Hard to beat a BLT

We have home-grown tomatoes lining every window sill in the kitchen, dining and sunroom.
My wife loves 'em. Tomato sandwiches. Tomatoes over cottage cheese with black pepper.
Tomatoes and Cucumber salads. (She's taken to adding avocado and chunks of feta cheese).
The green ones are used for fried green tomato sandwiches.
The plump, juicy reds ones ... Those are for BLTs. I'll bet we have gone through 5 pounds of bacon in the last few weeks, devouring BLTs for lunch and dinner. Just her and I.

Tomatoes are Ok. I can take 'em or leave em.
But a good BLT, is second best simple sandwich in the world. The best being a ham and swiss (on jewish rye).

 

Tomatoes are the debbil.

 

Rye bread is the dogshit.

 

We dedicate a good 60 percent of the tomatoes we grow for just Caprese salad. BLTs probably make up about another 20 percent.

The reuben and the Cubano are in a neck-and-neck race for greatest sandwich in the world, but BLTs are up there.

 

I haven't had a BLT sandwich since I was 10. Sorry, they always seemed skimpy to me. Bacon is fine, but I am not a huge bacon fan.

 

I'm not a tomato fan, which is unusual for a NJ native, NJ being home to the world's best tomatoes.
One of my main gripes nowadays is simply the in-season/out-of-season issue.
In an effort to make tomatoes available year round, they've bred all innate goodness out of them.
They are a decorative element, like parsley on a plate, but they present a possible detriment to my sandwich - sogginess.
But also, in the attempt to add decorative flair to my sandwich, the tomato ultimately serves as a reminder of what a good tomato can be and what today's tomatoes are not.

 

The problem with the year round tomato is that it is picked short of ripe so that it will not be rotten when it hits the produce section on the other side of the country. There is an issue of breeding for tomatoes that can ship well, but it is more of an issue of ripeness, I believe.

 

I'd say peanut butter and jelly is the best simple sandwich ever. It's amazing how good they are, even as an adult. Especially as an adult, because you tend not to eat them as much anymore. It's a food that really holds its value, as it were.

Of course, that's coming from someone who isn't crazy about ham. Or Swiss.

 

That's an issue with almost every fruit/produce item there is. You're forced to buy them virtually hard-as-a-rock, and it seems like, oftentimes, they don't ripen right at home, or as well as they would, had they not been taken off the tree/vine so soon.

 

Now I'm craving heirloom tomatoes.

 

I love ruebens, but they are very fatty and I don't consider them a simple sandwich. Who the hell keeps sauerkraut on hand?

Cubano's are solid.. I eat one of those and I feel greasy the rest of the day.

 

I grew up surrounded by German Mennonites and now work in a town with a gigantic Oktoberfest, so having sauerkraut in the house was like having ketchup or mustard around for us, but ... point taken.