cheddar chicken onion paninis; garlic mayo;

Up front: this recipe has nothing to do with me!  It came completely and utterly from T, and I’m not actually sure if he pulled the idea off the intermanets, or came up with this tasty concoction on his own!  My role in making this was twofold: 1) make the garlic mayo, and 2) grate the cheese.  That’s it!  My boy doeeees know how to take care of me in the food department.  He even made a take on roasted caesar broccoli swapping out the caesar dressing for Italian dressing!  T’s parents would be impressed–thinking about vegetables all by himself!

And everything turned out super yummy.  The only hiccup in our plan was that I had bought flatbread at costco a few weeks ago, and thought this might be the perfect time to whip it out!  Sadly for me, apparently flatbread is less like tortillas and more like bread in that it grows some nasty mold after a few weeks.  I should have expected it, but I was hoping that if I didn’t open the package, I’d get a little more shelf life out of it!  Into the trash it went though, and we just ran to the store to get french bread, which probably worked out better than flatbread anyway for paninis.

I will say, while the whole meal was delicious, the garlic mayo I made was to die for.  The fresh garlic actually gives it a tiny spicy kick (reminiscent of horseradish) if you taste it straight, but is a bright kick when slathered on a sandwich.  And here’s my super-secret-not-so-hush ingredient: soy sauce!  Yeah, I’m half asian so that means apparently I’ll try it in anything.  Not really, although I do love my soy sauce (low sodium though, the regular is just too salty for me nowadays).  It adds an extra richness of flavor, and some subtle complexity to the otherwise pretty straightforward flavor.  I took the original recipe of mayo, minced garlic, and lemon juice, and added (1) soy sauce, and (2) my go-to spice blend of garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and pepper.

T marinated the chicken, chopped and sauteed the onions, and put together the sandwiches.  The only suggestion we both had by the end was simply to slice the chicken up a little more finely for sandwich-ing.  The big chunks were tasty and flavorful, but would sometimes get pulled out of the sandwich when om-nom-noming.  Oh, though I did lie.  The OTHER thing I did was pick us some fresh basil from my planter.  Oh, it was so difficult!  I decided we should throw some on at the last minute.  I didn’t mind it, but honestly it didn’t particularly add to the sandwich since we threw the basil leaves on whole.  I think if we sliced them up and spread them a little more evenly throughout it could’ve worked.  I only had the idea because we used up the last of our sundried tomato and basil cheddar cheese we got from great shoals when we visited the farmers market/winery duo!

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