I realize I haven’t been around here much, so here’s a nice sandwich to keep things going. Last Sunday we celebrated the start of the wind-and-rain season with a milk-braised pork roast studded with garlic and herbs, serving it with buttermilk mashed potatoes and a fresh arugula salad. It was a big roast, so every day this week my lunch has involved some variation on the pork sandwich – oh, the hardship. Yesterday’s version (pictured) started with a sourdough hoagie roll from the Breadfarm, spread lightly with mayonnaise and dressed with chunks of rewarmed pork, dripping with garlicky milk sauce, and a few leaves of arugula for contrast. Today’s version was the same, but with a freshly home-baked sweet potato roll in place of the hoagie. Zowie.

Being a complete sucker for a good sandwich (as you can see by the photo selection above – gee, that’s a lot of sandwiches), I was thrilled to see the new Saveur arrive in the mail with “The Sandwich Issue” blazoned across the cover. Woohoo!

This issue made me hungry. Really hungry. It covers sandwiches from all over the world, including banh mi, croque madame, Philly cheesesteak, PB&J, bacon butty, shawarma, pimento cheese, fried squid rolls and all sorts of other good things. It makes you want to go out and put things on bread with lots of exciting condiments. I’m particularly excited about the sardine sandwich ideas, and a recipe for Yemenite chile relish called schug.  I have plans…

After perusing it from cover to cover, though, I was shocked to see two of my favorites, the chicken salad and the egg salad sandwich, very underrepresented. I found two recipes for chicken salad, but both are the kind I loathe, with grapes and nuts and celery, or currants and curry powder. Ugh. Personally I find it hard to do better than chicken salad in its simplest form: cold roasted shredded chicken mixed with Best Foods mayo (neither Miracle Whip nor homemade mayonnaise will do).  I roast chickens just so I can have this for lunch the next day.

I might put lettuce on, or green chutney, or a slice of piquillo pepper if I have one, but more often than not I’ll eat it plain, preferably on a toasted whole wheat English muffin. Despite my love for more elaborate concoctions, this is really my perfect sandwich. The proper accompaniments are beer or iced tea, and a good helping of pickled okra, or perhaps dilly beans. Lunch just doesn’t get much better than this. What’s wrong with simplicity?

We drive over Stevens Pass with some frequency, a trip that usually takes us 2 ½ or 3 hours and often requires a stop for sustenance along the way. Often that means the School Bus for barbecue, cornbread and hot pinto beans, or on the way home we may push on for Fred’s Rivertown Alehouse in Snohomish, but other times it means the Sultan Bakery. It’s not fancy, the service is slow, there’s not much to drink except coffee and water, and they have a definite tendency to run out of the very thing I was craving, but they make the best old-fashioned sour cream doughnuts I’ve had anywhere, and their sandwiches are as big as your head. Maybe bigger.

The menu here is flexible, with separate items written on a variety of white boards and set out or taken down as necessary. You can pretty much always count on there being tuna or plain deli meat sandwiches, with tomato soup or chili or maybe split pea to go on the side. They usually have French Dip or open-face turkey sandwiches, although not always, and depending on time of day there may be both breakfast sandwiches and a prime rib plate with mashed potatoes. We have tried some of their hot food, but every time we stop here I secretly hope they’ll have either the egg salad or the BLT.

Here’s what we got last weekend. I normally prefer my BLTs on thin toasted sourdough bread, but the Sultan Bakery’s country white bread is an exception. It’s like ultra-Wonder bread, cut so thick you think you’ll never fit it in your mouth, but squishing down to almost nothing. It’s exceptional for egg salad, as it molds around the filling without coming apart, but it’s also excellent with tuna or bacon. And as you can see, a single sandwich can easily feed two people. I saw a turkey sandwich across the room that looked nearly twice as big as this one – I believe a to-go carton was required for that.

The tomato-basil soup is deceptively heavy, being so laden with cheese you can almost stand a spoon up in it, and as I recall the chili is equally solid. The sandwiches here used to come with a really good goopy macaroni salad, but unfortunately that’s been discontinued. However, getting sufficient calories is not going to be a problem. And if you are still hungry after lunch, there are always doughnuts. Or cookies, or brownies, or turnovers, or bearclaws, or…

I haven’t been doing a good job of documenting our meals lately – I blame it on our garage remodel – so here’s a sandwich from a few weeks back, to give you something new to look at. It was a collection of leftovers that worked splendidly together: steak, grilled eggplant, sauteed chard, yogurt-garlic sauce, and a puree of seasoned chickpeas, all piled onto fresh baguette. When we bit into our sandwiches, the filling squirted out into a pile on our plates and down our fronts, but it was worth it.

