Worst Sandwich Week Ever

This week's sandwich roots were noble, and complimentary again towards the city of Buffalo. For the second week in a row I decided that I would pay homage to one of the best food cities in the country, but this time I chose to construct a Beef-on-weck sandwich... Much lesser-known to those outside of the city of Buffalo, but certainly not less important.

The beef-on-weck, to those unfamiliar, is a very simple sandwich that has German roots, but was ultimately invented in Buffalo. It's simplicity is in that it is roast beef, thinly sliced, placed on a kimmelweck roll... Horseradish is also acceptably thrown into this for those who feel adventurous. When made properly, this is a wonderful sandwich, both in it's taste and in it's unapologetic simplicity.

Something I had not counted on was the fact that this is almost primarily a Western New York delicacy (did you not read that Wikipedia article I linked?!?), and therefore when I purchased the kimmelweck rolls at my local Wegmans in Lanham, MD, I was disappointed in the very un-Wegmans like staleness of the rolls -- This was not a bread product that they normally sold a lot of. Determined not to let this get to me (and driven by the promise of giant sandwiches filled with meat), I decided to make the sandwich happen anyway. The following is a chronicle of the next 4 days of lunch.

Monday: Though fairly stale, the insides of the roll prove to be surprisingly fresh. The roast beef is very rare (perfect for this sandwich), and the week's 'Potential Lunch Enjoyment Outlook' (PLEO) is scoring off the charts.

Tuesday: The rolls are rock hard already... Very un-Wegman's like. I decide to take a 'wait-and-see' approach to the rest of the week's sandwiches. Still very good... I decide to soften the roll up in the microwave, and although it's mostly in that weird partially-hard-partially-soft-definitely-too-hot-in-that-microwavey-sort-of-way, I eat the sandwich anyway. Hard to knock this sandwich, even though it's less than ideal.

Wednesday: This is the day that I set the kitchen on fire. Attempting to soften the roll for a second day, I toss it in the microwave for a 30-second soften, and leave the kitchen to retrieve the camera (for those all-too-important blog screen shots)... I return to see the microwave on fire from the inside out... I have set the roll on fire. There is something primal to human beings when it comes to fire. There's nothing more exhilarating than creating fire where there was none before, and equally there's nothing more terrifying than accidentally creating fire when there was never intent to do so. That's why I shrieked like a little girl. In probably the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me at work (the setting of the fire, not the shriek... Although that didn't help), I created a lasting impression both in the minds of my co-workers, and more notably in the kitchen at CPI -- That shit smells terrible, and remains to this day.

Thursday-Friday: I bring regular bread. This is the part of the story that's not interesting.

So yea, rough week on the sandwich front. On a brighter note (followed quickly by another disappointing retrospective negative note), we have a 70 mile ride coming up after being unable to complete last week's ride because of a rainout. We've got 3 weeks left of training before the century ride in West Virginia... Pretty crazy that it's all happening this quick.

Buffalo Turkey: An All America Wrap

For this week's sandwich, I chose to pay homage to a place I would consider my second or third home, and that place is Buffalo, NY. Commonly known for many things (snowy weather, disastrous Super Bowl results in consecutive years), I think it's safe to say that the most well-known export out of the city of Buffalo is Buffalo Chicken. I decided to play off of this awesomely delicious food this week, and in order to keep it a bit healthy, I chose to replace the chicken with turkey, and to make it a wrap as opposed to a sandwich.

The wrap is surprisingly simple. I slap some oven roasted deli turkey meat (Courtesy of my local Wegman's), and top that with some crumbled bleu cheese, lettuce and tomato. On top of that I employ a generous lathering of Franks Buffalo Sauce, and wrap it up with the culinary dexterity of someone who has not only gone to Subway sandwich making school, but in fact someone who has graduated with honors from Subway sandwich making school.

The wrap ended up being mighty tasty. It takes a bit of time to construct, but I think the payoff is well worth it. I'm surprised as to how filling it is, considering that a bulk of the fill-factor is veggies. I rarely bring this topic up in my blog, but I have to point out the fact that I chose one of the worst pairing side dishes to go with this sandwich this week. Although the pears are delicious and perfectly ripe, they don't work well with the buffalo turkey taste. The pears are very bland when tasted in unison with the buffalo taste, and it's been somewhat disappointing. Welcome to Dustin's new blog -- 'Telling you how fruit you've had a million times before in your life tastes'

All in all, this wrap was a success. I wouldn't consider it the best or worst I've ever had, but it's been enjoyable all week. I'm surprised it's taken me this long to get around to making a wrap (about a year and half of this blog, really), but I do think I hit it out of the park. I'm also glad I was able to refer to Buffalo as an 'All America City' in a clever title-themed way. Arbitrary Scoring Scale? I think it gets an 8.5/10.

This weekend? JEOPARDY! And then a 70 mile ride. Things are heating up.

When I Stop Blogging...

A lot of information comes out all at once -- Envision a sandwich blog version of a pinched hose... I'm sure this is a common exercise for most.

