Summer Sandwiches
and eggplant pakoras and lemon almond cake!
August slips in and away as folklore echoes through the car, wistfully recounting summer moments. I want to repeat the very first night in June where it made more sense to eat outside, read outside, do it all outside. I think of my old neighborhood, which boasted ample privacy for obnoxious skipping. I miss terrible $1 movies in empty theaters with my mothers’ friends and all their kids. People love to say “don’t live in the past,” but screw that. Summer is fleeting and time feels curious, mystical, wondrous. Did I make the most of tomato season? How have I only eaten corn 5 times? And WHY did I see the words “pumpkin spice” today?
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
- Sylvia Plath
The odd uneven time, stuck in a limbo between ignoring back-to-school ads and making plans for fall. By “making plans” I mean browsing concert schedules or considering Halloween costumes—not testing fall recipes. I will hold on to the easy, intuitive rhythm of summer eating until its last breath. We can enjoy sandwiches all year, but summer is sandwich season. I don’t make the rules.
Prior to this summer, my philosophy was why make a sandwich when you can make toast, with double the toppings? But I finally get it. I learned to slam sandwiches together as a child, but making a GOOD sandwich is no simple feat.
How toasty is tooooo toasty, to the point of unrelentlessly mocking you with crusty rigidity? How much filling is tooooo much filling, to the point of making it impossible to look like a snack while widening your mouth in ambitious desperation, only for pickles and mayo to cascade out? How do we balance the forces of crispy, creamy, juicy, tender, chewy? A sandwich is an exercise in physics just as much as it is an exercise in art.
I’m overjoyed and overwhelmed by summer’s possibilities, for sandwiches and beyond.
Summer is for lingering on hobbies, pursuing books that are too emotionally difficult to stomach during the school year, and babysitting multiple fermentation projects. (Mainly sourdough, yet in the end, I manage to do everything except sourdough. My preserved lemons are thriving.) I anticipate adventures in new places, but I’m more excited about the small moments at home that make my life feel slow and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Like sandwiches.
sandwiches for every occasion
For back-to-school or one last road trip: the chickpea salad sandwich. It is important for it to be moist; the alternatives to this word that our culture has collectively canceled include dry or soggy, neither of which are lunchbox material. You can make a bunch of chickpea salad at once and continue to stuff it between bread on the daily, perhaps with tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, and/or avocado. I usually add chaat masala and a selection of ground spices to make an Indianish version of it or gochujang and mayo to make a spicy, tangy, and creamy version of it.
For a weekend hike: beet hummus (or another hummus, but the pink enlivens my spirit), cucumbers, sun-dried tomatoes, avocado, and arugula, in between toasted sourdough. Unwrapping this at the top of a peak is a gift from past you to future you..
For luxuriously basking in a home garden: the fried cremini mushroom sandwich with silken tofu aioli, all between a crusty golden baguette sliced in half. I still dream about this sandwich.
For effectively fusing cultures and making the parents happy: the eggplant pakora, raita, and chutney sandwich. Designed as a distant relative to the Italian eggplant parmigiana sandwich, this sandwich was the result of marrying my craving for homemade Indian food and my craving for a sandwich.
THE RECIPE
eggplant pakoras
There comes a time in every young woman’s life where she embraces the irreplaceability of fried food and ignores people who say “ew frying is bad for you.” Or at least, I hope so. With air fryer culture on the rise, I’m not sure how the #makefryingacceptableagain movement is going. I’m not telling you to heat up a huge pot of oil (I get it, the splitter splatter of oil makes me jump back too), but try an inch or so.
