I’ve put together a few kale sandwiches before, and the results were quite pleasant. Vegetables get short shrift in the sandwich world, rarely given an opportunity to stand as starring ingredients. There are plenty of reasons for that, some of them valid, but the fact remains that it need not always be that way. It’s a bit tough to make out all of what’s in there, but this sandwich consists of roasted eggplant, caramelized onions, kale sauteed in cabernet sauvignon, all on a homemade buttermilk white bread that had been spread with a bit of roasted garlic butter. That’s a short step away from a vegan sandwich, you’ll note, and switching out the butter for something like Earth Balance would hardly harm things.

Now, it’s possible that this sandwich could have been even better with something smokey and fatty. This was delicious on its own, and the world is better off with more than a handful of light, tasty, meatless sandwiches.

I had never heard of lutenica and ajvar when they were suggested to me. Native to Eastern Europe, I simply hadn’t come across them. But they came from a noted associate, so though it took me some time to get around to them, now that I’ve done so I’m glad I did. The challenge with these sorts of sandwiches is that if you include too many ingredients you risk losing the focus of the sandwich, and if you don’t add enough you simply haven’t much sandwich. Condiments are condiments for a reason, in other words. But I like a challenge, so ajvar and lutenica sandwiches it was.

Ajvar is built around roasted red peppers, with plenty of eggplant and garlic to round out the flavors, and chili peppers to give it a backbone of heat. The idea you see above came from a different associate, and is simply switching ajvar into a caprese sandwich in place of the tomato. This resulted in a fine sandwich, with the spicy finish of the ajvar giving it a dimension the standard caprese sandwich doesn’t have. A fine sandwich, but not one that represents a tremendous degree of difficulty. I had bigger plans in store.

But first, the lutenica. Built around tomatoes, peppers and carrots, this was sweeter than the ajvar and lacked the heat on the finish. (I understand that lack of heat may be atypical for lutenica, but the contrast between the two served me well.) With concerns over overwhelming the relish in mind, I paired it with some zucchini, panko breaded and baked, and a fried egg. Zucchini don’t have a tremendously assertive flavor, and the egg is resonating on a different level than the relish. This one worked as planned, with the vegetables in the relish playing well with the zucchini and the egg giving the sandwich a rich body it would have otherwise lacked. But this also wasn’t too adventurous. The challenges of building a sandwich around a spread deserved a bold gambit.

That, friends, is a wheat roll with ajvar, roasted carrots, and nutella. Ajvar is sweet and spicy. Chocolate and spice go quite well together. Was it so crazy to believe that the key to a sandwich built around a spread was another spread? But two condiments does not a sandwich make, and that left me considering the middle. Contrast didn’t seem like it would be the right play, something bitter or with too much contrast would just throw off the harmony. There are only a few ingredients here; if they aren’t working together there isn’t much left. So that meant carrots. One of the sweetest of vegetables, a roast carrot had the crucial sugars to play along with the rest of the sandwich, but a nuttiness that brought something the other two were lacking. This was a sandwich that doesn’t sell itself on the first bite, but if you stick with it, there’s something very enjoyable going on. I like this sandwich. I’m not going to make it every day, or even every week, but if I found myself entertaining associates on a Saturday afternoon, I just might put together a few just for the thrill of making people eat chocolate carrots.

Lastly, a sandwich that is a nod to the fact that these are, ultimately, condiments. That is not a criticism, mind you, just a note that they actually go quite well with any number of things. Here I went with a bed of spinach, and some vegetarian faux-sausage with ajvar piled on one half and lutenica on the other. It was delightful, and any actual sausage would have worked just as well. That’s sort of the point, that most anything would work. Any sandwich enthusiast should be able to put a spicy/sweet condiment to work on a dozen different sandwiches without strain. If you’re willing to sacrifice the spreads as the central element of the sandwich, the possibilities are nearly limitless. I’ve now got two nearly-full jars in my fridge, and a good number of tasty sandwiches in my future.

Theoretically, one could make a sandwich out of anything. One shouldn’t, though, because there are lots of things that simply don’t lend themselves to the format. After spotting some gorgeous green and purple Brussels sprouts at the farmer’s market, I had to wonder just how they would fare. After a while, it was clear that the only way to test it out was to give it a shot. So I thought about the kinds of things normally served with sprouts, and in short order I had my game plan. If Brussels sprouts were ever going to work, they were going to work in this sandwich. Roasted garlic on the bottom. A layer of bacon over that, and deeply caramelized onions on top of the bacon. Then the sprouts, which had been tossed with salt and pepper and a touch of bacon grease and then roasted until beginning to brown. On top of the sprouts went some blue cheese crumbles and toasted walnuts, both scattered so as to not appear in every bite. Brown mustard capped things off, and the lot of it went between two pieces of sourdough, the particulars of which I will come to in a moment.

Friends, I was struck dumb. It’s a feeling familiar to many enthusiasts, but I took a bite of this sandwich and then stopped, staring down at my hand. It was transcendent. Every piece worked in concert with every other piece, and together they formed a rich medley that was far beyond the sum of its parts. The roasted garlic was as delicious as roasted garlic always is, bacon was salty and savory (let it never be said that I am categorically against bacon), the onions brought a welcome sweetness that tempered the deep richness of the sprouts, and the bites were divided between being capped by a tang of cheese or an echoing nuttiness. It may seem that I stacked the deck, but I genuinely felt that sprouts had such a distinct flavor they needed all of this to create the harmony that a great sandwich requires. The nuts could probably go and they wouldn’t be missed, but with any other ingredient removed I feel like this sandwich takes a big step down.

A note about the bread: Brussels sprouts, shaped as they are, present a great risk of filling creep. Even after being halved for the roasting, they still make for tricky sandwich assembly and even trickier eating. In order to solve this problem I cheated a bit, namely by selecting bread that had a nice dome to it. I used a miniature sourdough round, but anything with the proper shape will do. After slicing it in two, I went about scraping much of the bread out of the top half of the sandwich. This always feels like a bit of a betrayal to me – bread brings so much to sandwiches and here I am, telling much of it to get lost. But that’s the only way this works, is to hollow out the top half so that it forms something of a cap over the ingredients. When constructing the sandwich I left a clear lip so that the bread might be flush with the bottom half at the edges, and all together the sandwich was as manageable as could be. There was still some creep out of the front, but it really was as stable as I could reasonably ask.

I am usually fairly conservative in my home sandwiches, preferring to let more skilled chefs explore the margins. But if a few more sandwiches turn out like this one, it won’t be long before I’m keen to put just about anything between bread.