this fat Tuesday we tried two new incarnations of the muffaletta that weren’t purely sandwiches.  A muffaletta is a strictly New Orleans born sandwich of cured meats, cheese and olive salad that can rightly be called big mouth.  The friday night before fat Tuesday we dropped in to one of our favorite restaurants, Tibby’s for a hit of dinner.  We don’t usually have apps as we really want a beignet after dinner and apps and dessert are just too much.  Our server talked us into trying one though – a muffaletta spring roll.  Bizarre right?  To me, a spring roll is rice paper and may or may not be fried.  This came to the table as two large scale wonton wrapped bombs!  The standard meats – capicolla, mortadella and ham, provolone cheese and a vinegar hit olive salad wrapped in a pasta wrapper and deep fried.  I didn’t actually expect it to be any good at all.  They served it with a kind of mayo based creole mustard dipping sauce.  They turned out to be tasty in a bar food kind of way.  I might order them again but likely not since I’d rather have a beignet and this put me over the top. 

A few days later I shot a skype to Z with a slideshow of Muffaletta inspired foods that included this burger.  He thought it sounded pretty good so we added it to the weeks dinner menu.  It’s our standard turkey burger but topped with a slightly mod-ed pile of muffaletta toppings – I pan fried the salami to crisp it up, added provolone and a homemade olive salad that include gardiniera I made over the summer, a heaping spoon of capers and red pepper flakes.  We didn’t follow the recipe exactly but it tasted perfect.