Sandwich Science

Lunchtime at mom's house today was an interesting adventure. A good ham or turkey sandwich always satisfies my taste buds, and I'd been hankering a good lunch meat sandwich for a few days. I spotted a few ciabatta rolls atop the refrigerator, and I plucked one off to serve as the backbone of my soon-to-be sandwich. I quickly realized to my misfortune, that the roll was as hard as a rock. I plopped it in the toaster oven for a few short minutes to see if it would change the consistency of my roll. No dice. If anything it got harder, but I suppose I could have guessed that. The nice thing about these types of rolls is that they get stale before they can become a mushy breeding ground for bacteria. The crusty, crater filled roll sort of reminded me of the moon, in all of it's barren, lifeless existence. I'd crack a tooth on the ciabatta roll before I contracted some deathly mold-induced sickness.

In a continued effort to soften up my ciabatta roll, I decided to slice it in half. Slicing is how you would split a fresh, chewy roll. In my case, I had to saw through the darn thing, wincing as enormous crumbs of ciabatta shrapnel flew in every direction. It was at least sixty seconds of sawing before I split that sucker in two. Then I placed turkey slices on one half and a slice of provolone cheese on the other. I hypothesized that if I tried toasting it again, some of the moisture from the turkey and cheese would be drawn down into the hard bread. After taking the sandwich halves out of the toaster oven and testing the bread hardness, I let out a sigh, squirted on some spicy brown mustard, and braced myself as I gingerly bit into my cement sandwich. I can't say I enjoyed gnawing through my entire sandwich this afternoon, but it tasted just like I'd  hoped it would.

You can see in the bottom right corner where a chunk
of bread was lost to the brute force of the formidable
bread knife