Veggie Sandwiches
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My regular readers know that I am a devoted carnivore, but there are times when a veggie sandwich of one kind or another is called for. I have three particular favorites, all of which make perfect bedtime snacks.
I learned in my adulthood that if I don’t eat before I go to bed I wake up nauseated. It’s true. I can’t eat something sugary or the same thing happens. A high-protein snack like cheese or yogurt is best, but sometimes I want something else.
Take the tomato sandwich, for instance. This is a sandwich for high summer, when the beefsteak tomatoes are ripe and sweet and luscious. I don’t make them unless the tomatoes are home-grown or farmer’s-market-purchased, vine ripened beefsteaks. No other tomato will do. Beefsteaks are low acid, so they don’t cause heartburn. They taste like summer.
A good tomato sandwich always brings back the memory of getting the soil just right, planting the young plants so they have the most area to root from, watching them grow almost as I watched, until the vines grew out of the cages and over the top, cascading down and reaching the ground again before frost took them out. Beefsteak tomatoes are big fruits growing on robust vines and they need lots of space! I used to pick tomatoes that weighed up to three pounds each.
A good tomato slice covers a slice of bread. Some of the ones I grew would cover several slice of bread, and it was all meat and almost no seed space. That’s the thing about beefsteaks – they are very meaty and the seed cavities are tiny.
I no longer grow my own tomatoes and I really, really miss those giant dark red ones. I can get pretty good ones at the farmer’s market up the road, though.
I’ve never decided whether I prefer the bread toasted or untoasted. I do know that it must be a good-quality white bread like Pepperidge Farm or Arnold because the fluffy white bread can’t stand up to the tomato. It must be spread thickly with mayonnaise and well seasoned with fresh-ground black pepper. If I have bacon I might add it, but I never make a BLT, I just sometimes make a BT on toast. Making a tomato sandwich properly is an art form. It’s worth it for that month and a half when the tomatoes are really, really good. This is a sandwich best eaten over the sink so the juice doesn’t drip onto your lap or the tablecloth.
Other seasons I eat banana sandwiches or olive sandwiches. What, you say? Banana or olive? Yes, banana or olive. Not both at once, no. That sounds a bit awkward.
The banana sandwich is perfect when I want something a little sweet but not sugary. Many’s the bedtime when I’ve stood in the kitchen with only a night light on, spreading mayonnaise (of course) on white bread and slicing the banana just right. The acid saltiness of the mayonnaise complements the banana so well that just dollop on the fruit with no bread is almost as good. They say that some folks like peanut butter and banana and if you like peanut butter they probably are. I don’t care for the stuff.
The fruit must be just the right degree of ripeness. If it’s too green it isn’t sweet enough. If it’s too ripe it gives one heartburn. If it's evenly yellow and just lightly freckled it's ju-ust right, Goldilocks. Then my OCD takes over and I slice the half banana (just enough for one sandwich) into thin slices and tile it on the slice of bread. This is the only sandwich I cut the crusts off of. The taste of the crust seems incompatible with banana. I never toast the bread for this one.
But banana sandwiches are when I want something a little sweet. If I want something a little salty, it’s olive. I discovered olive sandwiches when I was in high school and couldn’t sleep. I would pad barefoot down to the semi-dark kitchen to get a little snack, and discovered that olive sandwiches were perfect. I used to be able to get something called olive spread, which was finely chopped green olives. It had pimiento in it and I always suspected that they ground up the broken and defective olives that they couldn’t put in the jars, but that was OK. I can’t get it now, so I chop up the olives myself.
It takes a small handful of olives to make a sandwich. It’s kind of a pain in the ahem! to first slice them so they don’t roll, then use a chef’s knife to do a fast and thorough chop. They have to be well chopped to be spreadable. Once again, it’s a white bread with mayo kind of thing. I’ve never tried toast, probably because the prep of the olives is such a pain. This is an exceptionally satisfying sandwich because of the salt and the fat inherent in the ingredients. It’s another bedtime snack sort of thing.
Of all three sandwiches, the tomato is the only one that stands up to daylight. The others are best eaten late at night, in a darkened kitchen, waiting for the dogs to do their late-night duty and come back in for their “cookies:” end-of-the-day tooth-cleaning dog biscuits. It’s a quiet time to contemplate one’s navel and savor a good sandwich.
