Cross-Country with Sandwich

My kitchen gets a lot of sunshine. I have been growing my sample size of kitchens over the past month, and I am satisfied to say that my kitchen is the sunniest of the lot.

I did not take pictures of the kitchensI visited, so you must take this claim on faith. However:

Here is a picture of my parents in a cave made of Michigan woods.

Here is a picture of what it looks like when a whole lot of people release balloons a quarter of an hour before a new year begins in Harrisonburg, Virginia. * #

Here is a picture I took from inside a tree in Portola Redwoods, in California.

And here is a picture of a frog showing off its toes in the California Academy of Sciences.

While I was in California I ate avocados every day. They were very good in an omelette with gooey american cheese, and they made a lovely addition to a nice BLT, but they were best of all on a bagel sandwich with hummus, lettuce, tomato and sprouts. I knew they would be.

The first thing I did when I got back to my chilly non-California kitchen was turn on the heat and go back out to get groceries. I got veggie juice (became instantly obsessed with it on the flight from SF back to DTW), cheese and crackers (reminded by my mother that this is an easy snack for people who are often not quite hungry enough to bother with an actual meal), stuff to make soup and all the fixings for an SF-style veggie-bagel sandwich.

The second thing I did was get sick.

I got home on a Thursday and took Friday off. At some point in the weekend I managed to dazedly put together a filling and nutritive sausage-escarole-chickpea soup. I even managed to eat it. My avocados and tomatoes ripened and were ignored. I snuffled, read books, drank veggie juice, slept.

Finally, on Tuesday, my avocado-guilt overcame me. I gathered my ingredients in the sunny kitchen and attempted to put together an Avocado-Tomato-Lettuce-Sprouts-Hummus-Sesame-Bagel-Sandwich. The result was quite handsom, in its way:

And it looked nice with my customary toureen of coffe:

But I can tell the difference between a San Francisco avocado and a world-weary East Coast impersonator. Also, lovely as it looked, the started to crumble before I even took a bite. I wound up eating bagel-with-hummus-sprouts-and-lettuce and mopping up bits of avocado and tomato with my fingers.

I will keep trying. And in a year-ish, give or take, when I get back to California, the first thing I will do is go out and get a sandwich.

* It looks better in person.
# Apparently the balloons were biodegradable, in case you’re the sort of person who worries about that kind of thing, which I am.