Summer means fresh everything. The best part is the tomatoes. Recently, I planted a garden with 10 tomato plants, 5 different varieties. Just like any other raw ingredient there is a variety of things you can do with tomatoes. Personally I prefer not messing with them at all. Maybe a little olive oil, salt, and pepper or a smothering of cottage cheese on top of a slice or two is all it takes to satisfy my tomato needs.
With the abundance of the red, juicy fruits (Technically speaking: Vegetable is a culinary term and Fruit is a botanical term making a tomato both a fruit and a vegetable) I’ve been throwing them on any sandwich I’ve slammed together. Earlier this week my dad re-introduced me to a classic sandwich, the BLT. It was strange that it had completely slip from my mind. The sandwich is so minimalist and elegant that it should be brought to the attention of everyone!
As my dad cooked the bacon in our large iron skillet I washed and sliced the tomato and lettuce. While grabbing the lettuce out of the crisper I noticed two huge, Costco-sized avocados. “Why not?” I thought.
Avocado goes great on just about everything. Sometimes I even sprinkle a little salt and pepper on a halved avocado and eat it with a spoon. Their creamy texture is exquisite and preparing the fruit is fun! Take a knife and at the stem end cut the avocado in half. At the center of the thickest portion your blade will run into the large pit, simply rotate the avocado in your hand to slice around the pit. Once you have finished cutting through the entire fruit, grab each half in a hand and twist to release one half from the pit and separate them. Now the fun/impressive part comes. Place half without the pit in it down and pick your knife back up. Chop the blade of the knife forcefully into the pit then twist the pit. It should become dislodged and remain stuck to your blade!
The rest of the BLT assemblage is quite simple. I like to toast my bread and spread mayonnaise on one side. From there I just pile tomato, avocado, lettuce, and bacon to the point that only a snake with a hinged jaw could eat it. Then I lightly dust it with salt and pepper to finish it off.
After having dreamt all night about the other half of an avocado left over from BLTs I woke up knowing lunch needed to be special.
At this point in time, that is if this were a tv show, the program would pause and only my voice would narrate something like, “But wait . . . how do you keep an avocado from browning over night?” I’m sure this is a common problem for anyone who has ever eaten guacamole. I have had lots of problems with it, to the point that my policy was if I cut one open I had to eat it in one sitting. Luckily, I have been told 3 ways to save my avocados and have tried them all with great satisfaction! First is to cover the exposed green of the avocado with lime. The acidity of the lime keeps the avocado ripe and works best over guacamole. Always cover the avocado with plastic wrap. The second way is to leave the pit in the fruit. Of course this works the best when you only want to eat half an avocado, or drop the pit into your guacamole. An article in The Tennessean recently suggested dunking the avocado in ice cold water.
I like to think of the sandwich I made as “The Scrounger.” I had no plan, except for using avocado, and nearly opened every cabinet containing some sort of edible material looking for anything that I could use. What I came up with was a frozen french baguette, deli sliced smoked turkey, Monterrey Jack cheese, hot banana pepper rings, Famous Dave’s Spicy Pickle Chips, a cherry tomato, red wine vinegar, olive oil, manchego cheese, season salt, ground black pepper, and oregano.
The first thing I did was throw the french baguette into the oven and start preheating it to 350 degrees. I was starving and didn’t know how long it would take for the baguette to be finished (it only needed to lightly brown and crisp), therefore I decided to let it bake as the oven preheated. This freed me up to cut the avocado and tomato, as well as grate a bit of manchego cheese.
Once the baguette looked close to satisfactory I removed it and split it length wise down the middle. I then pressed the inner bread flat on each side creating a ditch in it. On one side I stacked a few slices of turkey and Monterrey Jack, then tossed both sides of the bread back into the oven. With a little more time I decided to take out the portions of each ingredient. I guess one could do practically anything at this time; dance, get the mail, eat a slice of avocado that was supposed to go on the sandwich! But, eventually, the cheese was melted and the bread perfectly brown. 
All of the ingredients created a beautiful collage of vivid colors. I like to put the olive oil and the red wine vinegar on after everything except for the spices are on. I’m not to keen on a soggy sandwich, especially if its soggy on the bottom. I dust all of my seasonings and manchego cheese after I’ve made a sandwich so it all sticks to the olive oil and vinegar. I then slammed the top on, cut it in half, and buried most of it straight into my mouth. And Everything Was Good.
D'Jeat? 
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