Croque Monsieur

You may have noticed that the sandwich featured above is not real. It is, in fact, a cartoon picture of a sandwich featured in the UK brand T-shirt line, conceptTshirts.

The reason this sandwich is not real is because my (real) sandwich was eaten hastily and with fervor in the middle of a 16-hour work day. Needless to say I worked through lunch over a keyboard and did not have time to spruce up for photographs. Tuesdays are my production day for the newspaper, which is why I originally planned for Tuesday to be leftover spaghetti day instead of a "real" meal day.

In essence, Croque Monsieur is a mix between a ham and cheese sandwich and a grilled cheese sandwich. It's delicious and the ingredients are cheap. The ingredients used for this particular lunch cost me a grand total of $12. However, that was for an entire baguette as well as all the deli ham and cheese. Those ingredients would stretch me to probably three reasonable Croque Monsieurs, so we'll say this meal cost me $4. That price can go up or down depending on the quality of the deli meat and cheese you are purchasing.

I generally like to use both muenster and Swiss cheese on mine, but there are many choices out there. The next time I make one, I will take a photo and swap out the T-shirt design for my own creation.

I also like to use a sliced baguette for mine, and I will often serve it as an open faced sandwich to cut back on all the bread. You can use any type of bread you like, of course, since there are lots of healthy and tasty sliced breads out there.

For my purposes, I did need to plan ahead a bit. I baked it the night before in the oven so that the cheese melted to the proper consistency, and then reheated it in the toaster oven. I've never tried reheating a Croque Monsieur before--it's obviously better fresh, but it wasn't too bad. I imagine it would be worse if you tried reheating in a microwave, because part of what makes this sandwich stand above the rest is its crunch.

It also goes well with french onion soup--yum!

Cheers.