Only twelve hours ago, we didn’t know this place existed.

We had decided to run down to Seattle for the afternoon and pick up some necessary framing materials. I had recently received an email from Seattle Metropolitan featuring good lunch spots, so I pulled that up to look over while we were getting our stuff together. The Inner Sanctum of the Temple of Porcine Love immediately made itself known as the place we needed to have lunch. Today.

As it turns out, this place is a recent adjunct to the quite fabulous little butcher/charcuterie shop The Swinery. It’s rather like the old Pok Pok in Portland, back when it was just a takeout stand in someone’s driveway. You order your sandwich, eat it on a bench in the narrow courtyard, and pay for it in the shop (where, if you’re like us, you will instantly succumb to the lure of gorgeous charcuterie as well). They’re doing it as a bit of a trial run, to see how it goes.

How was the food, you ask? Hmmm. Jon got the Swinery Burger with caramelized onions and Swiss cheese, cooked medium rare. I got the Carolina pulled pork sandwich, which was so rich and smoky it didn’t need sauce (except for mayo, which I can’t live without). Both were fabulous. I was especially impressed with the bun, which was soft enough to squish down over the meat but didn’t dissolve into mush, and had been nicely toasted. My only regret is that I wasn’t able to try the BLT or the tallow fries.

West Seattle isn’t on our usual route, so I’d just like to put a call out to anyone in the area – check this place out! Give them enough business to consider making it permanent. The world needs more really great burgers and pulled pork sandwiches. Not to mention duck chorizo.

I’m beginning to think I should just call this blog “Sandwiches on the Brain.” I seem to get a lot more excited about making sandwiches out of the leftovers of something than I do the original dish. I made a beautiful roast beef last weekend, complete with Yorkshire pudding (I made the mistake of looking through The River Cottage Meat Book), and it was delightful…but it’s the roast beef sandwiches that are really rocking my boat this week.

The beef was a rolled and tied cross-rib roast from our grassfed freezer cow, rubbed with fresh thyme and rosemary from the garden, and roasted just until perfectly rare. Sliced, a lot of the nice herb rub came off, so the largest pieces didn’t actually have any seasoning, but they still had a good beefy flavor. I made a special trip down to the co-op for a loaf of Samish Potato Bread, one of my favorite Breadfarm products – it has a nice sourdough tang, and the potato makes it spongy enough to soak up a lot of juices without falling apart. The first few days I stuck to a formula of mayo, horseradish, beef, lettuce, and jarred piquillo peppers, but the very last of the beef was consumed with a good dollop of sauerkraut instead. Mmmm.

We have been braising fiends this year, and we’ve begun to make inroads on some of our larger roasts, which means leftovers. Of course, the great thing about braised meat is that it’s better the next day, after the flavors have had a chance to really meld and settle in. Last weekend we pulled out a pork arm roast and braised it on a bed of cabbage, onion, and sauerkraut flavored with paprika, caraway and beer. It was pleasant enough the first night, but lunch the next day was when it really shone.

I had made a batch of buttermilk-caraway dinner rolls (from our go-to baking book for such things, Mary’s Bread Basket and Soup Kettle), which were wonderful eaten hot out of the pan with butter, but were also delightful split, toasted, spread with mustard, and turned into little pork-and-cabbage sliders. A pile of cornichons and a glass of Pacific Rim Riesling completed a rather dreamy lunch.

And because we made a truly enormous amount, I had those sliders again yesterday (maybe today, too). And for dinner last night, I threw together this interesting noodle dish. Some fresh shredded cabbage, sauteed in olive oil until well browned, tossed with some of the leftover braised pork, and mixed with cooked gemelli pasta and doused with Frank’s hot sauce. It came out well, with a sort of spicy Asian-fusiony sort of effect. I liked it.

I don’t normally have the attention span to eat the same thing every day, but I ate this sandwich for lunch three days running and was still not tired of it. I kept trying to decide whether to change it up a bit, add a different condiment…and then made it exactly the same way. Again.

This all came about because we thought a particular day was going to be cold and rainy, so we planned a pot roast. As it turned out, the weather all week was ridiculously warm and springlike, but once the beef was defrosted it was too late to back out. We based the braise on the Yankee Pot Roast Redux recipe in Molly Stevens’ All About Braising, using a rolled and tied cross-rib roast from our freezer and cooking it in Strongbow cider, chicken broth and onions, with carrots and potatoes going in near the end. It was fabulous, and we ate it two nights running with polenta and shredded Brussels sprouts, but there were still many leftovers.

