Remember that roast pork from a couple of days ago? I sure do! I always get really excited when I have leftover roast pork on hand, because it inevitably leads to one thing: cuban sandwiches.

In addition to roast pork, a cubano contains dijon mustard, ham, pickles and swiss cheese. Real cubanos are made on soft white Cuban bread, but I used my usual wild-yeast boule. After all, I’m not a real cubano either.

When everything is stacked together, the sandwich is ready for a hot plancha, griddle, or cast-iron pan. And then comes the crucial step in cubanos: pressing. Pressing the sandwich compresses all the ingredients together and gives it a nice, thick texture and also seems to make the grilled surfaces of the bread extra-crispy. Home cookery stores sell all kinds of ridiculous weighted accessories with handles for this purpose, but you could just as easily use a culinary brick or anything else that’s heavy. I use a second cast-iron pan.

This sandwich is so great because it combines a lot of contrasting flavors into a neatly compressed package: hot dijon mustard, sweet, salty pig meats, tangy swiss cheese and sour pickles, all forced together into a warm, crispy amalgam. It’s rare that I will make a pork roast expressly for the purpose of making cubanos, but it’s even rarer that I’ll roast pork and not make sure there’s plenty leftover to fulfill my cuban sandwich needs.

Martha and I love picnics, probably because they combine some of our (at least, my) favorite things. Those being:

• Eating
• Being outside
• Drinking

As soon as the weather starts to turn to the right side of warm I am pushing to be eating food outside. Actually this year we tried at least one picnic on the wrong side of warm; generally speaking, a picnic in Duluth in February is not a good idea. But last weekend, with temperatures in the 60s here in the Twin Cities, it was time to brave the south shore of Lake Calhoun for the official start of the picnicking season.

Although eventually I’d like to get more adventurous with picnic food, long habit dictates that the focus of any picnic should be bread, cured meat and cheese. With Martha working we needed to have an evening picnic and since it still gets dark sooner than I’d like we needed something simple and fast, i.e. sandwiches. Inspired by countless bocadillos consumed in Spain, I went with Boar’s Head Virginia ham (jamón york rather than jamón), very generic white cheese, and butter, on my standard wild-yeast boule.

The first picnic of the year is a real celebration of spring, and no vegetable says spring more than asparagus. My favorite way to prepare asparagus (and almost any vegetable) is to roast it with olive oil, salt and pepper. I whipped together some mayonnaise to serve as dip. This was the first asparagus I have eaten all year (it’s still out of season here but there comes a point every year where I kind of give up on local produce) and it was everything I wanted it to be. I doubt I could articulate exactly what makes spring asparagus so awesome, but if you’ve had it you hardly need an explanation. 

It was a very simple picnic, but those are usually the best ones. As we set out on our bikes for the lake the all-day blue sky started to cloud up, and the wind sure can blow on the lake, making it was a little too cool to be comfortable. We did not linger after eating. But hey, less than perfect weather is just a part of being outside and what makes picnicking so fun.

And as for the last thing I like about picnics, drinking, it is illegal to consume alcohol in Minneapolis parks. We certainly did not conceal a bottle of wine between our stainless steel water bottles. That would be illegal.

Here are four pizzas I made recently. I remembered to move the pizza stone to the oven floor so I got a nice char on the crust. In all of them but the first, the cheese blend is asiago, fontina, and mozzarella. For my tomato sauce, I take a can of tomatoes and pulse them a bit in the food processor, then mix in red pepper flakes, dried oregano, salt, black pepper, some kind of acid (lemon juice or red wine vinegar) and sometimes sugar if the tomatoes need the help.

Pizza Margherita

Not much to say about this classic combination: basil, sauce, mozzarella.

Hot Italian sausage and fennel. This is an idea I got after eating it at La Rinata. It’s a great pairing since the sausage already has fennel seeds in it.

The Wedge has really great fire roasted tomatoes that are in the refrigerated case across from the butcher. They are quite sweet and intensely flavored as you would expect fire-roasted tomatoes to be. I also got marinated artichoke hearts in a jar from the Wedge but they were nothing special. It’s the tomatoes that made this pizza a nice treat in February.

This last pizza had shiitake mushrooms, ham and taleggio cheese, in addition to the usual sauce and cheese blend. I sauteed the shiitakes before starting the pizzas to get rid of their extra moisture and brown them. The ham was Black Forest ham that we had in the fridge and needed using up. The nicest surprise for me in this pizza was the taleggio cheese. I saw a recipe for a pizza that was just crust stuffed with taleggio a few years ago (on Emeril Live I am afraid to say) and was intrigued, but could never find taleggio. When I saw it in the dairy case at the Wedge I knew I needed to buy it, even if I didn’t have an idea for how to use it. When I got home I inspected further: the cheese has a very funky cheese smell but its flavor is actually pretty mild, creamy like brie but more surprising in its flavor. I thought it would go pretty well with the rich ham and mushrooms and I was right. If they still have taleggio next time I am at the Wedge and thinking of pizza, I will have to try a cheese and dough pie.