I’m pretty excited to share this recipe with you.  It’s a good one.  I love sandwiches, and I especially love warm, ooey-gooey slider sandwiches.  And I really love a good Reuben.  This is like, the nexus of the sandwich universe.  Or something.

My family isn’t doing our annual St. Patrick’s Day dinner until next week sometime, so I know that tomorrow (on the actual holiday) I will want something corn-beefy to tide me over until next week when we can celebrate.  Since there is an abundance of basketball on this weekend as well, this also serves as a great sporting event food.  The sandwiches are small enough to be considered a “finger food” and the recipe makes a bunch of them so it’s easy to feed a crowd.  (Just double the recipe for 24 sandwiches.) Lots of times when I’m entertaining, I’ll prepare a bunch of these and keep them in the refrigerator  overnight. Then when my guests arrive I just pop them in the oven for a few minutes – it makes for an easy but tasty & stress free party food.

I’ve been meaning to make homemade Thousand Island dressing for quite a while now,  so this was really the perfect excuse.  I do have to say that the homemade version is much better than the store-bought, and it really enhances these sandwiches and gives them a little bit of a kick.  Plus, it’s only 4 ingredients so there’s really no excuse not to just whip it up.

If you decide not to go the homemade route, I would alter the recipe a bit – you might want to do Thousand Island on the top half of the sandwich and slather some mayo on the bottom half.  The mayo gives the sandwich a creaminess that really adds to the overall decadence of the sandwich, and I’m not sure you can replicate that with store-bought Thousand Island alone.