Chicken-Avo-Hell-Yeah

In my opinion, anything served on grilled bread is already A+. That goes double for sandwiches. And we’re big sandwich fans around here. Especially those of the open face* variety.

Lately, I’ve been seeing ads for open faced ciabatta sandwiches, which has made me be all “Yes. Yes please, chicken and bacon and avocado open face sandwich.” It’s a simple idea with simple ingredients, and sure, it’s an idea that’s well visited, but that doesn’t mean it’s not truly fantastic. So I scraped change together, collected the ingredients, and went for it. And it turned out to be one of the best sandwich meals I’ve made, so it gets a blog.

And you should definitely try it sometime:

Chicken-Avo-Hell-Yeah
Makes 4 open face sandwich slices

What you’ll need:

– 2 chicken breasts, cut into strips (I used pre-cut strips, because I’m lazy)
– 1 package bacon or pancetta, diced (I used pancetta because it’s tastier, fancier bacon, and crisps better than Australian bacon. Also, it was on sale and cheaper than bacon.)
– 1 small-medium tomato, or 3 cherry tomatoes (which is what I used, because I had them at home and didn’t want to buy more)
– 1 large avocado
– 1 lemon
– 1 large ciabatta loaf, or 4 small ciabatta rolls (I went with Turkish sea salt flat bread, because they ran out of ciabatta bread at the bakery and I was on a time crunch)
– olive oil and butter
-salt, pepper, paprika

Step 1: Heat a glug of olive oil in a pan (if using pancetta, not if you’re using bacon) in a large skillet on medium-high heat. Bacon will produce it’s own glorious grease if you’re in the States and are eating American style bacon. I miss bacon grease.

Step 2: toss in the pancetta/bacon, and fry until crispy. Crispy is important here. Like, really important. You don’t want to throw off the Texture Continuum. Once it’s reached the appropriate crispiness, transfer the meat to a bowl, but leave the drippings in the pan. You’ll thank me in the next step.

DSCF1234 — whoops, blurry! Camera can’t handle that crispy pancetta action.

Step 3: add another glug of olive oil to the pan and cook the chicken strips. Unless you’re cooking the chicken in bacon grease. I cooked mine in the pancetta drippings. mmmm.

I’ve found that the best way to cook chicken is to cook it all the way through. Take it from me, but it’s awkward when you give someone salmonella poisoning. Also, be generous with the olive oil, salt, and pepper. Unless you like dried card board that kinda tastes like chicken.

4. Remove from pan and dice/cube/rip the strips until they’re size that’s comparable to your mouth. No choking, please.

5. Suddenly remember you have to smash up the avocado. Dice the tomatoes first.

It’s hard to dice cherry tomatoes. But they’re tiny and cute, so that makes up for it. Don’t worry, you too can use a steak knife to cut your tomatoes. This is a safe place, no judgement.

6. slice and de-shell avocado. Almost take your finger off removing the seed with that cool knife trick Leigh taught you.

7. Mash the avocado with tomato, a squeeze of lemon juice, salt, pepper, olive oil, and a bit of paprika. At this point, you might remember to add onion and jalapeno, but then that would be guacamole and you suck at making guacamole.

8. Slice the bread, butter the shit out of it, and toss it under the grill, or face down on a hot skillet. You can also toast it, but do it on a low setting so the bread doesn’t get extra hard. I’d recommend grilling it in the bacon/pancetta drippings, but the chicken hogged all that up. Good for the chicken, sad for the bread. But, the bread gets butter. And butter is Godly.