Special to AOL from Dr. Don Kinsman
When I was a child growing up in
Oh, there was also now and then a slab of head cheese which only my Father would eat... along with a slice of the Limburger my Mother insisted he keep wrapped up in aluminum foil on the outside kitchen window ledge. But his guilty pleasures are worth a story all their own.
Then one day all those wonderful meats simply disappeared.
Butch said that the butcher who made them had gone out of business and would not give anyone the recipe. Over the years I have found some pretty good replacements for these long lost goodies -- even for the Dutch loaf -- but they all involve trips to delis, or "foodie markets" featuring meats made by smaller butcher operations and the trip isn't always convenient. So, I have sampled the offerings of a good number of the major commercial, easily available varieties and have settled on a few which are passable for everyday use -- and at least one I downright like a lot.
I find Hillshire Farm's Deli Sliced Honey Ham to be tasty and quite acceptable for a lunchtime sandwich. Personally I favor putting it on lightly buttered bread with good mustard. I like varying the mustard, but am partial to ones that are grainy, stone ground, and dark.
While taste should be paramount, the ol' blood triglyceride levels have made me somewhat fat-content-conscious over the last few years. So, I have honed in on a couple of turkey-based versions of the old fashioned, high fat lunchmeats I have always craved. Oscar Mayer makes a turkey version of cotto salami which I like. I have to admit that I have never been a dyed-in-the-wool cotto fan so I don't have a benchmark to go by, but I find this lunchmeat to be satisfying enough in a sandwich, usually with cheese.
Oscar Mayer also makes a turkey bologna, which I'll use a low-fat substitute. I must admit that eating a slice all by itself without the bread and other "fixins" reminds me that in spite of its often mysterious origins the full-fat bologna does taste better. But this turkey bologna, when slapped onto a slice of old-fashioned white bread with a little margarine and a slice of what I call "phony cheese" (you know, one of those no-fat, individually wrapped mystery slabs) evokes just enough good memories of my "fat-be-darned days" and is tasty enough that I'll let it slide.
With no qualifications about healthiness, taste, or anything else, I do like Oscar Mayer's hard salami. Okay, it IS a bit higher in fat than I feel comfortable with these days, but after all -- it's salami. Thus, I have devised a sort of justification system for scarfing down a handful of slices on buttered white bread. My wife and I periodically invite guests over and I'll make a salad of artichokes, tomatoes and olives with pieces of salami. Well, you always have left over salami and it would just be wrong to waste it, right?
I have tried various brands and forms of salami for this recipe, but find the Oscar Mayer packaged salami slices to be best and when I eat them later I find that a few slices stacked together give just the right texture and thickness. And, most important of all, they taste really good to me.
After all, as a character whose name I forget in a teen comedy movie whose name I also forget once said: "I can't live without salami." (Editor's note: It's "Zapped", but I suppose I'll let that slide, Dad)
Do you like Dutch loaf and salami, or is all that just baloney to ya? Post your comments below.
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