Sandwich: "The Usual"
- Orowheat 12 grain bread
- Athenos hummus (roasted red pepper or plain) on both slices of bread
- Oscar Meyer shaved smoked turkey breast
- 2 slices of tomato (currently homegrown)
- leaf lettuce
- Vlasic roasted red peppers
- Avocado slices
- Swiss cheese (currently generic processed crap, but improving in the near future)

Over the summer this sandwich has become sort of a staple of my diet. It has changed slightly and I have experimented with different ingredients in the past, but this is it's current form. Unfortunately it is not without it's problems.

Pros and Cons
First off, you'll notice that a lot of the ingredients I am using are sub par (namely the meat and cheese). Obviously, one of the most important parts of any sandwich is the quality of it's ingredients. I will be looking to improve these two ingredients once I find a good deli and/or grocery store nearby.

Second, the tomatoes, if not cut thin enough tend to overpower many of the other flavors of the sandwich. It is also very important to find correctly ripe tomatoes. I am using homegrown ones right now that are very full of flavor. One of the things that can ruin a sandwich in my opinion are under-ripe tomatoes that are too crispy and lack flavor. I may go into more detail on this in a later post.

Setting these things aside, I like this sandwich quite a bit for the following reasons:
1. It has a good mix of different flavors
2. The turkey-swiss combination is tough to beat
3. It's healthy
4. The avocado really rounds out the sandwich I think and provides an interesting texture/flavor that increases the complexity of the overall taste.

Implementation
Today, I attempted a slight variation on the usual. For one thing, my avocado was over-ripe so I was unable to use it. Second, I was low on bread and using the tough slices close to the end. I decided to toast the bread before constructing the sandwich to sort of help mitigate this. Now, normally I prefer to toast this sandwich after it has been completely assembled (except maybe the lettuce) in order to melt the cheese and provide a warm meal. Unfortunately, I currently do not have access to a sandwich toaster right now or even a George Foreman grill. Toasted the bread alone proved to be alright, but missing the avocado was a bit of a let down. Also, I cut the tomato slices a little thick which really didn't help matters.

Future enhancements
- Toast the sandwich
- Spinach?
- Better meat/cheese
- well cut tomato slices