Sandwiches I Have Loved

According to some food thing I follow on Twitter (clearly, a reliable source), today is National Sandwich Day. And you know what? I LOVE SANDWICHES.

So to honor this illustrious day, let’s go on a journey of discovery through my sandwich past.

The PB&J: The first sandwich to enter my repertoire was the pb&j, which I ate plenty of because I was quite possibly the pickiest child alive. However, even though my taste buds have matured, I still get a hankering for this classic, especially because I have now discovered the trick of toasting the bread, which makes the peanut butter gooey and the bread crunchy.

(Let it be known that my mom, whose age shall remain undisclosed, still eats a pb&j at least three times a week, and more when my dad travels and she doesn’t feel like cooking. Multi-grain bread, Skippy peanut butter and boysenberry Smuckers jam. Like clockwork.)

Sometimes it may be substituted by a PB&H (peanut butter and honey), which my dad prefers to elevate by whipping the two ingredients together into a somewhat fluffy substance - bananas optional.

The Bologna: I’m pretty sure I was the only one who EVER got the bologna sandwich in the Kava house on Fridays and I’m pretty sure I never want to find out how it is made/what’s in it and I’m pretty sure people judge me for this… but I harbor a secret love for bologna.

The Fried Egg: This sandwich may just have single-handedly kept me alive in Ireland, where deli meat was either hella expensive or sketchy at best and I had to walk half a mile to take a bus the rest of the few miles and carry all my groceries that whole way and I only had one shelf and approximately six square inches of fridge space in which to store my food and had access to very few cooking materials and, well, half the time I didn’t feel much like making something all that complex.

So I made a LOT of fried egg sammies. It was always best on toasted bread, with mayo (and if I was feeling crazy, some cheese). The egg should be fried just to a point where the yolk is still a tiny bit runny, so it kind of oozes everywhere when you cut it and you can soak it all up with the bread. That is such a gross image, but it is so so yummy.

The Steak: The ideal leftovers ‘wich. Take a quality steak cooked medium rare, throw it in the fridge overnight, bust it out at lunchtime, slice it thin, add bread (preferably crunchy and/or soft dinner rolls) and cheese and mayo and enter sandwich bliss.

This sandwich tastes the best when it has been put together by my dad. There have been scientific studies that prove this irrefutably. 

The Bagel: Perfection. While bagels might have 8952300932 more calories than normal sandwich bread, they are also 949328743820 times better. There are breakfast bagels, with egg, sausage and cheese – delicious. There are deli bagels, with meat and cheese and veggies – scrumptious. But the pinnacle of bagel goodness is also the simplest. Toasted with cream cheese – perfection, for breakfast, lunch or dinner (or possibly all three – I’m not above it).

The Turkey: I make turkey sandwiches the most often these days. In addition to making them for myself, on the days Brian has to work I wake up sometime between 5:45 and 6:30 (depending on how on-time Brian is running), shuffle around in my pajamas and crazy slept-on hair, mumble incoherently and carefully make a turkey and havarti cheese sandwich to send Brian off with before crawling back into bed and resuming unconsciousness for another hour or two. Turkey, the sandwich of love.

God I’m hungry now.