Sandwiches

Seems the latest food trend is food trucks, more specifically gourmet food trucks. Or as one San Fransisco owner calls his, "mobile bistro." From LA to Austin to NYC, dozens of urban, hip food trucks are charming epicureans with fare ranging from duck dumplings to pavlova with red fruit gelée. Hotdogs and hamburgers have been usurped by their more politically correct cousins, organic free-range chicken and grass-fed beef.

But what about the old food trucks and carts? You know the ones -- the quintessential LA taco trucks and the hot pretzel carts run by a gruff guys named Sully or Bobby. Are they being squeezed out? Last March in East LA, Mexican food truck owners, under fire from restaurants who claim they're hurting business, began a campaign called "Save Our Taco Trucks."

Personally, I'd like to see both camps succeed. Because, let's face it, getting affordable, healthful, organic meals from a food truck is terrific. So is getting an artery clogging carne asada (marinated steak) torta when the craving strikes.

My dad was a two job guy.  We lived in a representative, working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, which was to me, the paradise of the world.  Representative I learned years later meant not just Jewish people, like us, but an equal mix of almost everything else.  The working class is obvious.

My dad worked at a brokerage house on Wall Street as a runner from 9 to 3.  That was his first job.  His second job was at the Morgan Annex branch of the US Post Office, in mid-town Manhattan.  He had started at the PO as a teen-ager, and was in it for the longest possible haul, a modest pension being the carrot at the end of his rainbow.  His hours on that job were 4 pm to mid-night.  He rode the subway to work.  He never owned a car.  Once in a long while he got driven home. 

My mother stayed with us during her recent visit from back east.  She emerged early each day from the back bedroom in need of coffee.  In the kitchen she would find me up to my elbows in three-grain biscuit dough or in the midst of mixing a large oven baked pancake, or perhaps dropping oatmeal scones onto a cookie sheet.  I was always in the midst of something made from scratch, time consuming and terrifically messy. 

A ritual that was met with a quizzical look and her quiet reproach, as if I couldn’t hear her say, “Nu? Whats wrong with frozen waffles?” My childhood breakfasts came straight out of a box from the freezer in the cold mid-western kitchen where I grew up.  My mother taught in downtown Detroit, and early morning school days were mostly about getting up and getting out. Yet, somewhere in between the up and out part, I remember a breakfast ritual that my mother and I shared, just her and I, before she left for work. 

My family likes sandwiches.  My present husband had his bachelor party at Langer’s.  The day before our wedding, while I was at a ladies’ lunch thrown by my sisters, my husband, his son, my son, his daughter’s boyfriend, my brother-in-law, and one of my nephews went to Langer’s Deli (across the street from MacArthur Park) and ordered pastrami sandwiches, lots of them, I understand, more than one apiece.  And it was further evidence to me that I was marrying the right person.

In our family, we think of sandwiches as comfort food.   The slightest thing, a bad grade, a lost soccer game, a minor heartbreak can prompt any one of us to say, “How do you feel about a sandwich?” – which is code for:  Let’s all jump in the car and go to the fish market in Malibu, Bay Cities in Santa Monica, Bryan’s Pit Barbecue in the Farmers’ Market...” or any number of other places where they have a great sandwich.