Enjoy Every Sandwich(bradmontague.substack.com) |
Enjoy Every Sandwich(bradmontague.substack.com) |
I've been chasing a "white whale" bacon / egg / cheddar on grilled Texas toast sandwich I made 20-ish years ago that I've never been able to replicate. I didn't keep track of the particular bacon or cheddar I used, and I don't recall if the eggs were the farm co-op eggs we used to get or plain old grocery eggs. I should have taken notes but didn't.
It's probably a silly thing to do, but I keep fairly meticulous notes about food I make now (including weighing-out ingredients on a kitchen scale). I don't want to have another experience like my mythical sandwich.
My wife has a good point about my quest: I can't replica my hunger level that day. That got me paying attention to how hunger level effects food enjoyment. I now make a point of planning my eating ahead of special meals to maximize enjoyment. It's shocking, to me, how much a little hunger makes every food better.
Food matters.
Brands matter. See if you can match the brands that your mother used; especially the mayonnaise. Bacon will be harder to match.
In 1969, my family would have made its own mayonnaise, so try that, too.
If I want a flashback to my childhood, it's peanut butter and jelly. But it has to be Skippy peanut butter on Wonder bread with Smuckers jelly, and freezing cold whole milk. Anything deviation doesn't trigger the same brain cells.
There is so much to be gained by slowing down, focusing on what you can be grateful for, and not striving for more.
> There's an expression on Wall Street, often attributed to Warren Buffett, which goes, "They don't ring a bell at the top." There's tremendous wisdom in that adage, because while in retrospect it's easy to pinpoint the day that the market (or even a specific stock) reached an all-time high that looks unlikely to ever be attained again in the foreseeable future, at the moment it happened it was impossible to recognize. That's because, unlike market bottoms, which usually have a crescendo feeling to them accompanied by investor panic, a market top generally passes without fanfare, indistinguishable from the series of tops that preceded it.
> You know when else they don't ring a bell? For parents, they don't ring a bell the last time you read Goodnight Moon. They don't do it the last time you watch Sleeping Beauty and they don't do it the last time you help your daughter put on the same article of clothing she's wanted to wear every day as a toddler. Instead, a couple years after the fact, you find the book on a shelf, the DVD in a box, and the tights with the pink ballerinas on them in the back of a drawer. You can't for the life of you remember the last time you read the book, danced to "Once Upon a Dream" with your daughter on your feet, or helped put those tights on. But you do know that now she reads to herself at bedtime, she dances, alone, to Taylor Swift, and the tights—well, the tights wouldn't even make it over her knees.
Some of the days have been very, very long. The weeks, months, and years have been so short.
we were desiged to want more it impossible to override that design.
Yes, wanting "More" [time, money, love, status] is pretty firmly ingrained as an advantageous trait. But you can override your instincts (e.g. declining a drink when thirsty, if you learn the glass of water contains poison). And it is possible to learn to want what you already have.
How? Practice three things: Compassion, Attention, and Gratitude. (Pick any two, and the third will follow almost automatically.)
That's the central thesis of an excellent book, "How to Want What You Have" by Dr Timothy Miller. It changed my life.
This is a hard teaching and not all can accept it. Those that do will find peace, life, meaning, and rest.
The interpretation of this I love most is the visual of a sheep, satisfied enough that they lay down instead of grazing or drinking. This posture is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible.
I imagine most religions and philosophies have similar.
says who?
- Raging Bull or Brian Allen from Star Meats in Berkeley, CA
- Shaking Beef, Dinosaur Sandwiches in San Francisco / Daily City, CA
- Turkey Cranberry from the GBC in Berkeley, CA
- Lemongrass tofu from Lokal Sandwiches in Los Angeles, CA
- Pastrami on rye from Sarges Deli in NYC, NY
- Fried Chicken Sandwich from Bakesale Betty's in Berkeley, CA
- Dad's BLT or fried egg sandwiches
- Any sandwich from Mom paired with potato salad
- Wife's Cemita
- Turkey sandwich from "The Sandwich Shop", Dogpatch in San Francisco, CA
"The winters are cold... but I can't complain. My socks have holes... but again, do I complain? I do not. The oldest needs braces... the youngest once sneezed for three days straight... but who could complain? They're gifts."
"Children?"
"All of it. The cold, the holes."
For all of the complaining we can do about our hardships, it's a gift to even be able to complain. When someone says, "Life is good", they're right even if you feel like things are shitty -- because life itself, being here and alive, to be able to feel and to think, is a wonderful gift.
