Man, that is a DEEP fucking cut on the title joke. Why hello there, everyone, this is Jon O’Guin with a pretty-late Wednesday post. Sorry about that, the whole “three posts a week” schedule has really wrung all the extra research time out of my day-to-day, so non-recipe posts are harder: Monday’s post took TWO meal-making opportunities, and…I’ve just been struggling, you know? Anyway, if you don’t want to chat at all, just click this link. Everyone else…well, this isn’t going to be a super in-depth post, but it’s something.

A Spur of the Moment Revisit

Today’s post is about Croque Monsieur, which, as we mentioned on Monday, we’ve already made before. See Part of this whole pandemic thing has involved me being moderately more rigorous about planning out meals…except when I’m not. My goals were to cover enough posts to do 3 posts a week until May 4th, since that was the original date of our Stay-at-Home order ending. The order has since been extended, but I kind of celebrated early, and took most of last week “off”. So I didn’t have anything built up to write about this week. I was seriously emotionally kicking the Shit out of myself Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, because I had just heard about the meat shortage things, and was torn between “I definitely want to help people deal with that” and “But I also definitely want to make a Beef-based dish for the 4th” AND “I would really like to stop doing three posts a week”. I couldn’t resolve that, so I dropped the latter. As much as I may bitch and moan about the extra work, I know it’s not a great sacrifice. Which is why something that was never meant to be recorded got recorded WRONG, and now you get to hear about it.

See, while I just mentioned that my planning hasn’t been 100% effective, I didn’t mention that it also wasn’t 100% focused on WORK cooking: today’s recipe wasn’t ever supposed to be a post, it was just supposed to be a nice lunch/dinner for my family off of a pretty simple recipe: toast some bread, make Mornay, assemble bread, sauce, ham, and cheese, bake, and eat. I mostly made it just because the cover of the magazine I was looking at made it look really good.

It’s the KING of sandwiches!

I have days built in where I’m not cooking because I know we’re going to hit up a local restaurant, and days where I know “I won’t WANT to cook, because I’ll likely have just finished editing that recipe, which is going to be long…” So I do make food that you guys don’t learn about. On top of that, I planned to make this WEEKS ago. I bought the first bag of bread for this at the same time I bought the bread for the Egg Salad post. And when that got moldy, I threw it out, and bought a new bag of bread, along with a bag of BUNS for what we’ll be cooking on Friday.  Finally, last Saturday, I decided to make it, thinking maybe I’d toss it up on Patreon or something, since I’ve been accidentally ignoring them the last couple weeks. (I DO have something for you guys, I just keep overwhelming myself, I’ll get to you later tonight or tomorrow.)

Then the Beef post ate up a lot of mental space, I got a little sick Monday/Tuesday, and found myself standing here today with nothing. Which I could have just accepted, but I said “fuck that.” So let’s quickly revisit Croque Monsieur.  

That’s a Croque of Shit

In case you didn’t read the first post, and don’t WANT to (I don’t blame you, there’s an extended section on Proust that’s fairly indulgent), a summary: Croque Monsieur is a classic French bistro sandwich whose name translates roughly to “Mister Crunchy” or “The Gentleman’s Bite”. (croque means “bite/crunch”) The general belief is that some dude with a ham and cheese sandwich left it on a radiator while working, melting the cheese, and realized it was much better this way, spawning a revolution of “ham with melted cheese” sandwiches, that got more decadent over time. I’ve almost ONLY ever seen it made with a béchamel or Mornay sauce, but Wikipedia tells me that’s not STRICTLY necessary. Basically, you need buttered or fried bread (sometimes dipped in egg, a la a French Toast), cheese, and ham.

Which is why the first step of today’s recipe (which comes to us from Cook’s Country, while our previous one was from Alton Brown) is “make some great toast”, a process that required 16 minutes in the oven, and brushing melted butter onto bread.

A process that is not easy to photograph, especially with my ENORMOUS choice of breads.

This is also where things immediately went wrong, as I discovered that the ham I had intended to use had also gone bad. Which I should have really anticipated: if the BREAD went bad over a week ago, the MEAT probably wasn’t doing too well. So I had to run to the store to buy more ham while the bread toasted.

Once back, it was time for the most complicated part: making a Mornay sauce. Now, we’ve talked about this distinction before, but, again, in case you forgot: A béchamel is one of the French Mother Sauces, and consists of just…milk thickened with a roux, with some seasoning.

