The Art of the Drunk Sandwich

The roots of the Drunk Sandwich concept lie somewhere in the murk of late college nights. I was living in a Swarthmore student tenement called the Barn, for years the off-campus home of myself and a shifting horde of shiftless, shirtless compatriots.  The combination of deadbeat landlord, liberal paint policy, and spacious porch made for a deeply congeni(t)al undergraduate lodging experience.  The dust in the basement made for a lot of black snot on days after parties.  Lest I paint a picture of complete and utter debauchery, though, a lot of good old-fashioned home cooking was done in the sooty kitchens of that condemned building

Granted, many nights as the festive momentum was winding down and the midnight hunger pangs set in, Renato's pizza would get a late-night call.  But then as now being of a fiendish, scheming culinary bent, I would just as often break out the cast iron skillet, the one whose greasiness I so jealously maintained.  Out with it would come butter, bread, eggs, chcese, and whatever leftovers and condiments were to hand.  Commence to frying of all of the above ingredients, first in sequence and then together.  The results, which loosely resembled a spicy grilled cheese that an egg had fallen into, may have been sloppy, but they were hot and deeply gratifying.  This until we began pushing the envelope over the proverbial line in the sand, and for a short string of masochistic weekends the Disgusting Sandwich reigned supreme.  (The ultimate in disgusting sandwich, for the perverse or the curious: congealed bacon fat, globs of strawberry jam, and ice cubes on whole wheat.  Gloriously inedible.  Its only contender: canned smoked oysters and pelletized hops on rye.)

Well, living situations and scholastic settings may change, but late night appetites are pretty much a constant.  As long as there's at least one ravenous co-conspirator in the house, drunk sandwiches are apt to occur.  Indeed, at a recent, almost entirely civilized soiree here at the house--at no point did a gin bucket even make an appearance--I advertised a couple of special-order items: lard fries, turkish coffee, and drunk sandwiches.

But this is grad school, where the qualities of substances is a full time study, and this is Portland, where food carts like Lardo make high-class fatty excess into a fine art.  Yes, standards have risen in the late-night snackagawea department, and no spongy whole wheat loaf is fit for the job; no Red Devil sauce, Heinz ketchup or Helman's plasticine glop.  There's a new caliber of inebriated meal on the scene.  And like everything in this epicurean wonderland, it involves artisan meat, fresh bread, hand-made sauces, naturally fermented pickles, and heirloom produce named for someone's Dutch great aunt.  Same old tried-and-true everything-gets-fried technique, though, and same old black cast iron skillet.

I'm never one for recipes per se, but I did sit down to type tonight to mark the recent creation of what may be the ultimate drunk sandwich.  Meet the Cubano Borracho.  It is, if not the Sandwich king of Southeast Portland, then at the very least the Sandwich for its time and place.  Quite simply, it consists of fine ham, tart apples thinly sliced, shaved dill pickle, caramelized onion, dijon mustard, mayonnaise (home-made if possible), black pepper, and an over-easy egg, all meticulously layered on finest not-too-porous bread, the whole thing thoroughly fried in a combination of butter and the bacon grease that was left in the skillet and that you conscientiously pre-fried the ham in.  No cheese necessary in this case, though some gruyere wouldn't be altogether amiss.  Cut diagonal and served dripping.

Half of one of these is more than enough even for a late night hunger; first thing in the morning, which was perversely when this mongrel was born, a whole one will send you straight back to bed groaning.  Such is the dark power of this, the final evolution of the Drunk Sandwich.  Enjoy!

Boom.  

Drinking Straight From the Hydrant

The title phrase fairly well describes my experience of studying Chinese medicine at NCNM these days.  I'm by turns pummeled, exhilarated, soaked, and gorged on the high-velocity stream.  And when I pause for air, it's a little dismaying to see gallons of precious fluid spilling out into the street every second.  At least I can't complain of being dehydrated.

The preliminaries of the first year are out of the way and we're getting into the meat now: herbs, acu-moxa points, pathology, case studies, and clinical observation, in addition to such juicy morsels as immunology and clinical physical diagnosis.  Presenting this smorgasbord of material is a particularly brilliant array of faculty, each with a wildly individual style: Paul Kalnins' free-wheeling integration of biomedicine with the Chinese framework and Anthroposophical medicine; Brandt Stickley's penetrating psychological approach; David Berkshire's practical mix of TCM and Worsley Five Element, just to name a few.  It's enough to make me--usually ever thirsty for more--want to slow down, to take a breather to process and assimilate the wealth of information.  But every new day brings a different class with a different instructor and different set of expectations.  By the time a week goes by and the next session of any one class comes around again, there's been so much presented in the meantime that I'm twenty or thirty pages ahead in my all-in-one little spiral notebook.  By year's end I envision a stack of such raggedy things lining my bookshelves, which are already sagging from the weight of acupuncture and herbal tomes, a Chinese dictionary or two, ancient classics like the Nei Jing, three versions of the I Ching, and western herbals from Matthew Wood and Michael Moore...

Signs of my single-minded caduceal pursuit have in fact taken over my room completely: my big poster-sized Chinese organ clock is installed on the wall above the computer I'm typing on; next to the overstuffed bookshelf are arrayed three separate bookcases of tinctures and bulk herbs.  There's a small area reserved for sleeping, I'll admit, and a picture of some loved ones, two photo montages from my Southasian travels, and two hanging houseplants (whose medicinal properties I have not explored--yet).  There's a small dresser, and a mirror, and other such mundanery. But the overall impression is overwhelmingly of an herbalist's inner sanctum.  Things are going to get worse before they get better--and "better" only means the medicinary will outgrow my little room altogether and initiate a hostile takeover of the apartment at large.

Yes, I've finally done it: immersed myself completely and quite irrevocably in a world of my own obsessions. (Passions, to put it in more appropriately positive light.) It's not such a strange thing to do, really; in this place, at this time, it feels almost normal.  This ain't Kansas anymore.  Nor Manhattan.  No, this is the beginning of the future, and the future is the beginning of the end.  But let's not talk about that.  For the time being, I'm just thankful to be here in Portland, in 2011.  I mean, it may be the egocentrism of youth, but this place and time feels like what I imagine Greenwich Village felt like in the early sixties.  I refer not so much to Portland's bohemian side, though that is substantial, but to the bubble and ferment of creative energy that's evident all over the city.  The sense of being a bubble on the vanguard wave--part of an as yet undefined movement.  From my own vantage point amidst the rollicking motion, it's hard to see what the movement shares, besides ideals of simpler, more natural living, real food, self-expression, low-impact modes of transportation.  Maybe I need to watch Portlandia and get in better touch with the stereotype.  I think there's a deeper valuing of tradition--or a valuing of deeper traditions--than the hippie generation tended to exhibit.  This must have something to do with the sense of imminent planetary peril (a sense that, I admit, is nothing new), not to say doom, that's in the air.

Every time may very well be a pivotal one, but this really feels like the neck of the hourglass.  I'm not much interested in theories of 2012, but the mathematician in me senses the inflection point on the societal curve--that almost imperceptible moment when acceleration starts to slow down, when convex becomes concave.  Interesting times!