Earsdropping: on the second-day sando
The holiday season is here and, with the first major one coming to a close, it’s time to start working our way through leftovers. There is an art to leftovers. Some leftover artists are like Michelangelo, carefully plating all of the ingredients of yesterday’s meal to craft a pensive recreation of the angel hair pasta reaching out to touch the green goddess salad. Others are like Vincent van Gogh, dolloping and swirling sauces on the plate to feed the soul. The chaotic Jackson Pollacks splatter the plate (and microwave) without flinching and the Salvador Dalis wonder “what if I mixed jello, green beans, and turkey together in the same bowl?”
The go-to leftover strategy for most is the sandwich — simple, yet effectively the best way to reincarnate the original ingredients into a new life form. The sandwich is a transporter of taste and a nod of nostalgia to many of us. We grew up watching cartoons where the main characters made these morsels any chance they could have mustered/mustard. In Tom and Jerry, they shuffled the sandwich ingredients like a deck of cards and inhaled them in one vacuumous gulp (toothpick and all). Scooby and Shaggy were often famished after escaping phantoms and would raid the closest kitchen to make their concoctions: hot pepper hoagies, ham, lettuce, and mustard, or sardine, marshmallow, and fudge sandwiches. Nothing was off the table for those two starving scaredy-cats.
Even modern animation keeps the tradition alive with the Regular Show’s hoagie sandwich. The characters improvise an instructive ingredient song and collaboratively smear and stack the sandwich, showing there isn’t just one hero at the table. Other shows gorge on gastronomic grinders. Jake, a daring dog from the show Adventure Time, centers himself with his perfect sandwich which includes many common ingredients typically found in a kitchen, as well as the outlandish ones: bird from a window, tears, and soul of a lobster. Internet chef Binging with Babish, famous for bringing interpretations of TV food to life, reimagined the lobster’s soul as an aioli made with strained lobster shells.
So this holiday season, when we reach for the toppling tower of Tupperwares in our fridge and go ham (or turkey) on those leftovers, we have decisions to make. Do we slap down the remaining rolls or some slices of wonder(ful) bread? Do we slather on some sweet cranberry sauce or tangy Dijon mustard? Do we feel keen on the crunchy green beans? Do we let us freshen up with some lettuce? Stuff it with stuffing? A scoop of potatoes? (Now that’s a mash-up.) Diagonal or straight down the middle, no matter which way you cut it, it’s going to be a feast.
