Minimum Wage Peanut Butter & Strawberry Sandwich

Ninety-nine years ago, Massachusetts became the first state to set a minimum wage (for women and children only). I couldn't find a reference to the cent amount, but I did learn that the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1923. Pesky livelihoods!

The idea for this sandwich comes from my mother, who found inspiration in a magazine while waiting in an office. She can't remember which magazine or what was in it, exactly, only that there was fresh fruit where there normally isn't. Straight line from that revelation to replacing strawberry jam with strawberries from a local farm. Of course I use bananas all the time, but it never occurred to me to use berries because bananas don't replace anything, you know?

This was lunch. Dinner is a Chinese place. Hold the fish sauce, please.

INGREDIENTS:

2 slices of bread

peanut butter

strawberries

DIRECTIONS:

1. Spread peanut butter thickly on one slice of bread and thinly on the other.

2. Slice strawberries in half if small, in thirds if large. Arrange on heavily peanut-buttered slice. Close sandwich.

Peanut Butter and Jelly and Apple Sandwich

I thought about coming up with a clever name for this one by riffing on Elvis and Johnny Appleseed or something. You can see why I decided against that and went with a more straightforward approach. The explanation for having this for dinner goes like this: I was hungry after work at 4pm, which is too early to make dinner, but I didn't want to eat leftover curry since I had it for lunch, but I also won't have time to cook a proper dinner since I'm going to a 6:30pm screening of White Material. So I needed a filling snack.

If you're wondering what in the hell I was thinking with this particular choice of snack, I'd like to point out that 1) peanut butter goes great with apples and also with jelly on a sandwich, so they must all combine splendidly (don't think too hard about this one), and 2) eating bananas in the dead of winter is weird. I know, we're importing them from the same place regardless of the season here in the US and storing them in state-of-the-art climate-controlled sections of huge supermarket warehouses, but... well, no buts -- eat a PB&J&A sandwich!

INGREDIENTS:
2 slices bread
peanut butter
jam
1/4 large apple (I used a Honeycrisp, but I think it would have been even better had I used one of the smaller Empires I bought more recently), sliced into 1/4 in.-thick pieces

DIRECTIONS:
1. Spread jam on one bread slice and peanut butter on the other.
2. Slice the apple and lay the pieces on top of the peanut butter. Complete the sandwich.
3. Heat some oil in a small pan over low-medium heat. You can use any old oil I suppose, but I think using peanut oil makes sense given what's on the sandwich. Another favorite of mine in situations like this is sunflower oil.
4. Cook the sandwich several minutes on each side, until browned but not burned (unless you're into that, of course).

While having peanut butter and banana get all melt-y together is delicious, I think the apple crunch is a nice change. It's like those people I've heard about who put potato chips in their savory sandwiches.