Not just your regular joe

Gochujang gives this sloppy joe an extra bit of flavor.

Warmed ground beef and sauce on a bun? Or shredded beef with not much sauce? Or some combination in between? Everyone seems to have grown up with their own definition of sloppy joes, loose meats, Maid Rites or taverns. In my family, we had taverns, which is how we referred to the same sauced ground meat sandwich other families around home called sloppy joes. We attributed this to our mother growing up in Des Moines, but I also see references to others thinking of taverns as being more like what I'm told Maid Rites were like, but never having been exposed to the chain, I couldn't verify that. I saw one claim that the tavern name came from a local restaurant named the Tavern, but given that my mother's childhood predated that restaurant's existence, I'm a tad skeptical. 

At any rate, whatever you call them and however you choose to prepare them, at heart they are a simple way to fix a warm meal for a crowd, and easy to make ahead and keep warm in a slow cooker, making them a busy mom's uncomplicated way to get a kid-approved meal that could keep until whenever practice was over. 

They are an unpretentious comfort food it there ever was one, and really don't need to be messed with. Of course, cooks gotta tinker, so  I thought I'd explore some variations as an excuse to have a bite of nostalgia. All four of these are way better than school cafeteria sloppy joes, although that was comparatively edible as school meals went.

Gochujang sloppy joes

From Bon Appetit by Hana Asbrink in February 2023. They allege it serves 4. I would say it serves 10. See takeaway below.

This recipe smacks to me of how I used to approach making meatloaf when my mother put it on the menu. It showed up on the menu a lot, since we raised cattle, and it was not my favorite dish since the basic recipe seemed so very, very bland. So I would try to dump the contents of various condiments into the meat mixture in hopes of spicing it up. I can't say as it accomplished that, but it didn't make it any worse, at any rate. I was limited to the spice rack offerings and condiments of a Midwestern farm kitchen in the 1970s, so there was a limit to what I could get up to. No gochujang in sight.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 pound ground beef
Kosher salt, divided
1 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1 medium onion, finely chopped
6 to 8 garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons gochujang
2 tablespoons ketchup
1 tablespoon soy sauce or tamari
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon yellow mustard
1 15-ounce can tomato sauce
¼ cup water
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
Buns for serving

Method

Heat oil in a large deep pot. Add ground beef and brown until mostly cooked. Push to the side of the pot and add green pepper, onion and garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Cook over medium heat until vegetables are softened. Add gochujang, ketchup, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, mustard, tomato sauce and water. Cook, uncovered, until mixture tightens to a thick sauce; you don't want this runny. Remove from heat and add balsamic vinegar. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed. Serve on hamburger buns or potato rolls.

Rating: I still say this list of ingredients looks like the result of a condiment dump or cleanup, but it's a perfectly tasty one. Not spicy, but flavorful. Better than the taverns/sloppy joes I remember from school days. There are definitely worse ways to use up the condiments lurking in the door of your refrigerator. I froze the leftovers in the one-cup portion silicon freezer trays and thaw one of the cups when we want a no-fuss lunch.

Veggie sloppy joes

From Better Homes & Gardens, July/August 2024 issue. Serves 10 quite amply, maybe even 12.  I actually made this recipe before the other three which led me down the sloppy joe rabbit hole to refresh my memory of the meaty version to see how they compared.

Ingredients
1½ cups brown lentils, rinsed  and drained
½ brown rice
1 cup chopped carrot
½ cup chopped onion
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tablespoon yellow mustard
1 tablespoon molasses
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon salt 
4 cups chicken broth
8 ounces cremini mushrooms, chopped
1 15-ounce can tomato sauce
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
10 hamburger buns, toasted
Pickled unions and lettuce for optional toppings

Method

Combine lentils, rice, carrot, onion, garlic, mustard, molasses, cayenne, salt and chicken broth in a large slow cooker. Heat on high for 3½ to 4 hours or on low for 6 to 7 hours. Add tomato sauce, mushrooms and vinegar and cook for another half hour. Serve on toasted buns.

