Category: mmm… food

Can you name this “food” item?

INGREDIENTS. CRUST: FLOUR, SUGAR/GLUCOSE-FRUCTOSE, WHOLE OATS, VEGETABLE SHORTENING, WATER, HONEY, DECSTROSE, MILK INGREDIENTS, WHEAT BRAN, SALT, MICORCRYSTALLINE CELLULOSE, POTASSIUM BICARBONATE, SOYA LECITHIN (EMULSIFIER), NATURAL AND SIMULATED FLAVOUR, WHEAT GLUTEN, CORN STARCH, CARRAGEENAN, GUAR GUM. FILLING: SUGAR/GLUCOSE-FRUCTOSE, APPLE PRESERVE (GLUCOSE-FRUCTOSE), APPLE PUREE, WATER) GLYCEROL, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, SODIUM ALGINATE, MALIC ACID, SODIUM CITRATE, CALCIUM PHOSPHATE, METHYLCELLULOSE, CINNAMON, CITRIC ACID (ACIDULANT), COLOUR.

On the bright side, it has only 3 grams of fat! It must be good for you.

I watched Dragonfly recently. About halfway though, because I was so intensely bored, I began to forage for snack foods. The weird Japanese snacks had long since run out (“…and there was much rejoicing. Yaaay.“), which left me a little wanting in the munchies department. As I scanned the cupboard, my internal monologue sounded a bit like this: “Soup? No. Dry bread? No. Rice? NO!”… and so on. I finally settled on the sunflower seeds in the shell.

What a useless snack. What kind of sadistic freak packages these things as a snack food? Twenty minutes later, I had a small pile of shells and wasn’t sure if I’d actually eaten anything. A hungry person could probably go insane trying to extract enough actual seed. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were one of the CIA’s dreaded interrogation techniques. “No! Not the seeds! Not the seeds! I’ll talk! I’ll tell you anything!”

Hmm. I notice that they have a website with the headline, “Canada’s most exciting snack food company!”

“Most exciting”? This country is deeply troubled.

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Sandwich preference is a very personal thing. I consider it a reflection of a person’s personality — a collage of favourite flavours, engineered to work in harmony to satisfy a person’s most basic desires. What you choose to put in your sandwich truly reveals who you are.

So here I am — I will describe what is, to me, the perfect sandwich. This has to be built in the correct order to achieve the correct interplay of taste and texture.

Ingredents:

• alfalfa sprouts

• green leaf lettuce

• 1 vine-ripened tomato

• 1 kosher dill pickle

• mozzarella cheese, thinly sliced

• dijon mustard (the kind with the seeds)

• Miracle Whip (NOT mayonnaise)

• smoked breast of penguin (substitute duck where penguin is either unavailable or illegal)

• sourdough bread, thinly sliced and toasted

Assembly:

The order of these ingredients is very important.

Place two pieces of Sourdough bread, thinly-sliced and lightly toasted, on your bread board and begin building on it as follows:

On one slice, carefully spread the Miracle Whip so that it’s about 3 millimetres thick in the centre, but only 1 millimetre at the edges.

Onto the Miracle Whip, place a 1 centimetre layer of lightly packed alfalfa sprouts. The sprouts will absorb the Miracle Whip at the centre.

Onto the layer of sprouts, place a single 5 millimetre layer of vine-ripened tomato. Again, the sprouts will absorb the juice. Healthful and practical things, sprouts are.

Add 5 millimetres of the thinly-sliced mozzarella and a single leaf of lettuce. The cheese provides tasty structural integrity to the vegetable matter and acts as a moisture barrier between the tomato and the lettuce (never let your lettuce get soggy).

Add the penguin, but not too thickly. This is an ensemble piece — don’t let your penguin become the prima donna. If it tries, give it a stern talking-to.

Slice the pickle lengthwise in 3 millimetre slices and place them across the width of the sandwich.

Finally, on the second slice of sourdough, lavishly spread the brown, seedy dijon and mount the slice on the pickles to complete the sandwich.

At this point, you may now take the sandwich to your favourite cubicle and consume it without relish. I mean don’t use pickle relish. By all means, enjoy eating the Cubicle Dweller Sandwich™.

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In Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams wrote, “There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth.”

When I was a student, I must have had far too much time on my hands, because if there is only one thing that I am truly good at, it is making sandwiches. When I make a sandwich, it’s a perfect creation. Some people just slap a few things between a couple of slices of white bread and stuff it into their mouths. I suppose for them it gets the job done — it puts matter in their bellies. But there’s so much more to the experience. It’s an experience that begins with sandwich architecture, which I think Douglas Adams understood:

There was also the geometry of the slice to be refined: the precise relationships between the width and height of the slice and also its thickness which would give the proper sense of bulk and weight to the finished sandwich: here again, lightness was a virtue, but so too were firmness, generosity and that promise of succulence and savour that is the hallmark of a truly intense sandwich experience.

Such a deep understanding of the delicate nuances of sandwich presentation and form is rare.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to make myself a sandwich for breakfast.

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Another shock at the cube farm. After the replacement of our good old coffee urns with a coffee vending machine, I didn’t think it could get worse. It has.

There’s a big empty spot in the employee lounge where the snack vending machine used to be. That’s right — one of our principal food sources has vanished.

I don’t know what to say, but that my heart is heavy with the loss. It was a provider of nourishment. From it’s glowing window, it offered all the staples of the cubicle diet.

No more Mr. Big or Kit Kat. No more giant double chocolate chunk cookies. And worst of all — and I have a tear in my eye as I type this — no more Miss Vickie’s sea salt and malt vinegar homestyle potato chips.

We will miss you Miss Vickie. You touched all of our hearts, as well as our major arteries.

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