A fish of a 'wich
This weekend, Nate and I took the kiddo to Pelican Cove Park in Palos Verdes. It was a bit of a drive, but we’re running out of ideas for interesting weekend activities that are both toddler and social-distancing friendly. That’s not to say that getting busted by the police after ignoring the “closed-to-the-public” signs and taking our toddler into an otherwise-empty playground so he can live his best toddler life even for just a few minutes isn’t an interesting thing to happen on a weekend — but we’ve already done that twice now so we were looking for other ways to be irresponsible parents.
Seconds after taking our kid to a playground.
So we went to a rocky cove with big waves as the tide was coming in. (Yes, I already have my gown picked out for the Parents-of-the-Year awards.)
It was a quiet, foggy morning, so it was easy to get lost in the trance of the waves crashing into the beach, Something about watching them made me think about the movie Interstellar, specifically the water planet Anne Hathaway’s character landed on. It made me wonder out loud how (spoilers) her character didn’t age for the brief time she was there, while the astronaut who stayed aboard the spaceship in orbit aged decades.
“But you look so old.” “Yeah. You guys were gone for 23 years and that’s how time works, ANNE.”
Nate tried his darndest to explain it. He even pulled up youtube videos that use very simple terms and cute animations to explain it. But try as they might, it didn’t — and still doesn’t — make sense to me.
How time works, apparently.
Luckily, my brain didn’t have to work too hard at trying to figure it out, because I cheated my way through my last science class in college years ago. Besides, I had more important fish to (literally) fry. Because it was Sandwich Sunday, the day of the week where we make a sandwich off of this list, eat it, and judge it like scorned teenagers stalking their ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s Facebook profile — that is to say, mercilessly.
This week we took on Minnesota’s sandwich: the fried walleye. A fried fish sandwich for the state nicknamed “the land of 10,000 lakes?” Unlike aging in Interstellar, this is something that actually makes perfect sense.
Unfortunately, because we’re in Los Angeles and not in Minnesota, we couldn’t find any walleye. But, we went to our now-frequented seafood market and got the closest thing they had — grouper. We were guaranteed by both the people at the seafood market and the Internet that this is a perfectly apt substitution. And if the Internet says it, it must be true.
This was a relatively low-prep sandwich. It’s fried, so that always adds a little extra effort and clean-up, but all things considered, this is an easy sandwich to make. Especially when your husband does the frying while you ̶w̶a̶t̶c̶h̶ ̶c̶a̶r̶t̶o̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶d̶d̶l̶e̶r̶ tirelessly work to make sure your young child doesn’t get burned by the oil.
This is the exact quote on our family crest.
The sandwich was very good. The fish was fried perfectly, the tartar sauce, tomato and lettuce were all perfectly portioned. But, in this case, I don’t think the sandwiching did anything to improve the fried fish. It tasted better without the bread and toppings. There was just nothing about the sandwich that elevated the fish or the other ingredients to being better as a whole rather than as great individual parts of a non-sandwich meal.
It’s like when you’re a person who doesn’t wear hats and you buy a really pretty, trendy hat and you try to wear the hat but it just looks weird on you because you just don’t have a head for hats, so you take the hat off and you immediately look and feel better because the hat just wasn’t for you. And now that you’re not wearing the hat, people feel comfortable telling you that you look better without the hat. Sure, it’s mildly disappointing because you wanted to be a hat person, but some of us are just better without all the extras. After all, like a good sandwich, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
And by, “you’re beautiful on the inside,” we mean, “that hat’s just ugly.”
Unless you’re a sandwich ingredient that tastes better outside of the bread, in which case be more like Taco Bell from the early 2000’s and think outside the bun.
Do you know someone else who likes news that has nothing to do with news and more to do with eating sandwiches? Share this newsletter with them!
Want more sandwich-adjacent thoughts in your life? (Don’t we all?) Subscribe today!
Have thoughts on what sandwich we SHOULD have eaten? Or should be eating next? Let us know in the comments!