Rating: Well, it's certainly got the sloppy part nailed. Definitely not a good candidate for finger food, since so much of it escapes. Dave refers to these as faux joes or loose lentils. He liked the flavor, but found them a challenge to consume since so much sploots out the sides. It's one of those sandwiches you really can't put down once you pick it up because of structural integrity concerns. The problem was eased a bit when I dialed back the filling to bun ratio with the leftovers to what I considered to be a more normal amount; they're plenty filling. 

They don't taste that much like meat sloppy joes, but they are reasonably tasty, and apparently smell that way too. I opted to make these on high so we could have a lunch that didn't require much kitchen prep time while we had workers in the house finally repairing a plumbing disaster. When they departed, they said they were going to have to get it written into their next contract that there should be no crock pot meals being made while they're on the job site so they aren't tortured by smelling warm food. I wonder if they would have felt that way if they'd known it was lentils.

Definitely sloppy.

Leftover notes: It reheats just fine. I opted to store some of the leftovers in some souper cubes so we can opt for some warm comfort food on short notice. Just remember to provide lots of napkins or else a spoon. Having since made the gochujang version, I'm curious to know if adding some of that to this lentil version would amp up the flavor to the point where it would be a more fair fight in a taste comparison between the meaty-but-meatless lentil version and standard meat versions. I did find that mashing up some of the lentils helped it bind together a bit more.

Sloppy Janes

I wanted to try another meatless version just to give it another chance, to see if the reason the meat version was so much better than the lentil-based version was the meat itself or the spice profile. This version from "Vegetarian Heartland" by Shelly Westerhausen seemed like a decent bet.

Note: If you opt to make the pickles, you'll need to start this days ahead. I'm not going to say they're required, but I will report that you won't mind if you do, even though the need to take the very simple steps to make them delayed me making these for far too long. It's so unpredictable when I'll feel lazy in the kitchen.

Ingredients

1 24-ounce jar dill pickle spears
2 cups sugar
2 cinnamon sticks

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
2 celery stalks, diced
2 medium carrots, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 cups broth or water
½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon tamari
2 teaspoons seasoned rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon honey
1 6-ounce container tomato paste
½ cup finely chopped walnuts
1 15-ounce can pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 15-ounce can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
Hamburger buns (figure on 8 to 10, depending on how full you fill them, we used 10)

Method
Drain the pickles and cut into bite-size chunks. Place back in the same jar and cover with water. Let soak for 24 hours, then drain and place into a large jar. Combine sugar and 1 cup of water until dissolved and pour mixture over the pickles. Tuck in the cinnamon sticks. Cover and refrigerate at least 48 hours to allow the flavors to blend. The recipe notes that they'll keep up to 6 months, but once you try them, you'll pretty quickly find uses for them.

For the filling, heat olive oil in a large deep pan. Cook onion, celery and carrots over medium heat until very soft. Add garlic and cumin and cook for 1 minute. Add oregano, broth, red pepper flakes, tamari, vinegar, honey, tomato paste, walnuts and beans and simmer until it thickens into serving consistency. Season with salt and pepper if desired. Serve on buns and top with the pickles.

Rating: OK, so these work on a lot of levels. It's kind of like going to a place that you know has a good bean burger when that's what you're in the market for; it's not a meat burger, but it's good at being what it is. It definitely brings the flavor profile. And those pickles add an interesting touch. I'm not super into sweet pickles, but this kind of splits the difference, and the cinnamon pairs with the sloppy joe spices for a nice effect. Would definitely consider making this one again.

Sloppy Ottos

And then there's Sloppy Joe's cousin, Sloppy Otto. I ran across this one online and found a number of variations. They didn't always agree on the meat, but there seemed to be a greater tendency to use pork sausage. Sauerkraut and pretzel buns seemed to be a constant, but they varied on whether you added cheese to the assembled bun and melted it. There was wide variation in the ratio of kraut to meat. Sour cream crept in, or didn't. One suspects there are as many recipes for this as there are German great-grandmothers.

Here's where I landed. It's probably closest to the Taste of Home version as any other. 