A pakora is an Indian fritter often served on street sides or as I know it, at homes of aunties who love to say, “My, look how tall and smart you’ve gotten!” or “Take three more, you’ve barely eaten!” A vegetable (often potatoes, onions, or some greens) is coated with besan (also known as chickpea flour or gram flour) and spices. These eggplant pakoras have a mildly crispy exterior with a tender, silky interior that melts in your mouth. Every sandwich needs a sturdy component, whether it be tofu, chickpeas, or a veggie patty, and I think eggplant pakoras fulfill the role perfectly.
serves 8 pakoras
1 medium eggplant, cut into semicircles and soaked in salted water for 30 minutes
1 cup besan (chickpea flour or gram flour)
2/3 cup water
1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp coriander
1 tsp salt (more or less to taste)
Cut the eggplant into disks that are ~ ½ inch thick. For the disks that are particularly large, cut them in half.
Prepare a bowl of water with 1 tbsp salt. Soak the eggplant for about 30 minutes to draw out its moisture.
While the eggplant soaks, prepare the pakora batter. Stir besan (chickpea flour) and water together until they form a smooth, viscous paste. Add spices and salt.
Heat about an inch of neutral oil over medium heat in a frying pot.
Rinse and dry the eggplant. Dip the eggplant into the batter on both sides. Fry in the oil, about 4 min per side until sturdy, golden, and crisp. Place the finished pakoras on a paper towel.
the sandwich
Sourdough or sandwich bread of choice, toasted (might I suggest a sourdough roll sliced in half, sub-style?)
Lettuce
Tomatoes
Your favorite green chutney (here is a recipe if you need a place to start)
½ cup plant-based yogurt
1 tbsp lime juice (or juice from ½ a lime)
¼ cup chopped cilantro
½ tsp ground cumin
Chaat masala to taste
Salt to taste
Whisk together the ingredients for the vegan raita: plant-based yogurt, lime juice, cilantro, cumin, chaat masala, and salt. This recipe makes enough for 3-4 sandwiches. Double it if you want more.
On one slice of bread, spread the vegan raita. Then add lettuce, tomatoes, and 1 or 2 eggplant pakoras, depending on the size of the pakoras. To the other slice of bread, spread green chutney. Close and enjoy, perhaps with a side of chutney and this plate of pakoras you now have.
SPICE RACK
dishing on the favorites
cooking: A lot of lunch! And tiffins! And lemon almond cake with coconut frosting and strawberries, which turned out impeccable and delightfully lemony despite the fact that it slid and fell in the car (don’t worry, only a little) in my efforts to preserve its beauty. Some folks on Instagram asked for the recipe so here it is.
For the lemon almond cake, I mostly followed Lazy Cat Kitchen’s recipe. The only alteration I made is that I used ¾ cup all-purpose flour and 1¾ cups almond flour instead of almond meal. I bought the giant almond flour bag from Costco and it makes baked goods so fluffy.
For the coconut frosting, I ended up doing a complicated series of kitchen acrobatics to save it, so here is a frosting recipe that I’ve used before and enjoyed.
Complete the top with strawberries and sliced almonds. Don’t eat it immediately after taking it out of the fridge: the texture needs some time to soften.
drinking: Copycat Philz mint mojito and this time I made a video for it.
dining: Seeing that this newsletter is about sandwiches, it was only appropriate for me to seek out a sandwich in San Francisco. This city is known for its pastrami sandwiches, so naturally, I ordered a tofu sandwich off of a menu chock-full of deli meat sandwiches at Sunset Subs in Inner Sunset. It hit the spot.
I also revisited Dumpling Home in Hayes Valley with a friend and my goodness! I totally ordered the wrong things last time. What to get: vegetable bao, okra with garlic sauce, ginger and green onion noodles.
reading: Finished Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I saw a TikTok of someone guessing whether a line is part of a Taylor Swift song or a Sylvia Plath poem, so the whole time I was reading this, The Lakes was playing in my head. It was eerie and depressing and sometimes beautiful, but I’m glad it’s over.
listening: If you caught all the folklore nods in this, congratulations. Otherwise, I’m still on a podcast kick. A few good ones:
Gut Feeling (Gastropod): Just gut microbiome talk, but more fun because of the hosts of this foodcast.
Susan Cain (on the power of introverts and bittersweetness) (Armchair Expert): I feel seen.