Greens, sesame and Cheddar toastie

And doing things that go against your instincts

Hi, I’m Anna Jones and welcome to my newsletter, a celebration of cooking, vegetables and life. It’s great to have you here. If you have found yourself here but are not yet subscribed then you can sort that out below….

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The newsletter is coming to you a bit early this week. Before we get to a recipe, I wanted to let you know about something that is happening tomorrow. This Thursday March 13th at 16:00 GMT // 12:00 ET I will be chatting with Carla Lalli Music, author, cook and ex-Bon Appetit cook. If you are not familiar with Carla then have a read of her brilliant newsletter Food Processing.

We will be talking about how we come up with recipes and how being a cookbook author is influenced/impacted/complicated by social media and AI. I’m a big fan of Carla and I’m so looking forward to it. If you have any questions that you’d like for us to answer, leave them in the comments below, and we’ll try to get to them.

Instructions on how to join the live and the full line-up can be found here. You’ll get an email reminder tomorrow just before the chat (so just make sure you have the app before then).

Back to the toastie. Are there things you never let yourself do? Instinctive lines that you have set for yourself that you don’t cross? I have a long list. Some are helpful limits I’ve set for myself, like not having a coffee after lunchtime and waving goodbye to several hours of sleep. Some are decisions I made without really realising, that have stuck and turned into part of who I am, or who I am not. I am not a runner (I’m more of a swimmer), I don’t wear purple (my mum wore purple for most of my teens - call it a teenage rebellion).

I’ve also set up a good amount of lines for myself around food. I’m not talking about things I will and won’t eat in a nutrition kind of way (I’m not here for that) but there are things I have had a block around eating, cooking and doing.

Remember in peak Gwyneth era there was a lot of baking with mayonnaise? (In fact I think Gwyneth and the very excellent Julia Turshen who co-wrote her book preferred veganaise) The idea of it makes me feel bad and despite a serious curiosity, I could not go near it. Mayonnaise is just a suspension of eggs and fat, both of which are key to cakes. I am sure that the cakes in that book are excellent. But anyone who has made mayo will know that it also has a decent amount of vinegar, a lot of salt and sometimes mustard and I want no part of that in a cake.

Anyway the reason I am taking you back to a ten-year-old food trend is that this week I’ve broken through my own mayonnaise barrier.

Not in a sandwich but ON a sandwich. I have taken to using mayo in place of the butter, spread on the outside of a toasted sandwich so as it hits the pan it caramelises and creates the best and most even toasty brown-ness as the cheese inside melts. Do I feel weird about doing it? Yes. Am I thrilled to have done it every time I bite into my toasted sandwich? Also yes.

This particular toasted sandwich (toastie if you must) is inspired by one I ate in a park a couple of weeks ago. It was a cold February day and I was starving. John and I had pulled a classic parent move of making our kids fluffy pancakes and fruit plates and eating nothing ourselves so by the time we arrived at the park we needed food badly.

I ordered us two toasted sandwiches from Popham’s bakery and thought not much of it. Pophams is great, and the toastie was everything I needed in that moment, warm, crispy, tangy. I thought about it for days after and this is my version of it.

This toastie is packed with wilted greens and lots of lemon, it’s crisp outside (thanks mayo) grasps onto lots of sesame seeds which add an unreal crunch and some chilli sauce brings a bit of attitude.

Some of these things might not be the kind of thing you have put in a toasted sandwich before but let me make a case for them. The greens balance the cheese and make it something that feels like it could be a weekday lunch. The lemon brings some zip, it lifts what is traditionally quite hefty hunk of bread and cheese. The sesame seeds bring their toasty finish and some very pleasing crunch. The chilli sauce links the sesame and spring onions to the greens and cheese.

I don’t use a toasted sandwich maker - I don’t own one and this is not that kind of toastie. To cook a toastie successfully in a pan, here are my thoughts. You will need to get your pan nice and hot before you add your sandwich, then turn the heat down to medium once you put the sandwich in. I press it down using a heavy frying pan or a large spatula to put on top of the sandwich to press it down onto the surface of the pan, and so get even browning.

If using mayo on the outside of your sandwich is not your thing then butter works well too, it will brown more quickly but will still be excellent. Good bread is needed here as cooking the toastie like this you want bread that will hold up when pressed down into the pan. I used a potato sourdough.

In these days where spring is not quite with us and winter lingers on, it's just what I want to eat.

Greens, sesame and Cheddar toastie