Ingredients
1 pound bulk spicy pork sausage
1½ cups sauerkraut, well drained
2 medium bell peppers of the color of your choice, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
Pretzel buns for serving (8 to 10 depending on meat serving size of choice)
Sliced Muenster cheese 

Method

Preheat oven to 350. 

In a large pan, brown sausage. Add sauerkraut, peppers and onion. Cook over medium heat until vegetables are tender.

Dish meat onto buns. Top with a cheese slice. Bake for 4 minutes or so or until cheese is melted.

Rating: The addition of cheese to this version makes them much less sloppy since the melted cheese helps hold the mixture in place. The flavor is going to depend on the spiciness of your sausage, and I would avoid a bland cheese. These weren't bad, or anything, but they do fall into the category of worth trying but not worth repeating unless you had that German great-grandmother who made these.

Takeaway

I'd kind of written taverns/sloppy joes permanently off my menu as kid food, and we no longer eat much in the way of beef, but maybe I was a bit hasty. Given that each recipe yields a lot of servings that you can freeze to pull out later, they count as a pretty good meal prep option. 

And whatever you call them, there seems to be one other point of contention: how much they serve. Ordinarily I quibble with the number of servings in a recipe in the other direction: that they're way too stingy, but the original specified serving amount in these recipes were off wildly in the other direction from my perspective. If you tried to pile on that much meat it would immediately squelch out when you pick it up and result in a soggy sandwich that instantly loses integrity. Dave remembers being served the same quantity per bun as I do, so perhaps it was a Midwestern church basement standard serving size we were used to. It was farm country, so it's not like people were always trying to stretch the meat since that was one thing for which you didn't have to pay retail. I don't know how to account for that disconnect, but it was consistent across all the recipes.

Breakfast egg sandwiches, only for lunch

 

In between the sky is falling posts and cat videos, my Instagram feed quickly seemed to default to offering me all sorts of variations on what people refer to as breakfast sandwiches. Something that you can prep a bunch of for the week and quickly zap in the microwave on the way out the door or at the office. 

Since I've never been a big breakfast eater except on Sundays when we treat it as more like a brunch, I never really saw the point. But the same premise definitely applies to a fast lunch fix, and I find I'm still in need of those, so I decided to test drive some of the more promising recipes out there from Instagram-land and beyond.

Freezer egg sandwiches

From Better Homes & Gardens, January 2020 issue

Ingredients

8 eggs, beaten
⅓ cup milk
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground pepper
6 English muffins, toasted
6 slices cooked bacon
6 slices Cheddar cheese
Fresh spinach leaves, optional

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 13- by 9-inch pan with tin foil. Spray with cooking spray. Combine eggs, milk, herbs, mustard and salt and pepper in a medium bowl. Pour into prepared pan and bake until set, 8 to 12 minutes. Slice into six pieces, then each piece in half. Stack two slices on one half of an English muffin, then top each with a slice of bacon and a slice of cheese. (If using spinach, you can tuck that in on top of the cheese before topping with remaining muffin half once you're ready to reheat them.) Bake until cheese melts.

To assemble ahead and reheat, wrap prepared sandwiches in plastic wrap after assembling them and before melting the cheese. Ostensibly you can freeze them, then remove the plastic wrap and reheat them in a paper towel in the microwave for a minute or two. 

Rating: Tasty. The herbs and mustard give the eggs some character. It's a bit like bacon cheeseburger topping meets egg sandwich. As for their instructions about reheating, well, I'm not a microwave fan in this case because of what it does to bread products, so I opt for reheating in a 350-degree oven until the cheese melts and sandwich is warmed through. I couldn't bring myself to try it from a frozen state, but I'm not imagining that being the work of a moment. It still counts as tasty fast food, at any rate.

Tomato, feta egg sandwiches

This is kind of like a bit of a caprese version of an egg sandwich, or at least one that incorporates flavors of peak summer with pesto and tomatoes. Adapted from the Instagram post of ellena_fit; go there if you want a video how-to. She cut her frittata into 4 pieces that were a bit deeper to make 4 sandwiches, but given my pan dimensions (8-by-10) it made sense to cut them into 6 because otherwise it would have hung over the edge quite a bit.

