Avocado! The Cheese that Grows on Trees!

     The Midwest, and Michigan in particular, has an inferiority complex when it comes to food. We always name food after far off exotic locations to make it sound cooler. I grew up eating Brazilian Beans and Rice, Roman Holiday Bake, New England Pot Roast, Connecticut Beef Supper, Polynesian Chicken Salad and the like.
      I too have conformed to this trick to make Speedbump's food sound cooler...enter the California Turkey Sandwich. (It just sounds better than "Real Cheese Would Make You Puke and Wheeze Turkey Sandwich") In this case, avocado fills in as a cheap and easy cheese substitute. I'll review the cheese substitutes on a later post, but lets simplify it by saying, there are not many that taste good cold. Pick a soft avocado, slice thinly, then mash with a fork to keep the avocado in the sandwich and not sliding out (avocado slices are a bit slippery).
      I "butter" the bread with Fleishmann's Unsalted margarine, but that's only because I'm trying to get my kid to chub up. I can't even tell you how many of these my kids eat every week. And yes, I cut the crusts off the bread because I want my skinny kids to eat the whole thing and not stop eating 2 inches from the crust. Truth be told, I bake all my own bread, and sometimes the crust does get a little "caramelized" and needs some trimming.