The Fan Favorite

People have asked me how I come up with my sandwich ideas (trust me, this does in fact happen). The truth of it is that it's different depending on the week. Sometimes I have an idea formulating in my head for a few weeks before it actually plays out in sandwich form. Sometimes I wake up on Sunday morning (when I go shopping) without having considered it all week long. This week was an example of the former. I have been spending a good deal of my past couple of weeks dedicating my mental energy towards college basketball, and so I woke up on Sunday, after a devastating loss for Syracuse with a question that I didn't have long much time to answer. What's the sandwich for this week?

The answer to the question turned out to be a pretty good one, and ended up not seeming to be hastily thrown together, which was a big surprise. I decided on a whim that since I hadn't made an egg salad sandwich yet that I would do that. I googled 'spicy egg salad' and literally worked off the first recipe that I found. I would have added the link, but I'm unable to find it at this juncture.

I went surprisingly off-path from the recipe, adding in red pepper and a spicy peppercorn mustard (courtesy of  fellow trainer Erin), and played around a bit with the amounts of different ingredients. What came of this experimentation, I'm proud to admit, is a wonderful egg salad unlike any that I have ever had. The pepper, peppercorn mustard, chipotle chili powder, onion and celery added a ton to this salad, and it turned out to be a somewhat spicy, but completely delicious concoction to be thrown between two pieces of toast.

This sandwich became a fan favorite at Charles Products. Many tried it, and almost all spoke highly of it. One co-worker even went as far to state that it was the 'best egg salad' she had ever had. Whoa, shit just got real, son.

The arbitrary scoring system pegs this sandwich at a 9/10. I'm not sure if I even could make this egg salad again because, to be honest, I sort of winged a lot of it. I'm very pleased with how everything came out, and I'd love to have it again, but I'd make a couple of minor changes to the construction. Taste-wise this is a great egg salad, but it could use some salt/pepper, and probably a higher ratio of egg. I'd also like to tone back the liquid components a bit, as it is a bit soupy for my tastes, but my tastes are particularly anti-soupy, so there you go.

And so, as goes another Syracuse basketball season (R.I.P.), another sandwich week has come and gone (although sandwich switch-up Friday may be in full effect tomorrow). This weekend brings a 17-mile jump in mileage for our training ride, which I would guess is the biggest jump we've ever done outside of the actual century ride. Physically I'm ready for it. Mentally I'm not so sure.

Matthew Henson Makes A Mean Trail

Saturday was the first 'official' training ride for me of the season. Ben had rocked a 30 mile ride last weekend, so I guess I was behind a week in 'Operation Get Ass In Gear'. Ben and I are joined this year by Erin, who was somehow able to keep up with our blazing speed and overall near-perfect ability on a bicycle (sarcasm). Ben, Erin, & I met up around 8:45 somewhat down Beach Drive (a sort of centralized location), and set out on what was intended to be a very casual 35 mile ride.

You may think that the ending of that first paragraph was an ominous cliffhanger. It was not, and this actually was totally a casual and enjoyable ride. We headed north on Beach Drive, and basically took my route to work plus another 6 or so miles (Thanks to Ben for mapping this out), jumping from the Rock Creek Trail onto the Matthew Henson Trail. I gotta hand it to that 'African American explorer and associate of Robert Peary on various expeditions, the most famous being a 1909 expedition during which he may have been the first person to reach the Geographic North Pole', he made a hell of a trail (totally did not make that trail, BTW). It's been probably about a year now since I biked that particular trail, and every time I do I enjoy it more and more. It's smooth, less populated than the Rock Creek Trail, and generally just a lot of fun to ride on.

We made pretty awesome time, considering that we were on bike paths (curvaceous, and thus much slower-going), and made close to the entire 36-mile round trip in somewhere between 2 hours and 2 hours and 15 minutes. This is the pace that we certainly would like to keep up for the century ride in order to reach our target time of under 7.5 hours.

Sandwich Kickoff 2012

I'm only 2 and a half weeks late with my first sandwich post of the year, which, let's be honest, isn't all that bad these days. Besides, I'm sure the majority of readers weren't waiting on the edge of their seats for me to write a blog post about a sandwich. What? You were? Oh, sorry about that, then, I'll get right to it.

I'm in a different place this year than I was last, as far as sandwich creation goes, and I think my very first sandwich of the season exemplifies exactly that. Last year I found myself dreaming about sandwich combinations. I found myself visualizing sandwiches when people were talking to me about things that were unrelated. 

To simplify, I was sandwich obsessed. This year I have a sandwich season under my belt (and after a full winter of not biking or working out, this is quite evident), and I'm not as eager to change the world with new sandwich concoctions. Maybe things will change in the future, but for now I'm content just making delicious sandwiches that only somewhat blow my mind. 

Another thing that I'm saying right now that may prove to be super true or a complete lie is that I'd like to push myself towards more vegetarian-style sandwiches. I'm not going to make this a super strict rule, but I am going to try to make it a bit of a soft-guideline (like how wishy-washy I'm being?). I was surprised to find that many of the best sandwiches last year were on the healthier side, and also in many cases tended to be of the vegetarian variety.

So, with that enormous preface out of the way, I present to you my first week of sandwich creation. This week I took a familiar idea and spun it into a sandwich. I would say that my favorite go-to snack for big-time sporting events (doesn't everyone have one of these?) is an olive oil, sun-dried tomato & mozzarella cheese mixture on top of fresh cut up baguettes. I basically took precisely that and made it a sandwich, obviously with some tweaks. The baguette became a sandwich, and in order to pull in some sort of nutritional value I added spinach. Can I say I nailed it without sounding predictably smug? Who cares, I nailed this sandwich. Then again, I can't exactly say that I went too far out of my comfort zone. I'd certainly suggest this bad boy to anybody who has taste buds exactly like mine. This is a full 10/10 on my arbitrary scoring scale -- No negatives. Easy to make, delicious, fairly healthy, aesthetically appealing (A co-worker asked if I got this sandwich from the bakery down the street... Compliment accepted!)... This sandwich has it all.

On the biking front, there's not a whole ton to report... I'm struggling to get into the mindset that I'll be biking 100 miles just under two months from now. I'm sure I'll get there... The first step will be my first long(ish) ride, which will be Saturday morning. Biking to and from work has become a daily thing, minus a few exceptions, and that will be the last time I mention that unless something significant happens, or I forgot that I wasn't supposed to mention it.