The Lunch Encounter

≈¡Sabich!≈

Gesundheit!

The Accidental Vegetarian

Herbivoracious
(Is that not so pretty? It is! It is!)

What exactly is Sabich?  I asked around and this is what I found out:  It’s more modern than when I was in Israel. Had falafel, humous, tahini, all that stuff. Yum. But not a sabich. It sounds like someone with a bad cold trying to say sandwich. 

I tried to talk to an actual human, rather than getting it all from cyber-space. See where it got me? Right back in Google’s lap. 

From Master G: It is hummus, fried eggplant, steamed potatoes, (browned) hard-boiled egg, salad and amba (a mango pickle), all tucked neatly into a pita.

Neatly? This I would like to see, in real life, 3-D. And eat. Not neatly. A tidy construction till it meets my teeth. Press my face right into it, like you do with a wedge of watermelon. 

Well, it ain’t true that any old dude’ll do, but the joke is funny anyhow. Told it before and I will tell it again. Now. With an every so slightly different inflection. Fresh every time. If Ralph Stanley can tell it, I can tell it. Again and again and again. Wisecracks do wizen, but not this one, dudes.

Q: What’s the difference between a rooster, Uncle Sam and an old maid? (Yeah, yeah, I hate that word combo too, but w.t.h.e.doubletoothpicks?)
A: The first goes cock a doodle doo, the second says yankee doodle doo and for the third any old dude’ll do.
I’m quite sure this “any old dude” who we lured to our table with a promise of bacon would not want to be considered “any old dude”. One would hope not. Out of the driving rain came packs of any-old-dudes pouring into Ruby and Ketchy’s and hunkering down at four-tops. We snagged one or two as they passed. 
Ruby and Ketchy’s is the place you think has gone the way of the passenger pigeon. To come upon it rachets up your faith higher than the knotholes in the knotty pine.Snug as bugs we were. Fog-hushed murmuring, waitresses in soft-soles shoes, car tires gently mashing wet gravel out front. Crossing east from Illinois, West Virginia came upon us at lunch time. Not a moment too soon. Rain, rain, rain. Moving down the highway, the water bolts down onto the windshield and froths up off the truck tires with so much more vigor than when you are standing still. Makes a passenger – and the driver too, I presume – road weary and hungering for familiar food.Ruby and Ketchy’s is in the Cheat Lake area, outside Morgantown, which I understand is all that, but we had no way of knowing. Exit, eat, return.And there were milkshakes. Slurped up in record speed on my side of the table. None for the road.Opened in 1958 by Ruby Nicholson, this sweet spot is still run by their descendants. Ruby’s original recipes include meatloaf, vegetable soup and chili. Dang, we will have to drive that way again and partake. Heard a word about piiiiiiiie.

Wordplay by Jon, a thin Perkes

Indianapolis.

Indi-man-apolis. Man-sized-sandapolis. Sand-wich-man-apolis.

Indianapolis.

We did not snooze, and we did not lose. Mercy, those hoosiers. Mercy me.

Nickel Plate Bar and Grill

8654 E 116th Street

Fishers, IN 46038

(317)841-2888

At the railroad Xing.

Heidi I-love-the-obscure Leech has a smile as wide as an Indianapolis waitress’. Sure as shinola.(As wide as her smile, not as wide as the waitress, dummy.)

This is the land of Otis Gibbs and one can expect authenticity.

The Nickel Plate was the 2005 Indy Men’s Magazine pick for best pork tenderloin sandwich.

Pork tenderloin. So they say. It hadda be the loin, ladies, that crispy fellow was sliver/slice/slab/slob. It was a slab, man. A crispy, make-me-moan slab of sammy.

The burger wazzz, ummmm, none too shabby. On that buttery toasted bread. Never seen that before. Still finding crumbs behind my ears.

Just outside the outer belt on the northeast side. Excellent stop as you cross the country on Route 70. We only went so far as Champaign/Urbana, just far enough to wonder about the Urbana thing. Champaign/Urbana is not the only /Urbana metropolis. What does it mean? Where did it come from? Perhaps, had we driven on further, to the other coast, the mystery would have come clear. But we did a loop de loop, Illinois and back, the rental car turning its nose automatically at the Mississippi. Outta bounds beyond.

