It's Super Bowl week. Very soon, it will be Super Bowl Sunday and I bet plenty of people will be scrambling on Sunday afternoon to throw together last-minute Super Bowl parties.
And therefore, there will be a rush on the grocery stores in town at about 3 p.m. Sunday afternoon for Super Bowl party fare. It will be crowded and unpleasant, but it will be Super Bowl Sunday, so everyone will be in kind of a festive mood, so there won't be any fights.
But you don't have to follow that path, friends. I'm going to make a suggestion right now that could revolutionize your Super Bowl party.
Cory and I kicked off the WacoFork work week by enjoying breakfast at The Coffee Shop in McGregor, which leads me to believe it's going to be a good week.
Obviously, we don't think of food as just being fuel. We think about dining and how we can do that well. But eating is also, ultimately, the thing that fuels the body. To that end, a breakfast of pancakes, bacon, eggs (doused with salsa) and coffee seem like jet fuel to me. I feel like that breakfast alone is going to make me unstoppable for the rest of the week. (Reader's note: I am not a nutritionalist).
I love hummus. I could and have eaten hummus and crackers for dinner. And now I know how to make it, though I will need to buy a food processor if I want to make it at home. Perhaps I'll just make regular trips to Crav at Gourment Gallery to get my hummus fix.
On Thursday, Crav chef Juanita Barrientos walked me through making hummus from edamame. As a bonus, we also made kale salad with avocado dressing and topped with red onions and toasted almonds. There's a good chance my lunch was better — and healthier — than yours.
Is the restaurant, especially the fast food restaurant, a construction of particularly modern culture and lifestyle?
I tend to think so as I imagine most people do. We say things like, "Oh, look what a rush we're in with all of our cell phones and fast food restaurants and the like." And then perhaps we fantasize about a bygone era, maybe frontier life, when every meal was slaved over with a level of effort that we can hardly even imagine now.
Well, apparently from something I read this morning, that's just not the way it was.
Upon embarking on the series of blogs that has been The Week of the Sandwich, I considered the boundaries of the blogs I would write. I decided to go local, almost exclusively.
As mentioned in Monday's blog, there's are certain cultural identifiers associated with different types of sandwiches, whether its a bahn mi or a Philly cheese steak or even a special kind of barbecues sandwich. The Schmaltz's Schmaltz for example, is not all that different from The Original at Schlotzsky's, but it's different enough that a longtime Wacoan could take the Pepsi challenge with The Schmaltz and the The Original and identify The Schmaltz every time.
If you've enjoyed The Week of the Sandwich so far, then I'm glad. From my end, it's been a huge success as it's pushed me to explore a portion of the wide variety of sandwiches we have here in Waco.
After beginning the week with a pair of deli sandwiches, I've gone on to dine on Philly, barbecue and today a Vietnamese sandwiche at Clay Pot. Specifically the beef banh mi.
I don't know if I'm getting better at taking pictures of food or if it's just pretty easy. I know that the photo accompanying this blog, featuring Tony DeMaria's BBQ's The Dagwood, came out fantastic.
It almost defies a carnivorous person to resist rushing over to Tony DeMaria's and ordering one as soon as possible. It really doesn't need any more words from me. The picture stands on its own.
But since I'm sitting here at my computer anyway, I'll offer a little more backstory.
Just to clarify, burgers don't count during The Week of the Sandwich.
Obviously, I have nothing against burgers. In fact, I've written at length about my love of the cheeseburger. But in order to give proper attention to other distinctive forms of meat (or other stuff as we might find) between bread, I'm removing the subset of burgers from consideration during this sandwich-focused week.
Tuesday of "The Week of the Sandwich" took me to The Olive Branch, where I stared down the menu and debated ordering the club sandwich.
I wanted to order the club sandwich almost solely because of Mitch Hedberg and his club sandwich joke. But I could not resist the Santa Fe.
It is a member of the great triumvirate of human invention, along with fire and the wheel.
It is diverse as it is simple. It can be made by anyone, but it constantly challenges the imagination.
Look to any people group in the universe, and probably in the history of mankind, and it will hoist its preferred version (or versions) of the sandwich made from ingredients as integral to and evident of the culture as anything else.