Ingredients
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1 teaspoon olive oil
8 eggs
A generous ½ cup of cottage cheese
2 tablespoons torn fresh basil leaves or 1 tablespoon oregano leaves
½ salt, plus more for sprinkling
½ cup crumbled feta
6 English muffins, split and toasted
6 slices of mozzarella
Pesto for spreading 

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place tomatoes in a mid-size baking dish. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with some salt. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until smooshable. Remove from oven. I chose to smoosh a few of the tomatoes and leave the rest whole.

Combine eggs, cottage cheese, herbs, ½ salt and a generous grind of pepper. Pour over tomatoes in pan. Sprinkle top with feta. Bake for 20 minutes until set. Let cool slightly.

Cut egg bake into 6 pieces. Spread toasted English muffins with pesto. Top muffin bottoms with a square of egg bake, a slice of mozzarella and the English muffin tops. Bake at 350 until cheese is melted and sandwich is heated through.

I opted to store the egg bake separately after serving us sandwiches for lunch because I was concerned that the amount of liquid in the pesto and tomatoes might result in a somewhat soggy sandwich if stored assembled, but I suppose that depends on the nature of your pesto.

Rating: The tomatoes and feta help bring more to the egg party, and pesto pairs nicely with the tomatoes. This sandwich had surprisingly good structural integrity, which can be an issue with this type of sandwich. With prebaked, precut egg bake squares it's no more trouble to make than any sandwich for lunch and it's another way to get a decent hot sandwich into the rotation on a cold day along with the soup du jour or semaine.

Bacon, egg and cheese bagels

Also from ellena_fit on Instagram.

Ingredients
4 bagels (the everything bagels worked well here)
8 eggs
½ cup cottage cheese
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
4 slices of cooked bacon, chopped
½ salt
4 slices smoked gouda or cheddar cheese
Sriracha mayo for spreading, or see Cane's dipping sauce recipe below

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-by-8 pan. Combine eggs, cottage cheese, chives, salt and a generous sprinkle of pepper in a bowl. Stir in bacon. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool slightly. Cut into 4 squares. Spread bagels with mayo or dip. Top each with a quarter of the egg bake and a slice of cheese. Return to oven and cook about 5 minutes until cheese melts.

Rating: This was my favorite one so far. The everything bagels really brought a little something to the party, as did that dip. (Oh, that dip. It should probably be illegal.) The bacon comes through and the smoked gouda is a nice touch. 

Cane's sauce

From Diane Morrisey's Instagram post, her version of a dipping sauce from the Raising Cane restaurant. The flavor deepens a bit if you refrigerate it for a time instead of trying to use it right away. She paired hers with homemade fish sticks, which seems like another really yummy usage, and she includes a recipe at that link.

1 cup mayonnaise
¼ cup ketchup
½ teaspoon cayenne powder
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
2 teaspoons white vinegar
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

Combine all sauce ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Definitely a little kick to it, but not like get-me-water hot or anything.  The sauce is a definite keeper.

Did I need to try yet another version? Possibly not, but I did it anyway:

Spicy maple breakfast sandwiches 

Adapted from "good mood food” from Kale Me Maybe’s Carina Wolff. This one drew my interest because of the homemade sausage and I liked the idea of cutting out circles of egg bake to match the English muffin size. More on that later.

Ingredients

2 tablespoon olive oil, divided
2 pounds ground pork
⅓ cup maple syrup
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt, divided
1 tablespoon Calabrian chili
10 eggs
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 small onion, diced
⅓ cup milk
2 cups baby spinach leaves
10 English muffins, toasted
10 slices cheese of choice, I found pepper jack works well here

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9-by-13 pan with parchment paper.

Heat olive oil in a large nonstick skillet. Combine pork, maple syrup, garlic powder, ¼ salt and Calabrian chili in a bowl. Form into 10 patties. Cook in oil until cooked through, flipping half way through. Remove from pan and set aside on paper towels.