Last week's sandwich was a re-run. This was partially because there were fewer days in the sandwich-eating week (Good Friday was off for us), but also because the egg salad sandwich was a success the week before, and I was interested to see if I could improve on it (I did! -- Less soupy, more eggy, and overall better proportions of ingredients). Also, I was lazy and totally did not want to come up with a new sandwich idea last week.

This week's sandwich is a PBJ. I'm losing my sandwich mojo -- What with coming back from Buffalo (woo Buffalo!) on Monday and another bout of laziness, I have officially made this sandwich hiatus a two week event. While this is a fairly disappointing thing for me, I hope to make it up over the next few weeks when both training and sandwich making should be kicking into high gear.

Speaking of training, much in the same vein as the sandwich-making, it has been as far from consistent as it really could be. Unfortunately we've had up and down weather, making commuting to and from work difficult to be consistent on. I'm still holding strong at around 50%, which I guess in early April isn't a terrible percentage.

Two weeks ago Ben, Erin and I embarked on a 50 mile ride on some familiar bike paths. Unfortunately the bike gods (bike path gods?) chose to negatively effect the ride and wrecked havoc on Erin's tires. She got out on her own the next day, but she was missed on the ride. In true 'one-persons-shitty-day-is-another-persons-best-day' style, I happened to feel better than I believe I'd ever felt on a long ride. Although I ended up exhausted after a 'mere' 50 miles, I felt fresh and solid the entire ride. If I feel that way for the century ride, than I will feel sorry for every bike riding record ever set.

Last weekend, as previously noted, I went to Buffalo with my wonderful wife for Easter. I went all-in on getting a really good ride in while there. I went and bought a bike rack at REI. I constructed a really gnarly ride along the Riverwalk. I was ready... Unfortunately for me, Buffalo at 6 AM in early April is, for lack of a better phrase, balls-fucking cold. Because of time restraints (Oh no, I had to go to Duff's... Poor me...), I wasn't able to get out there at any other time. So yea, I missed out on some serious biking, but I can't say I feel regretful about it.

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.

Winter Sandwich Wrapup

I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this, mainly because there are no pictures, and blog posts about sandwiches with no pictures is sort of a worthless endeavor. Unless you're like really good at imagining how things taste in your mind. If you're good at that, this post is right up your alley.

After spending such a large amount of my money, effort, and time brainstorming and constructing different sandwiches last summer, I felt it was time to take a vacation from the whole sandwich thing -- I was still completely open to eating them, mind you -- I just wasn't going to be putting the same effort into it as I had been for the 10 weeks or so leading up to my century ride. The rest of the summer, and even into the fall, was sort of defined as a sandwich-free era of my life. I was happy to rock the PB&J.

Then in early winter I got antsy. I decided that I needed something a little bit more interesting than peanut butter and jelly, and so I decided to zero in on some sandwiches that I felt could be 'go-to sandwiches.' The following sandwiches aren't the best that I've ever had. Nor are they the easiest. They are the sandwiches that fall into that middle-of-the-road spot. Not too expensive, not too bad, not too difficult. The question I always ask myself is this: I've just finished mowing the lawn for the past hour in the middle of the summer. Along with some Fritos and iced tea, what sort of sandwich will really hit the spot? I don't want to spend a ton of time with this, but I want to enjoy it. These are the three sandwiches that answer that question in the best way possible. As always, these are all items purchased at my local Wegmans.

Sandwich #1:
Ham, Swiss Cheese, 2 Pickles, Mayo on Whole Grain White Bread
Ham's the most underrated of the 'Big 3' deli meats (ham, turkey, roast beef), I'm convinced. Swiss cheese may be the most underrated of the most common deli cheeses as well. If this sandwich was an athlete it would be Jeremy Lin -- Overshadowed ingredients who never get their due, finally coming together to prove the world of sandwich lovers wrong for ever doubting them.

Sandwich #2:
Cajun Turkey, Sharp Provolone, Guacamole, Toasted Whole Grain White Bread
This is a more basic version of a sandwich I created last summer. It's possible this is my favorite of the top 3. Guacamole needs to be a more commonly utilized sandwich condiment, I'm saying it right now. This combination of ingredients is the perfect summer sandwich. Surprisingly hearty.

Sandwich #3(A & B):
Roast Beef, Swiss Cheese, Roasted Red Peppers, Mayo on Whole Grain White
Roast Beef, Provolone Cheese, Hot Pepper Relish, Babaganouj, on Whole Grain White
Until just before lunchtime on Monday this week, the first sandwich listed was sandwich #3. Now I'm almost 100% sure I've changed my mind. Babaganouj is something I had never had until Sunday when I was perusing free samples at Wegmans, and promptly made an impulse buy. This makes the sandwich. In the same style of guacamole, this is a spread that should be getting more sandwich play as a rule. The hot pepper relish is something I'm sure to use more of this sandwich season.

So there you have it -- These 3 sandwiches have been getting the most run this winter. I look forward to rocking out new sandwich combinations this summer. It all starts March 5th, which is the first week that I'll be commuting on bike every day of the week.