Having thought ahead to this predicament, I had picked up a bag of rosemary potato rolls at the co-op, made by the Breadfarm, a wonderful bakery in Edison. These rolls, like so much the Breadfarm does, are spectacular – sour and chewy, with coarse salt on top and plenty of fresh rosemary scattered throughout. When it came time to make my sandwich, I cut a roll in half, toasted it lightly, spread it with mayonnaise (Best Foods), and fit a slice of pot roast onto it. I also remembered that we had a bag of cilantro in the fridge, so I pulled out a few sprigs to add. Squished down well, the ingredients melded together, and positively sang.

I ate that first sandwich and immediately made another.

When we flew into Kansas City last week, getting in just in time for dinner, we were sorely tempted to go back to our favorite BBQ joint, Oklahoma Joe’s. In the pursuit of knowledge, however, we felt that we really needed to try somewhere new – you know, so we can say with authority where our favorite KC barbecue is. We’ve tried Gates, Smokestack and Joe’s, but we had never made it to one which is often touted as the best in the city: L.C.’s Bar-B-Q.

Located on the corner of Blue Parkway and Sni-a-Bar Road, just off of the eastern curve of 435, L.C.’s isn’t hard to find – there are even signs on the freeway to get you there. It’s not much to look at, and they don’t serve beer, so I would suggest getting takeout – that’s what almost everyone else was doing when we stopped in. If you eat in, though, you get a big bottle of extra sauce and plenty of paper towels.  We also got to eavesdrop on a really interesting conversation L.C. was having with another guy at the corner table.

I knew the servings would be generous, but we ordered plenty anyway: burnt ends, a sliced beef sandwich, fried okra, and baked beans. The sandwich came with fries as well, which were obviously cut in-house.

The burnt ends were fantastic, fatty and rich and doused in L.C.’s tart, cuminy sauce. They were served piled heavily on plain white bread, and pretty much needed to be eaten with a fork.

The beef sandwich was awesome, almost too big to bite into. The smoke ring on the beef was brilliant pink, and the meat was tender and flavorful. It was modestly sauced, which really gave the flavor of the smoked meat a chance to shine.

We love fried okra, and can hardly ever get it on the west coast. This was blazingly hot and crisp. The only thing I wished for was a dish of mayo or ranch dressing to dip it in.

And the baked beans! They were thick, sweet with molasses, and well studded with shredded beef. Some of the best beans I’ve had. I could easily make a meal of a bowl of these and some cornbread.

We ate about half of all this, and took the rest home to my in-laws’ house, where it all got eaten for lunch the next day. L.C. does not skimp on his servings. I would love to come back and get a vast amount of takeout from here, especially ribs, and have a proper feast with Boulevard beer and lots of napkins.

By the way, this post marks the end of NaBloPoMo! Posting may be a bit less frequent for a while, but I guarantee I won’t stop talking about food anytime soon.

On our way out to Larabee State Park for a walk in the woods, we stopped in the town of Edison for a bite of lunch. My original intention had been to have some fried oysters and a beer at The Edison Inn, but as we walked past Slough Food we spied a sign advertising lunch in their courtyard. Whoo!

This place is one of our favorite shops in the whole area. John DeGloria, the owner, sells an intriguing mixture of European imported foods, such as pasta and anchovies, and locally produced specialties such as duck eggs and chanterelles. He has an incredible cheese case, plus cured meats from Salumi and other sources. Most of the shop is dedicated to wine, with a special table set aside for high quality chocolates. There is no better place to build a picnic. And even better, now you can have the picnic right there in the back yard!

The courtyard just opened about a month ago, and the menu is still limited to a few kinds of panini, tossed salads, and charcuterie plates, with a limited selection of bottled beer and wine by the glass. However, you have the option of any bottle of wine in the shop, with a $5 corkage fee, which I would consider a steal.

Plus, the panini and salad are nothing to sneer at. The mixed greens (I saw chard and orach in there) were fresh and delicate, with a scattering of flower petals and a light vinaigrette. The panini were hot and crunchy and full of mozzarella and basil. Mine had intensely ripe tomatoes as well, and Jon’s had prosciutto. Really good.

And you get to eat all this while sitting in someone else’s garden, sheltered from the wind blowing across the slough, watching the grasses wave. Then you can go next door to the Breadfarm for a fresh macaroon, and maybe a baguette for dinner.

And then a walk in the woods.