Veganomics

You may have surmised by now that I don't exactly advocate a vegan diet, but even the most stalwart Der Wienerschnitzel patron may well be wondering if I advocate eating more than a tablespoon of marinara sauce for daily vegetable intake.  Yes, I do.

To that end, let me share the lunch I recently completed.  Well, not exactly share the lunch but tell you how to replicate this delicious meal while adding only three more items to your shopping list: honey dijon mustard, Roma tomato and Hass avocado.  I think alfalfa sprouts are a great addition to this mix, or perhaps a little lettuce, but I didn't have those in the refrigerator today.  Put those on the list too, if you love them.

We'll once again resurrect that leftover Oscar Mayer turkey bacon. If you ate all the bacon at breakfast, you can substitute some lunch meat, assuming you have that in your refrigerator. In a pinch, you could use pepperoni, but only sparingly. In fact, I only use one piece of bacon on the sandwich. 

The trick to saving time in preparation is multi-tasking. Stick a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster, and while it is heating, wash the outside of your avocado and cut it in half lengthwise with a steak knife. Avocados have a big pit in the middle, so you actually don't cut straight through, but I'm sure you can figure out how to cut a circle around the pit and pull the pieces apart. Remove and discard the pit, and put half of the avocado into a Baggie, preferably the one you previously had the bacon in (save the Baggie, save the planet!).

Wash the outside of the tomato and cut it in half, putting  one half of that in the Baggie with the saved avocado half.  If there's still a piece of bacon in there, you have done a lot of the prep work for another meal.  You can slice the tomato at this time, but that requires getting a cutting surface messy, so I usually just wait until the toast is done.

Put one piece of toast on a plate.  Push the avocado out of the peel, scraping any excess out with your knive.  Press the avocado onto your toast so that it becomes a sort of thick, evenly-distributed paste.  Crumple the bacon over the avocado to sprinkle it uniformly on the avocado.  Slice the tomato over the top of the half-finished masterpiece.  Spread mustard on the second piece of toast and and put it on top of the sandwich. 

Unless you put your sandwich together with the food and mustard on the outside, this should be easier to cleanup than to make. Simply wash the plate and knife, and you're done.

If you are a vegetarian, you can eat this without any meat, and it still tastes very good.  It is the combination of the avocado and honey dijon mustard that really delivers the knockout punch.

Bon appetit!