Grilled Vegetable Paninis

Today, I made grilled vegetable paninis! Zach keeps his allrecipes.com account up to date, and adds good looking meals he wants to try to his recipe box. I was flipping through it this morning, and found this recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Grilled-Mediterranean-Vegetable-Sandwich/Detail.aspx. (The recipe online has a prep time of about 3 hours because it wants you to flatten the sandwiches for 2 hours, but I skipped that part, and the whole thing took me about 30 minutes, including the roasting in the oven.)

So, I trekked to the store to pick up my ingredients. Red bell pepper, eggplant, olive bread, portabello mushroom caps, and some extra vegetables and pita chips for the sides.

The recipe called for mayonnaise with some chopped up garlic, and I spread that on one piece of bread per sandwich. Additionally, I threw the sliced red pepper and eggplant in the oven with olive oil and salt and pepper to roast for about 20 minutes, until the eggplant was tender, and the pepper was charred. In a separate pan, I sauteed the mushrooms for about 5 minutes, until tender.

Here are the assembled sandwiches.

We got a cast iron grill pan a couple of weeks ago, and it's perfect to get the grill marks on the paninis, and it really crisped up the olive bread.

Ready to eat!

Isn't that a good lookin' lunch?

Sometimes it's nice to have a vegetarian meal that doesn't weigh you down. This was a wonderful meal on a beautiful Sunday. Plus, Zach did the dishes, so that was even better!

Happy eating!