Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Full disclosure, my weekend wasn’t entirely as screen-free as it could’ve been, with cinematic gems such as The A-Team deployed to fill the temporary void left by Hulu. That was the high point of my movie selection, actually, because then I proceeded to watch Clash of the Titans, Repo Men, and The Box, which featured Cameron Diaz rockin’–make it stop, please–a southern accent. Forgive me, father, for I have sinned, and poor is the judgment of a man deprived of episodic content.

Fortunately it wasn’t all movies, and what I really wanted to discuss tonight was the grand plan I presented to you when we last spoke. In it, I outlined a comprehensive treatment of sandwich production, dog hunting, and reading. Of books! The last two items fizzled out, with a lackluster trip to the shelter and a brief, pages-long encounter with Blue Like Jazz. Perhaps I wasn’t in the right mood for Christian literature, or perhaps I’m simply not ready to start reading again, period. I suspect it’s the latter, because when I fired up the movie adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the subtitles themselves were a chore to follow.

But sandwiches? We can talk about sandwiches. It all began with the ingredients. I found myself in the deli section of the supermarket on Sunday, reaching for prepackaged meats when it dawned on me: sure, prepackaged would’ve been the sensible choice. It’s the same brand, after all, just not slicer-fresh, and it’s substantially cheaper. At the same time, though, I figured I might as well pony up. It was, like, I made the trip, I’m fully committed to this inaugural sandwich, and shit just got real. Shit also got cost-prohibitive. $40 out the door for thinly sliced meats and cheeses, along with a few veggies, and then it was off to procure some organic “country wheat” bread elsewhere. Now, I don’t know what “country wheat” even means. I imagine it’s the opposite of “urban wheat,” which, as everybody knows, is milled into urban dough and baked over a roaring urban hobo fire into urban bread.

With raw materials in hand, I set out to assemble my masterpiece. I had two expectations for the sandwich. It needed texture. It also needed integrity. I wanted a sandwich with some heft that wouldn’t ooze mustard and dressing with every bite. I also wanted the culinary compass of my creation to point in one and only one direction. No predominantly salty sandwiches here, for example, marred by sweet caramelized onions or cranberries or some such shit. It needed to be a dry sandwich with some punch.

I drizzled deli dressing onto thick-cut slices of country wheat, then layered on capers, horseradish mustard, horseradish cheddar, shredded romaine, onions, prosciutto, hot capicola, Genoa salami, and finally, some pepperoni. The whole to-do then went straight into the oven for 5.5 minutes at 375. The verdict? It tasted fine, I suppose, but it had all the subtlety of–you guessed it–Cameron Diaz. With a southern accent. In a terrible flick.