectangles presents only 90-degree angles from which to take the first bite. That’s suboptimal. The 45-degree angles created by a diagonal slice allow you to stuff way more sandwich into your mouth for the first bite, which is well-known to be the most important bite of the sandwich.

This is all assuming you start all your sliced sandwiches at a corner, which you probably do unless you’re seven years old. And it further assumes you eat those sandwiches from the inside out, finishing with the crust, because you’re not some sort of freak.

To help with this study, I drew this handy and very scientific diagram:

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I was wondering why we don’t have graham cookies? I made some.

I used actual graham flour. It’s in the Bob’s Red Mill section of my local supermarket, and maybe yours too. The recipe called for regular flour, but that’s seemed like a cop-out to me. The graham flour seemed to give them an interesting, heartier texture than most cookies. I liked it.

Ice-cream sandwich on graham cookies.

The recipe goes like this:

1) Follow this recipe. Substitute graham flour for all-purpose flour if you so choose. Or don’t. See if I care. Make the cookies a little bigger than they tell you to, otherwise you’re not going to get as much ice cream as you want.

2) When the cookies are done and cooled a little, lay one face down on a plate. Scoop on some ice cream. I used vanilla, but go nuts.

3) Place another one of the cookies down on top of the ice cream, creating an ice-cream sandwich.

4) Eat ice-cream sandwich.

OK, last one of these for a while, I promise. I got a lot of good questions yesterday.

I’m coupling these questions because they cover similar territory. The Primanti Brothers’ innovation is adding french fries to their sandwiches, a concept I found extremely strong in inspiration and slightly less so in execution due to some soft french fries (though with the added bonus of cole slaw).

When adding starch to the innately starchy sandwich, we must ask ourselves: Why? French fries are delicious pretty much anywhere, be they on top of a sandwich or beside it. But what can they add to a sandwich besides salt and some grease (and I mean no disrespect to salt or grease)? Unless they’re fried crispy, they just add a mushy layer of potato-stuff that could easily be drowned out by any of the more flavorful elements on a sandwich.

That’s where potato chips come in. They have the potential to add both the same salty, potatoey goodness of french fries as well as the elusive crunchiness, ever absent on even many of the best sandwiches.

The problem, of course, is that if your sandwich has much dressing or any greasier elements, the chips could easily become soggy and their effect ruined. The successful addition of potato chips to a sandwich requires both a strong sense of sandwich construction and efficiency in its execution. That’s no small feat, and I believe the reason most sandwich purveyors do not offer potato chips atop their creations.

Previti Pizza does a solid job of it, but you’ll note that in that review I mentioned how the chips “don’t hold perfectly hold their crunchiness.” Sentence fail in context.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Andrew. That’s a loaded question. For which type of food?

I generally keep three hot sauces in my fridge at any given time: Frank’s, Sriracha and Cholula. Frank’s is obviously there for wing-making purposes. The other two are pretty versatile and not at all like each other. And though I tend to use Sriracha for Asian-inspired foods and Cholula for Mexican dishes, there are times when you just want to try Sriracha on a taco or Cholula on your drunken noodles, and it turns out it’s all pretty delicious.

If I could only have one, I’d probably go with the Cholula — and not just because they sponsor this network (longtime readers of this blog know the Cholula bottles were present in the picture of my desk long before that deal ever came down). It’s got a thicker texture than most hot sauces, which I like, and good flavor even if it’s not the spiciest hot sauce in the world. Unfortunately I’ve yet to receive any free Cholula as fallout from that deal, which is total B.S.

As for mustard: Man, there are just so many different delicious types of mustard. I guess if I had to pick one, I’d probably go with Nance’s Hot Mustard — a smooth-textured and versatile but very assertive mustard, full of mustardy bite.

I love White Castle. I think the key to enjoying White Castle is moderation. The burgers are so small and delicious that you want to have like 15 of them, but the only way you’re going to be able to stomach them is if you limit yourself to three or four. Do that and you not only develop a taste for them, you start getting The Crave every time you see a White Castle. I’m pretty sure White Castle burgers are chemically addictive.

I don’t go there now as often as I did when I lived in Fort Greene and it was nearby, but I tend to get one regular cheeseburger, one bacon cheeseburger and one jalapeno cheeseburger. And every time I do, I have no idea why I bothered because they all just taste like White Castle. Delicious White Castle.

Worth noting: My father loves White Castle. Just f@#$ing loves it. He grew up near one and had to walk past it on his way home from high school, and I guess he developed a pretty strong dependence. He doesn’t get to go as often as he’d like, I think, because my mom doesn’t care for it and it’s a bit out of the way for him now.

A few years ago, he went to take my grandmother out to lunch and asked her where she wanted to go.

“What was the name of that place on Sunrise Highway in Lynbrook, with the tiny cheeseburgers?” she asked.

I imagine this had to be, for my father, the absolute best direction a lunch date with his mother could have gone. He asked her if she meant White Castle, and indeed she did. She had The Crave. So they went.

A week later, my father went back to take her out again, and eagerly asked her if she wanted to go to White Castle again.

“Oh no,” she said. “That’s the type of thing you only want once every 40 years.”