The blog seems to be treating it as aspirational -- a goal. A puzzle to be understood and applied to make our lives richer. It's more of a perspective shift.
When you really get it, you won't think you're supposed to like bad sandwiches -- you'll realize what a gift any sandwich is. What a gift it is to sit in any crummy airport eating a soggy sandwich. You won't have to try to like it, you'll cry with gratitude at how lucky you are to even be there.
My favorite interpretation is focusing on the beauty of how even such a mundane thing as a sandwich is a unique experience. Someone made it by-hand, the ingredients have their own backstory in arriving in the present moment, and the taste is greater than the sum of its parts because of all the competing and complementary flavors.
Sandwiches hide in plain sight and even when they aren't great they are unique and will underscore how good your next great one is.
Taking Mr. Zevon's advice to "enjoy every sandwich" literally is amazing. I think he'd appreciate the absurdity of the post.
I also like to do this, only I say the words
Give us this day our daily sandwich...Welcome to HN in 2026.
There has been a visible shift in the replies on this web site since about April of this year.
If you know what to look for, you realize there are far fewer humans bothering to post than before. It's like the proverbial scales falling from your eyes once you see it.
Enjoy every hedonic pleasure. But the balance sheet doesn’t look good even if you always do. It’s either all just a raw deal or we need to look beyond the low- and high-minded enjoyments.
That's obvious. Who doesn't notice that? I think if I were terminally ill I'd seek things I enjoy, and savor them, and avoid bad sandwiches. In good health, I'd ask what made that sandwich bad and think about how to improve it.
Quite the contrary. It's the difference between active eating and passive eating. It is the active eater who appreciates what he is eating at the deepest level, being capable of recreating and modifying his food. It is the same with every endeavor.
There is such a thing as a bad sandwich.
The fact that >50% of Italian sub shops default to not putting onions on their torpedoes is a testament to how far we've fallen as a culture.
Cheese and Banana Sandwich: https://youtu.be/uUzO19tgwZc
Clam and Cheese Sandwich: https://youtu.be/31bZ-ReB51U
Peanut-Butter Sandwich: https://youtu.be/1Bmw1JpNY90
So many tasty things people miss out on due to peer pressure and being afraid to give "strange" food a try.
Woosh.
"Crisp-roasted maitake mushrooms with garlicky labneh, fresh local raab, warm Middle Eastern Spices and Mama Lil's spicy pickled peppers on a toasted Ciabatta roll."
The raab and the mushrooms (sliced into sheets) were seared crisp. I substituted harissa mixed with mayo or greek yogurt for the sauce.
- Tradition Coffee Roasters, Kailua, HI
- Offset Coffee, LA, CA
- Igam Coffee, Brooklyn, NY
- City League, Brooklyn, NY
- Ozo Coffee, Boulder, CO
- Odyssey Coffee, Ocean Grove, NJ
in addition to anything your parents make, sometimes the best sandwich is the one my wife makes for my kids and they don't finish.
To up your sandwich enjoyment game, what you want is a bread making machine, ideally by Panasonic, with plenty of flour in the cupboards and a well-rehearsed routine of putting the bread on.
Here you get delayed gratification since it takes three minutes to load the machine and four hours for it to bake a loaf. You get proper bakery smells, which is a bonus, and the freshest bread in town (the second you unload the machine).
Freshness is a hack with any bread you buy. It is usually harmless additives that keep it 'fresh', but there is no need for the 'harmless additives' when you have a Panasonic machine. You won't find yourself adding weird chemicals, but you could find yourself adding, nuts, seeds, berries and other fruit to your bakes, to suit your whims or preferences of your guests.
Sometimes some people notice your fresh bread and insist on telling you how much better their sourdough is (that they made once in lockdown) or how that their local bakery makes far nicer bread than your pathetic little Panasonic machine. So you get an extra 'last laugh' from having to endure these ad-hoc lectures on sourdough that is just not in the same league as your favourite bread made effortless by your lovely machine.
You might miss out on interactions with that sandwich store (they rob you slowly, hence the staff will know your name and preferences, if a regular), however, people outside the sourdough cult are always impressed by home made bread, even if you insist it was effortlessly made.
Making your own bread connects you to our history of making bread, plus you get a much healthier product, arguably real bread, unlike that nonsense that is commercially sold as 'bread'.
Eating a sandwich now, haven't bought one for maybe five years.