100 days of sandwiches

On November 7, 2011, I embarked on a quest to find the perfect sandwich. Here I show you my creations for the next 100 days.

For all questions, suggestions and sandwich-making/editorial job offers, please email carol.shih@duke.edu.

Permalink Day 79: Oskar the Mochi Sandwich I performed some surgery on a mochi ball today. Cut him open, then added some almonds inside. Turns out the almonds look like teeth. So I’ve named him Oskar. Hello, Oskar. Nice to eat you.
Permalink Day 78: Oatmeal and Chinese Beans Sandwich Every morning, my mother wakes up earlier than I do. She turns on the stove, cooks up a batch of oatmeal, and mixes it with these Chinese red beans. The result is this maple syrupy oatmeal (minus the maple syrup). It’s warm. It makes me actually want to leave my bed. Usually I save it in a container, drive it downtown, and savor my oatmeal in front of my office computer. It reminds me of our oatmeal breakfasts, Em.
Permalink Day 77: Sabrina’s Birthday Sandwich Dangit, yesterday I sorta jumped the gun and posted this sandwich onto tumblr. A few seconds later, I realized it WASN’T the day of my goodfriend Sabrina’s birth… yet stupid Google Reader still published my post and she saw this thing anyway. One day early. Oops. Happy birthday, Sabrina! Now that I’m looking at this sandwich again, the letters kind of look like ______ (hint: fiber). I guess this is my failed attempt to make sandwich art. Hope you fix those bugs in your code today! That would be a great birthday present from God, wouldn’t it?
Permalink Day 76: Holiday Sandwich Sorry, dudes. This sandwich went on vacation. Scotland, methinks.
Permalink Day 75: Nian Gao Sandwich My nian gao (Chinese New Year cake) look like fleshy dead body parts of some unknown animal, but they’re really just glutinous sticky rice pieces that taste really, really good in the morning. The charred bits add that extra oomph. Stuck in the middle is a piece of luo buo gao (turnip cake). 
Permalink Day 74: Dumpling Sandwiches Homemade pork dumplings with green onion, garlic, and ginger  (It’s a sandwich because there’s a coin in the middle.) My family used to have the weirdest Chinese New Year tradition. When I was a young lass, my mother would scrub seven or eight coins really well and hide them inside her homemade pork dumplings so she could watch my brother and I go cockfight crazy as we each attempted to amass the most number of coins. To our disappointment, my father would always win; his superior chopstick skills and fast-eating ways would earn him a shining victory (plus some pained teeth from biting down too hard). His winnings meant that he’d have the most prosperity for the rest of the year :( 新年快乐!
Permalink Day 71, 72, and 73: Petite Sandwiches (Left) multi-grain crackers with wasabi (middle) mozz & cheese (right) choco chip animal crackers with mini choco chips I’m finding ways to cheat; can you tell?
Permalink Day 70: The Sand Witch I draw like a five-year-old. So what.
Permalink Day 69: The Basic Sandwich Even though I’ve just started my job, I have a feeling that I will get tired of food writing just like I get tired of watching tv shows after one season. At some point, we all ask ourselves, “What’s the point of ____?” Tucker Shaw from the Denver Post wrote this post before he left his position, reminding me of food’s purpose: to nourish us …whether we are poor or rich, young or old, male or female. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. It can simply be an egg richly yolked between two pieces of toast that reminds you of life’s quiet pleasures - the steady hum of a pan firing over the stove, the still morning holding its breath, and those five minutes of patient coddling while you watch the yolk rise like the dawn.
Permalink Day 68: The Invisible Sandwich Sometimes you feel like hiding. You decide to be a stalker who’s logged into Facebook, Gchat, and Skype with your status completely invisible to others. Yet you are there, lurking around Internetdom, reading your friends’ statuses, knowing exactly where they are and what they’ve been up to. The smart ones catch on. They chat with you anyways. You chat back if you like them. And if you don’t, well, it’s easy just to pretend you’re not there.
Permalink Day 67: First Day of Work Sandwich I was late to my first day of work by ten minutes.  Which is not surprising if you know my personal history and how I was always late to my first day of classes. (You know that girl who came in 30 minutes after class started and reached awkwardly for a syllabus while the prof kept talking? Err, that was me.) Clearly this is a psychological problem that has carried over into my Adult Life, which I KNEW was bad when the President personally came up to me and said, “You missed the 9:30 meeting. I was going to introduce you to everybody.” Craaaaaaaaap. When I told this story to Teresa, she screeched, “Now you have to go and freaking find the cure to AIDS at your company!”
Permalink Day 66: The Terminal Sandwich If you ever become stuck in a terminal like Viktor Navorski without any money, you’ll have to survive just like he did: on cracker sandwiches made with ketchup and mustard. Or you can be like my friend Sabrina and eat cracker sandwiches (minus the condiments) at your desk because you’re starving and too lumpish to get real food…  Either way, this seems to be a popular sandwich.
Permalink Day 65: Mom’s Sandwich She made the bread. And the egg. Found this great entry on Wikipedia: On September 21, 2007, U.S. District Court Judge James Muirhead used Green Eggs and Ham in his court ruling after receiving an egg in the mail from prisoner Charles Jay Wolff who was protesting the prison diet. Muirhead ordered the egg destroyed as he stated in his judgment: I do not like eggs in the file. I do not like them in any style. I will not take them fried or boiled. I will not take them poached or broiled. I will not take them soft or scrambled, Despite an argument well-rambled. No fan I am of the egg at hand. Destroy that egg! Today! Today! Today I say! Without delay!
Permalink Day 64: The Ramen Sandwich Well. It looks like dead spaghetti, but it’s really just a packet of Nong Shim Shin Ramyun. Some lazy butts would probably eat their ramen just like this, but I’m civilized. I’d rather cook it. Minutes after I dropped this ramen into a pot of boiling water, this congealed gelatin-like thing kept getting in the way of my poor noodles. Then I realized that I had thrown my ramen, not just the noodles, but BREAD AND ALL into the pot. 
Permalink Day 63: Chicken of the Sea Sandwich LOCATION: HOME. WHERE I CAN DIG THROUGH MY OWN PANTRY. Let’s pretend that the last four days never existed (they fell into a vacuous black hole) and I am right on schedule! Okay? Good.  Now that my guilt is over, I must tell you how long it’s been since I ate my last tuna fish sandwich. My guess is seven months. During my last year of college, I ate at least two of those Lunch-To-Go tuna kits per week - the kind where you slather 2.6 ounces of Albacore tuna onto six crisp crackers. Tuna, mayo and relish all included. They sold them in the vending machines right down the hall. I couldn’t help myself and real food was too far away. There are two things I’ve learned from that experience: Never bring tuna to work. Everybody can smell it and nobody likes the smell but you. Tuna tastes nothing like chicken.