If needed, add additional 1 tablespoon olive oil to the skillet; depending on the fat content of your meat you might have plenty in the pan. Cook onion and bell pepper and until softened. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Combine eggs, milk and remaining salt in a bowl. Stir in sauteed vegetables and spinach. Pour into pan and bake 20-25 minutes or until set. 

Cut egg bake into 10 pieces. Place egg bake on an English muffin. Top with a sausage and a slice of cheese and English muffin top. Bake until cheese melts. Alternatively, you can assemble them and then either bake or microwave them later. I did resort to the microwave once with these, because, well, I needed to clean my oven after some of the egg bake fell off a sandwich onto the oven floor. A minute on high wrapped in a paper towel will heat them through and melt the cheese, providing you don't mind rubbery cheese. 

Rating: The sausages definitely bring a lot to the party and have some merit on their own. That said, if you want to simplify the prep, if you've got a good breakfast sausage brand you like, you could cook that up instead. The frittata portion is fine, and adding the spinach to the bake itself is a good call, but it's really that sausage patty doing the work. The original recipe called for ground turkey, but I wound up with pork on hand instead, so it's possible that affected the patty size. As it was, those 10 patties were pretty much small breakfast sausage size, so I didn't see the point of having equally small rounds of egg bake when the muffins were significantly bigger diameter, so I skipped that bit. I tried this once following the egg bake instructions and wound up with nearly double the amount of egg bake to sausage ratio, so I took another whack at it to rationalize for my use case.

Takeaways

So am I enamored with the make-ahead breakfast sandwich genre? Well, not entirely. The part where I had some prepped sandwich portions to assemble quickly certainly had merit. After trying the microwave approach I definitely did not appreciate what it does to cheese, so I prefer the oven, but I get that if you were transporting them to an office setting they're better than nothing. 

The key: Something that makes them tasty, and generally that something is going to come in the form of meat. The one vegetarian option I tried compensated by bringing in more flavor to the egg bake portion, which helped, but the meat was definitely doing the heavy flavor lifting in these sandwiches. Everything-seasoned bagels are also a plus, and there's no reason to settle for bland cheese. 

That said, as much as I adore advance meal prep as a practice, it can't really hold a candle to my preferred breakfast sandwich of softly scrambled eggs piled on a brioche bun, topped with a slice of cooked bacon and a slice of smoked gouda cheese melted in the oven. Because good things often do reward spending just a bit more time, when you have it. 

Bacon cheddar tea sandwiches

Cut off the crusts and slice the triangles in half and you get tea sandwiches.

Tea sandwiches at the cabin? Why not?

While Cabin Breakfasts get the most advance prep attention before our annual trip north, I always try to come up with some sandwich enhancers to take along to elevate lunch choices. This year I opted to try this tea sandwich filling, which I ran across when trying to make inroads into some 20-year-old magazines. 

The factor that led me to try it as a cabin option was the fact that it looked like something that would work really well on presliced brioche bread, which has the advantage of being viable longer than some other types of bread, and we haven't generally had good luck buying good sandwich bread at the stores in Grand Marais so I try to take something along. I've resorted to the potato rolls at Gene's as being the most viable option ever since The Loafer was no more. (The building that housed that much-missed establishment has passed through two incarnations as a restaurant and now appears to be associated with real estate sales.)

But a new option opened in town after our visit last year, so I may no longer need to rely on ferrying bread north. They offer some basic loaves, focaccia and several sweet rolls from cruffins to all manner of croissant. On the way out of town we stopped at Crosby Bakery and picked up a sourdough loaf and a couple of ham and cheese croissant that we had for a lunch during a stop at Hoops in Duluth on the way back. Definitely a good call.

Bacon and cheddar tea sandwiches

Adapted from Cooking Light, December 2005, which specified reduced fat cheese and fat-free cream cheese and mayo. I used Cry Baby Craig’s jalapeño and garlic hot sauce. I also left on the crusts and didn't do the second diagonal cut to make them into tea sandwiches.

