My favorite meal of the day is lunch. Let’s go out for my favorite lunch, which is a BLT sandwich, with a scalding hot pile of crispy French fries. BLTs are reliably delicious and always seem celebratory.
No matter who makes the BLT, it will always spark joy. Miss Dee’s snack bar during our Washington College days offered an excellently greasy BLT, which was quite the perfect hangover cure. As I remember. Even if she was a little cheap with the potato chips. A large fountain Coke, with pearly pebbles of ice, helped cut through the extra bacon grease, as it refreshed and rehydrated. Ah, youth. Resuscitated and ready for more.
Post-grad, I would order club sandwiches when I was out for a grown up kind of luncheon, trying to signal familiarity with club life. Club sandwiches, with those extra layers of bread and turkey and fancy ruffled toothpicks, are just too baroque for purist me. I realized that club sandwiches didn’t signify sophistication, they were just unwieldy. They are not first date material. The bread would slide, mayonnaise would ooze, turkey was slimy and slippery, and where did the used toothpicks go on my plate? Simple is better.
During this summer tomato season I have been enjoying some delicious tomato sandwiches. Who doesn’t love thick slabs of tomato, carefully coated with a thick impasto of creamy mayonnaise, lightly salted with a cloud of Maldon, and a swift grind of fresh black pepper, on a raft of lightly toasted Pepperidge Farm white bread? But you know what would make a tomato sandwich even better? Of course you do. Bacon. Oooh. And some French fries. The potato chips will keep until cocktail hour.
Food52’s latest on BLTs
This is the Spy Test Kitchen’s favorite time of the year – when we pull out our annual sandwich ingredients list. Have an excellent school year!
I always loved that first day of school: new shoes, new notebooks, new pencils, and a pristine box of still-pointy, aromatic crayons. Though I always forgot about about my crippling anxiety about my locker combination. I never recalled the social implications of lunchroom seating during my leisurely summer, either. When I was a responsible parental-unit, I loved shopping for school supplies, and shoes, and new lunch boxes. It was only after the sun set on the night before school started that I confronted the horror: the woeful lack of organization in our lives.
While the young ’uns were setting out their new sneakers for the morning, and frantically paging through books that should have been read weeks before, I was peering into the fridge and taking stock of our jumble of foodstuffs. What nutritional and tempting combinations could I conjure that would actually be eaten? Once, when Mr. Sanders had been out of town for a very long business trip, we attempted to set a world’s record for eating pizza for every meal, for many days in a row. I understand that that sort of tomfoolery doesn’t set a good example nowadays with iPhones and social media.
Now all the cool kids carry cute, eco-friendly, bento box lunch boxes. There are cunning little compartments for vegetables, for fruits, for proteins. Some people cut vegetables on Sunday afternoons, and put them in the fridge for easy access on school mornings. They roll up lettuce wraps, dice carrots, prepare tuna salad, bake muffins and stack little cups of applesauce. These people also involve their children in the lunch assembly process. Loathsome creatures… The despair I often felt in those dark, early mornings racing to get lunches made before the school bus arrived no longer exists, because now those people are grown up and organized and thorough. And they use a lot of Door Dash.
While we are still leftover-dependent in this house, these folks know what to do about school lunch organization: Make Ahead Lunches
A handy guide to Sunday night preps: Make Ahead Prep And at Food52, the ever-clever Amanda always has some really fab lunch ideas. Amanda’s Clever Lunch Ideas
And now, with shameless drumroll, is the Spy Test Kitchen lunch list, which I haul out, shamelessly, every fall. Feel free to make your own spreadsheet, Google Doc or PowerPoint deck so you never have another moment of lunch ennui. The Test Kitchen came up with this flexible list of ingredients for packing school lunches a few years ago. It is just as timely today:
Luncheon Variations
Column A
Let’s start with bread:
Ciabatta bread
Rye bread
Whole grain breads
Hard rolls
Portuguese rolls
French baguettes
Italian bread
Brioche rolls
Flour tortillas
Croissants
Bagels
Challah bread
Crostini
Cornbread
Naan bread
Focaccia bread
Pita bread
If storing overnight, layer bread with lettuce first, then add the spreads, to keep sandwich from getting soggy.
Column B
Next, the spread:
Mayo
Sriracha
Ketchup
Dijon mustard
Honey mustard
Italian dressing
Russian dressing
Cranberry sauce
Pesto sauce
Hummus
Tapenade
Sour cream
Chutney
Butter
Hot sauce
Salsa
Salsa verde
Column C
Cheeses:
wiss cheese
American cheese
Mozzarella
Blue cheese
Cream cheese
Havarti cheese
Ricotta cheese
Cheddar cheese
Provolone cheese
Brie cheese
Cottage cheese
Goat cheese
Column D
The main ingredient:
Meatloaf
T
urkey
Chicken
Corned beef
Bacon
Crumbled hard-boiled eggs
Scrambled eggs
Corned beef
Salami
Italian sausage
Ham
Roast beef
Egg salad
Tuna salad
Ham salad
Crab salad
Shrimp salad
Chicken salad
Turkey salad
Lobster salad
Tofu
Column E
The decorative (and tasty) elements:
Tomatoes
Lettuce
Basil
Onion
Avocado
Cucumber
Cilantro
Shredded carrots
Jalapeños
Cole slaw
Sliced apples
Sliced red peppers
Arugula
Sprouts
Radicchio
Watercress
Sliced pears
Apricots
Pickles
Spinach
Artichoke hearts
Grapes
Strawberries
Figs
Column F
Finger foods:
Cherries
Carrots
Strawberries
Green Beans
Broccoli
Celery
Edamame
Granola
Rice cakes
Apples
Bananas
Oranges
Melon balls
Raisins
Broccoli
Radishes
Blueberries
And because we live in a time of modern miracles, there are even apps for your phone so you can plan lunches ahead of time. Ingenious! LaLa Lunchbox and Little Lunches are among many apps.
“ ‘We could take our lunch,’ said Katherine.‘What kind of sandwiches?’ said Mark. ‘Jam,’ said Martha thoughtfully, ‘and peanut-butter-and-banana, and cream-cheese-and-honey, and date-and-nut, and prune-and-marshmallow…’”
—Edward Eager
Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.
Joe Holt says
Miss Dee’s BLT’s. Now that takes me back! Used to have one waiting for me each morning on the counter with a large root beer (back in the day when they used styrofoam cups, and the pebble ice lasted all morning) and the morning’s Star-Democrat. Grab and go. No need for cash, it went in the book to be settled up later. Those were the days.