Grilled Vegetable Sandwiches

I guess I took a bit of a blogging hiatus. It wasn't exactly intentional, but I ended up working late just about every night this week and by the time I got home, I just didn't have the energy to blog.

My real job is a full-time writer, and I write and post content to the web all day long. Sometimes, especially when I have to work late, blogging seems like a chore rather than something fun. So that's why my posting is so sporadic. I love what I do, I just don't always feel like doing it 24/7.

I'm like that about everything, though. A few years ago I worked retail on the nights and weekends to pay off credit card debt and save up a down payment for my car, and during that time I did not fold laundry — ever. I lived out of laundry baskets or I dumped clothes in drawers all balled up. Sounds insane — and it was — but I worked at an extremely busy department store clearing their fitting rooms and spent 6 to 8 hours folding and hanging clothes and putting them back on the racks. I had nightmares about folding clothes. The absolute last thing I wanted to do on my precious evenings or afternoons off was fold clothes. So I didn't. If people came over I just hid the baskets.

I've also been a slug this week and haven't worked out since Monday. I pulled some muscles the the back of my legs cleaning my carpet of all things, and I could barely move. So I took it easy until I could at least walk without being in pain. To my defense I also ran a few miles that day, walked around a plant nursery for an hour and planted flowers on my balcony. I'm still pretty out of shape.

I've been busy cooking, though! Last night after dinner I made muffins for a co-worker's birthday breakfast and made focaccia for these grilled vegetable sandwiches. I cheated and made the bread in the bread machine. I don't own a stand mixer so using my mom's old bread maker to make the dough is my little trick. It's better than nothing, and you can't beat a free bread machine.

I liked these sandwiches a lot. I used focaccia because it seemed easier than ciabatta for some reason. I do have a ciabatta recipe I'd like to try next. Not every bread dough comes out great in the bread machine.. so some day I'll have work up the nerve to make bread by hand.

I found this sandwich recipe while trying to find a similar one I made like 5 years ago. But I can't find it in any of my cookbooks and I couldn't find it online. I was just beginning to learn to cook back then so it had to have come from my Cooking Light subscription or one of the two cookbooks I owned back then.

That's one great reason for this blog. I can look up just about every recipe I've ever made. It's an online recipe file — until one of the sites I cook from starts retiring pages or the bloggers I get recipes from delete their sites. I guess there's something to be said for pen and paper.