This is a picture of a roux, in case you had forgotten. I apparently didn’t take any pictures of the finished bechamel, which, in retrospect, makes sense: I was pouring milk with one hand, and stirring with another. until I’ve mastered using my phone camera with my mouth, we’re just going to be limited by my frail human form.

A Mornay is “A béchamel you added cheese to” (typically Gruyere or another hard white cheese). This is a thing I get a little pissy about when reading certain menus, since a lot more people know/prefer to USE the word béchamel because it looks fancier, but they almost always do so in dishes where they mixed in Cheese, meaning it’s a Mornay. That sounds (and is) a little petty, but in my defense, these things can be important. If you asked for crepes and I made pancakes, we’d all agree they weren’t the same thing, because one has a leavening agent and the other doesn’t.

These are awesome looking pancakes. But they’re really shitty crepes.

Once the toast and sauce is made, you’re going to need a LOT of cheese. IN fact, remember when I told you the first step was toasting bread? I lied. The FIRST step is grating half a cup of Parmigiano Reggiano, and 2 cups of Gruyere. Don’t worry, this doesn’t all go on top of the sandwich. Half of it goes IN the sandwich (Technically, half of it goes in the sauce, and the other half is purely topping. (Note, you can actually do this while the bread is toasting. I got lucky that I did it BEFORE toasting, because that gave me time to resolve the no-ham situation.)

Behold the piles of cheese.
Did I mention this is NOT a healthy meal?

Then, it’s just a matter of assembling the sandwich, which I will show here in some of the most informative sequential shots I’ve ever accomplished on the site.

Bread with paper paste, got it.

Meat Drapes on the paste.

Extra paste for the meat-drape hat.

Pasted hats with polar bear pubes. All very clear.

Once assembled and topped (in case you can’t see, just to be precise, under the… “polar bear pubes”, there’s another layer of Mornay sauce) you bake these bad boys for a couple minutes at 375 to get everything melting, and then broil them to get the cheese on top browned and bubbled.

Bubble Bubble, Ham and…stubble? I don’t know.

And that’s where the second big mess up of the recipe comes in: I didn’t take a finished picture. I thought for SURE I had pictures of them on the oven, slightly over-browned at the crusts, and another picture of them cut into chunks, but no dice. You just have to believe me that it looked pretty respectable. And tasted…pretty fine? There’s a LOT of dairy fat in this sandwich, between the buttered toast, dairy sauce, and extra cheese. I definitely would have liked a bit of mustard or jam in the mix to cut some of that richness. But I also felt it was pretty clear why it’s a classic. It’s warm, simple, and pretty damn good. Give it a shot yourself, or use our other recipe.

FRIDAY: WE REVISIT ONE OF OUR MOST POPULAR POSTS, WITH FRY-TENING ADDITIONS. A VEGGIE SANDWICH YOU CAN SINK YOUR TEETH INTO.

Cook’s Country Croque Monsieur

Serves 4

Ingredients

8 slices hearty white sandwich bread

4 tbps unsalted butter melted

12 oz thinly sliced Black Forest ham

¼  cup grated Parmesan cheese

4 oz Gruyère cheese, grated (1 cup)

Mornay Sauce

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 cup whole milk

4 ounces Gruyère cheese , shredded (1 cup)

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

Pinch ground nutmeg

Preparation

1. Place an oven rack about 6 inches from the broiler element, and preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Take a rimmed baking sheet, and line with aluminum foil. Coat the foil with baking spray, and brush the bread with the melted butter. Toast on the first side for 10 minutes, flip, and bake for another 6 minutes. Remove from the oven.

2. Make the Mornay sauce: melt the butter in a large skillet, and whisk in the flour. Stir in the milk a little at a time until it’s fully incorporated. Remove the sauce from the heat, and whisk in the cheese, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

3. Assemble the sandwiches: top the bottom slice of toast with 1 tablespoon of sauce, layer ham on top of the sauce. Take the top slice, spread 2 tablespoons of sauce on the inside of the toast, place on top of ham. Spread another 2 tablespoons sauce on top of each sandwich, and top with first the Parmesan, and then the Gruyere.

4. Place in the oven, baking at 375 for 5 minutes. Then broil for 5 minutes. Remove from the oven, serve hot.