Ingredients
1½ cup shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
 5 tablespoons cream cheese, softened
 5 tablespoons thinly sliced green onions
 1 ½ tablespoons mayonnaise
 1¼ teaspoon hot sauce
 3 bacon slices, cooked and crumbled
 12 slices bread, crusts removed if making them into tea sandwiches
 Microgreen sprouts

Method
Combine cheese, cream cheese, green onion, mayonnaise, hot sauce and bacon. Spread on half of bread slices. Top with sprouts and remaining bread. Cut in half diagonally, and to make into tea sandwiches, cut each diagonal in half to make four small triangles out of one sandwich.

Rating: These would make really nice actual tea sandwiches, although I'm not sure I'd choose to make them for a large party since the bacon makes them off limits for a couple of dietary subsets. But as a filling on brioche bread, they were very tasty, and work well with the filling made ahead; the filling becomes spreadable in pretty quick order, so you're only a few minutes away from lunch. And the leftovers when we got back made an admirable base for a pizza, with some Parmesan sprinkled on top before baking. 

And of course, the annual waterfall shot:

Egg salad sandwiches with olives and bacon

 

If you're one of those people for whom Easter means needing to do something with hard-cooked eggs, here's a variation on a usual suspect.

All-time favorite egg salad and olive sandwiches
Adapted from “Sunday Soup” by Betty Rosbottom

Ingredients
4 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons finely chopped celery
1 ½ tablespoons chopped pimento-stuffed green olives
2 tablespoons mayonnaise, plus more for spreading bread
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
4 slices white sandwich bread, lightly toasted
4 slices bacon, fried until crisp and golden
4 butterhead lettuce leaves

Method
Combine eggs, celery, olives, mustard, salt and pepper in a small bowl. Spread mayonnaise on one side of toasted bread. Divide egg mixture among two bread halves. Top with half of bacon and half of lettuce and then remaining bread slices. 

Rating: So the thing that's supposed to make this special is the olives. And they're fine. But really, who are we trying to kid here? Putting bacon on egg salad is the part that's cheating, but in a good way.

Grilled onion panini with miso butter

 

In another installment of cheaters always prosper, I gamed this recipe by having a packet of grilled onions in the refrigerator waiting to be used. I always like to maximize any grilling session to get the most out of the coals, so any corners on the grill are a great place to tuck a foil packet of onions, peppers or potatoes to grill along with everything else. Grilled onions make a pretty good stand-in for caramelized onions; they pick up some of that same rich color plus some smokiness from the grill. It's not a one-for-one substitution that I'd use in just any recipe, but they work great on sandwiches like this.

Sometimes in between I forget to think about grilled cheese as a lunch option. I haven't had the Velvetta version in decades. Can one go back, or am I spoiled for life?

 Caramelized onion grilled cheese sandwiches with miso butter
Adapted from “Umami Bomb” by Raquel Pelzel

Ingredients
1 cup caramelized or grilled onions*
3 tablespoons butter at room temperature, divided
1 tablespoon grainy Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon white miso paste
4 slices bread
1 cup grated Gruyere cheese

Method
Mix 1 tablespoon butter, mustard and miso paste. Set aside.

Spread remaining butter on outer surface of 4 bread slices. Spread miso butter on inner surfaces. Divide cheese and caramelized onions between two slices and top with remaining bread slices.

Toast in panini press or toast on both sides over low heat in a skillet until bread is golden brown and cheese is melted.

*To caramelize, thinly slice 1 large onion and saute over low heat in 1 tablespoon salted butter until caramelized. This always takes way longer than any recipe claims. Splash with malt vinegar. Or do yourself a favor and try my favorite slow cooker method from Lora Brody.

To grill onions, Cut a 15-inch length of tin foil. Put sliced onions in the middle in a not too deep layer. Drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt (and fresh herb leaves like thyme if desired). Fold foil in half lengthwise, then keep folding down in half again until the top is sealed. Fold in the ends to seal packet. Place on grill slightly off the hottest area for about 30 minutes.

Rating: Yummy. And with pre-caramelized onions, it's a fast fix. We used the sesame-topped Sicilian loaf from Turtle Bread, which worked well here.