Croque Monsieur

According to a Facebook post, today is National Sandwich Day. Good excuse to make sandwiches for dinner! But not just any kind of sandwich, tonight I made Croque Monsieurs. For those unfamiliar with this French-bistro staple, they're basically dressed up grilled ham and cheese, but this is absolutely a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Fortunately, they're not really all that complicated, well, for French food anyway.

What you'll need:

Soft butter (I used Land O'Lakes spreadable butter with canola)
Good bread (I used Italian bread from the bakery at our local Publix grocery store)
Ham deli meat (I used Boar's Head Virginia Ham)
Swiss cheese (I happened to have sliced on hand, but you can just use grated for both inside and on top) -- Gruyere and Emmentaler would be ideal, but you can use just about any kind of Swiss, I used Emmentaler and a block of regular generic Swiss for the top because I didn't feel like paying $10 for six ounces of cheese
All Purpose flour
White Pepper
Nutmeg
Ground Mustard Powder
Milk (neither the hubby nor I drink milk and we had heavy cream on hand, so I used it and it worked fine, so really milk, half-n-half, or cream can be used)

Step one: assemble sandwiches

Heat the ham (about 4 slices per sandwich for thin-sliced deli meat) in the microwave first
Butter one side of one slice of bread
Layer slices of Swiss or some of the grated Swiss and the ham and then top with butter slice of bread

Putting together sammies

Assembled sandwich ready to go into hot skillet

Step two: make the bechamel sauce

In a skillet over medium heat, melt one tablespoon of butter

Add one tablespoon of all purpose flour to the melted butter and whisk to combine

Cook flour-butter mixture for about 2 minutes

Add a pinch of nutmeg (freshly grated is always best) and about 1/4 tsp each of white pepper and ground mustard

Add one cup of milk (heat in microwave for 30 seconds before adding), whisking as you pour it into the skillet

Continue whisking until mixture thickens and is smooth

Remove from heat and set to side

Completed bechamel sauce

 Step three: cook sandwiches

Place sandwiches butter side down in a skillet that's been heated over medium-high heat.
Cook until golden and toasty. (I didn't get a pic of the sandwiches in the skillet, sorry!)
Transfer sandwiches to a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil, toasted side down.
Spread bechamel sauce (heaping tablespoonful) on the uncooked slice of bread.

Bechamel sauce topped sammies

 Then put a generous amount of grated Swiss cheese on top of the bechamel sauce.

Ready to broil!

 Place sandwiches on baking sheet in oven under the broiler and watch carefully. Broil until cheese is melted and bubbly.

Finished Croque Monsieurs

They will be way too hot to eat when they first come out of the oven, so let them cool for a couple minutes so you don't burn your mouth! I do recommend slicing on the diagonal to make them easier to eat.

I served these with Terra Exotic Potato Chips (normally I'd make my own Rosemary and Black Pepper Red Skin Potato Chips, but I didn't feel up to that today) and salads (basic garden for the hubby, salad of cucumber, red bell pepper, raw green beans, and tomato in vinaigrette for me).

Enjoy!

Radioactive

Had my third PET scan today. My first one was just before my hysterectomy and my second was just before I started chemo. This one will hopefully confirm what the CA-125* numbers are showing: that the chemotherapy has worked and I am in remission. I still have one cycle of chemo to complete (that's three sessions) and, then, hopefully, that will be it. I'll find out the results of today's scan at my oncology appointment on Wednesday.

As far as medical tests and exams go, PET scans are middling-annoying. You have to eat a low-carbohydrate diet the day before and can't have anything the day of other than water. This is because of the tracer that they give you for the exam. They establish an IV (if you have a port they use that) and inject radioactive glucose. If your blood glucose is over 160, they can't do the test because the tracer won't show up correctly. Cancer cells suck up glucose at a faster rate than normal body cells do, so they light up on the screen when they scan you with the CT machine. You rest for an hour after the tracer is injected to give it a chance to be taken up by cells and then you get to lie still in the scanning machine for about half an hour. So, you're hungry and have to spend an hour and a half being completely still, which is why it's not a completely non-annoying test to have done. It certainly could be worse, though!

The first two times I had the test performed, I experienced some mild anxiety during the scanning. I'm not normally someone who has a problem with claustrophobia, but being in that long tube can (and does) get to anybody. This time I didn't have that problem. I was so deeply engrossed in my thoughts that the test itself went by fairly quickly. The worst part was that my hands got icy cold! If I ever have to have another, I'm going to take gloves to wear!

The tracer has a very short half-life, so it's completely broken down and expelled from the body within 24 hours. But, for the time being, I'm very very mildly radioactive. Not that you can tell. Disappointingly, it doesn't make your pee glow or anything cool like that. That would be awesome. They should totally add something to the tracer that makes your pee glow. It would make dealing with the annoying bits totally worth it.

*Marker in the blood that is indicative of ovarian cancer.

Halloween's Not Evil

So, today's the first of November and I said I was going to attempt to post every day this month. This is going to be interesting!

Yesterday was Halloween. I didn't feel up to going all-out this year, so I didn't decorate and I didn't really dress up (I popped on one of my wigs and that was that). I did hand out treats to the few kids that showed (plea to world: please come our house, Trick-or-Treaters!), but it was overall pretty low-key around here.

Here's the thing: there are people out there who don't celebrate Halloween because "it's not a Christian holiday" or "it's based on a pagan holiday" or the most insane of all "it's Satan's birthday." Let me just say right now that that is patently STUPID (if you believe the last one, you are truly an idiot). If you know anything about the history and development of Christianity, then you know that pretty much the entire religion is based on "pagan" traditions. If this is something you don't know and you consider yourself a Christian, please, please, please for the love that is all good in this world, go read a book about the history of Christianity! Karen Armstrong's A History of God is a good place to start. After that read Bart D. Ehrman's Lost Christianities, Lost  Scriptures, and How Jesus Became God. Not knowing the history of the faith in which you purport to believe is pretty pathetic.

It's actually pretty scary to me that so many modern-day evangelicals are being led to believe that the particular version of Christianity being practiced at their individual church is 1) the only valid version and 2) is "traditional" Christianity (it is neither).

Halloween in its current incarnation is fairly removed from it's Christian roots and even further removed from ancient "pagan" traditions. Obviously, it's NOT "Satan's birthday." That particular bit of ridiculousness was dreamed up in the 1950s by some nutcase. Halloween's been around quite a bit longer than that. Today's Halloween is a chance to have fun by dressing up, either as a favorite character or as something "scary," and an excuse to indulge in candy-eating and scary movie-watching (if you're into that sort of thing, personally I am not a fan of scary movies, candy, however, is delicious). There's no deeper meaning behind any of those traditions (yes, they have historical roots in medieval traditions and superstitions which have even older historical roots, so what? as they exist today, they are simply FUN). It really is just as superficial as it seems: something that we do that's actually pretty silly, but is a lot of fun and is engaged in solely because it's fun. Actually, that's a damn good reason to do just about anything.

If you're against Halloween, you're against something incredibly innocent. And if you're against Halloween, but you celebrate Christmas complete with a tree, Santa, a feast of some sort, then you are either a hypocrite or  incredibly ignorant. However, if you don't celebrate any holidays that aren't explicitly in the Bible because you have been led to believe that that is the "correct" way to be Christian, then, you are probably a pretty damn boring person to be around and you've been seriously misled by someone who doesn't have a good understanding of  nor a solid foundational knowledge of Christianity. I could go on more about that, but I'm not going to, at least not now.

Halloween's not evil. It never has been. It's a night of harmless fun. Well, okay, maybe candy is a little evil. Delicious, delicious evil.