Fantasize holistically, he said.

Homegrown Sandwiches: Fantasies Fulfilled
The Fremont counter knows exactly what you want, and they’re going to give it to you as sustainably as you can handle.
By Jonathan Kauffman

Homegrown, Sustainable Sandwich Shop

Remembering. Preserving. Pickling. Keeping. Putting up. Memorializing.

All these words give my heart a sense of time as an enduring thing. The slow tick of the watch rather than a stopwatch race towards our destinies. Tick, tick, tick. Let time and patience do their work. And perhaps a little salt.  Salty sweat, blood and tears.

Kick off BBQ season with Rick’s Picks pickles!
 
Grill-worthy serving suggestions:
 
Dress up cheeseburgers with Green Tomato Condiment, curried green tomato pickles with flavor notes of ketchup and mustard rolled into one.
 
Pair Smokra with brisket and BBQ chicken, our popular okra pickled in Spanish smoked paprika with just enough heat to stand up to the ‘cue! 
 
Chop Bee ‘n’ Beez for hot dog relish; our bread-and-butter pickles have just a touch of sweetness for an unbeatable tangy-sweet combo. 
Garnish summer plates with our cucumber pickles!
 
Kool Gherks – crunchy whole dills
Spears of Influence – cumin lime dill spears
Slices of Life – our classic sliced pickles

Heartfelt thanks to the Sublime Miss M for keeping the Lunch Encounter full of spit and vinegar. Without vinegar we’d have no pickles. Without spit, no kissing. No kissing worth mentioning.

Boonswoggle bikin’ today with Ben, an illiterative lad, who managed magnificently to mouth several luscious, illiterative lines. Nicely notable nerdish words were debris boom and back-up beepers.

Queued curbside, tourist trailers don’t boast debris booms but should.

As last call looms back-up beepers broadcast burnished boasters.

Speaking of wienies, many years ago when bike messengers ruled the DC streets, Ben was a pedal jockey, a tall, adorable one, and he carried a pen, a personal pen, a pen no one would steal cause it was obviously HIS. You got to have a pen when it comes time to have the manifest signed. Ben’s pen had a little bird on it, a bird on a tiny spring, a bird with a very pointy beak, facing IN. Scribble your John Hancock with that pen and the little bird pecked away wildly, tapping for plastic beetles in his tiny plastic tree. “It’s a pen pecker,” Ben would grin. “The product, not the condition.”

Home On the Range

SANDWICH FOR LISA

Life’s a BITCH

No, it’s not

It’s a bit CH

A BIT of a sandwi CH

–If e.e. can do it so can I

Rye bread

Mustard spread

Salami pickle brie

Rye bread

Wry bred

Must turn instead

So lamely pick on me

Wry bred

–If I can do it so can e.e.

Jonathan Perkes, May 2009

When Cummings was a boy, his father bought a farm in the Sandwich Range of the White Mountains from a farmer named Ephraim Joy. Cummings was indebted to his boyhood summers at Joy Farm for his Wordsworthian love of nature.

His many poems that celebrate the natural world and the denizens of the forest were inspired by his New Hampshire summers.

I heard a guy talking about these on PRI today, and thought you might want to investigate, writes Malcolm Riviera.Check it out at Holly Eats. Never a dull moment.

All photos by Renee Comet with styling by Moi!

Those Australian beef and lamb folks are exacting, fun-loving, generous and – do they know how to raise tasty animals! Sun-soaked, grass-fed and robust, one can vividly imagine the feel of their warm coats under the palm of a hand on a hot day.

After five days of hard work, they sent me home with a cache of deliciously fatty ribeyes, which made their way to West Virginia for a snowy weekend. From the grill to the breakfast table to the supper sandwich, the ribeye is my all-time, all-around, preferred beef steak – thin, thick, bone in or out, hot or not, salt, pepper, thereyougo.