Semiserious Chefs

At last! After way too long, the Mutant Zombie sandwich recipe is finally posted. Now, I know what you’re thinking – what in the world is a Mutant Zombie sandwich? It’s nothing but a silly name, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the sandwich, apart from the fact that it was one of the ingredients I was forced (by a 4 year old) to use for the recipe. “Forced” might be a bit of a stretch, but he did have a snowball in his hand and that was kind of scary. Anyway, I hope this sandwich catches on and becomes popular and then some big corporation offers us money to purchase the rights to the sandwich…and that’s not really how any of this works is it?

Let me back up real quick. In our previous post, I got the bright idea of having Nathan and his day-care friend Zeke give me some ingredients that I could then use to come up with a brand new dish. And I even came up with a catchy name for the challenge. You can read the post here: Kid Challenge Recipe Time. Pretty good name huh? But if you don’t feel like reading the post, here are the five ingredients that must be used: wheat bread, ginger, garlic, milk, and mutant zombies. There were supposed to be six ingredients but Zeke was happy with just giving me two.

I must say however, I am quite happy with what we’ve put together. I say ‘we’ because Vanessa came up with some great ideas to really step this dish up. One of them being to use some wasabi-mayo as a spread for the wheat bread. Not to keep the bread moist – the coleslaw and apple bourbon chicken will handle that just fine – but to add a further layer of flavoring to the sandwich. It should add a touch of heat to compliment the sweetness of the apple bourbon chicken.

Originally I had planned to use the garlic and the ginger together with some chicken to make an offbeat teriyaki sauce of some kind. But then Vanessa had a better idea. Bourbon…

So after some careful consideration, we knew what we wanted to do. We would keep the garlic with the chicken but eliminate the ginger by placing it in the coleslaw instead. And before we knew it, we had already found uses for two of the ingredients: the milk and the ginger. I’m happy with that decision because I don’t know if ginger and bourbon would make for a good combination.

As usual, after a few unsuccessful attempts with the chicken we finally figured out what it needed. And that’s why whenever we’re trying to make a new recipe, we devote one of our weekend days to experimenting with new ideas. It can be time consuming. Especially when we consistently run out of ingredients and have to go to the store for more supplies. And then when we get back to the house, we realize we forgot one thing or another and have to go back to the store. At least (even though I don’t understand why we still have it) today is daylight savings time and we get another hour of light during the evening.

So anyway, we didn’t want to do a barbecue sauce (especially not the thick gooey kind that’s loaded with corn syrup) and we didn’t want to try and copy-cat a bourbon chicken recipe. Mostly because I had decided I absolutely wasn’t going to use soy sauce in this recipe. And we all know that since Wikipedia never lies and it has has soy sauce listed as one of the ingredients for bourbon chicken, it must be true. I don’t know why I was so opposed to it, but it could have to do with staying away from falling into the same rut of making a teriyaki sauce like I always seem to do. This had to be original (at least to us) and apple juice seemed to be a great choice to compliment the bourbon.

Thus was born our version of something called “The Apple Bourbon Chicken Sandwich”. I should really take this opportunity right now to talk about the chicken (I think his name was Dave) for a minute. The recipe below only calls for thawed cubed chicken meat. It doesn’t specify light or dark, so choose what you will. Keep in mind though, it will change the taste a little depending on what you pick. If I had to choose light or dark meat, I would go with white meat for this one. But that’s just me.

In addition – and if you have enough time – you could very easily soak your chicken in a brine for a while. I say “for a while” because I don’t know how big your chicken pieces are going to be. If the chicken is already cubed then it probably only needs about 30 minutes. But you can definitely let it soak longer if you want. You could also soak the chicken in buttermilk or plain yogurt overnight to make the chicken more tender. Or you can do nothing and simply cube it and toss it in the frying pan.

Oh yeah, I should probably say something about the wasabi mayo blend. In addition to blending with the ginger coleslaw like a champ, it gives just a little bite to the sandwich that works wonderfully. You can go about making this mayonnaise in one of two ways. Actually, I think I should say you can either make it yourself or buy some wasabi horseradish mayonnaise from the store. We like this brand here: Beaver

Don’t worry, that’s not an affiliate link. It might have been at one time, but quite frankly I don’t even know if I remember how to log into my account. Oh, and what’s up with those prices? I wonder if they include shipping?

I’m almost done here I promise, but I have to say to everyone that the ingredients listed below for the apple bourbon chicken produce a sauce with just a subtle amount of bourbon flavor. If you like the idea of a sauce that screams bourbon, you will definitely want to add some more at the very end. And you also might prefer to sauté some onions with the chicken and garlic.

One of my original attempts at creating the sauce included caramelizing some onions, but unfortunately I felt that the onions just didn’t work the way I was hoping. They kind of took away from the dish or somehow made it more complicated than it should be. In the end, I think by keeping it simple and making an easy sauce and mixing it with cubed chicken, we worked out a new recipe that we were both pleased with. Serve the sandwich with your favorite potato chips and call it a meal. Speaking of potato chips, that’s something Vanessa and I should look into making. Crushed red pepper flavored chips anyone?

Lastly, I want to say that this sandwich was simply something Vanessa and I could have fun coming up with. It’s not supposed to be serious, it’s supposed to be silly. But as a bonus, it just happens to taste pretty good. That reminds me, I need to put some of my mad-crazy image manipulation skills to work and add a zombie to one of the pictures in this post. After all, that is the only ingredient we haven’t used yet. And if you don’t believe I have skills just check out the picture below.