The epitome of comfort food.
You just need a big mound of rice underneath it and I’d be right over. 
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That’s what we had for dinner tonight too, but with some salt & vinegar potato chips. DH took our dogs Friday morning for their annual check-ups and vaccinations. I had a dentist appointment, and while in town I went to a small mom & pop grocery store for some staples (eggs, milk, bread) and bought one of their prepared fresh Italian subs from the deli case. When I got back home, it was about 12:30 and I talked him into going out to lunch for fish & chips. So, we shared the cold Italian sub for dinner. Ours also had pickled banana pepper rings on it. We very rarely eat sandwiches for our evening meal but we were too full from lunch to bother cooking anything. I love Italian subs, hot or cold, as long as they’re made with quality ingredients and no mayonnaise.
It must be kind of fun and nostalgic for you to have things you haven’t been able to eat for a long time. I do that when I go home to the midwest from New England. I hope you can carve out a place where you can be comfortable and chart a course for your future
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What a coincidence! I like hot subs such as eggplant parmigiana and mealball. but in my mind, cold cuts should be served the way they are…cold. In general I don’t like mayonnaise on sandwiches with Italian-style deli meats/cold cuts. For those, I want an oil and vinegar dressing and sometimes mustard. But for roast beef and turkey, mayonnaise is a must.
In regards to nostalgic foods, without a doubt, the thing(s) I missed most about the US were the various foods of my youth and even some from my adulthood. Though some were available in Japan, most weren’t and most of them that were tended to be quite high. I’m happily surprised to see many everyday cheeses like Swiss and Muenster still fairly reasonably priced here…in Japan Swiss (sold only as Emmentale) was very hard to find and expensive and Muenster was never to be found by me.
Lastly, thanks for the kind wishes. Las Vegas isn’t for me at all, but at least for the time being, it’ll have to do.
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Between your post and the We Ranked 26 Classic American Sandwiches From Worst To Best - Tasting Table thread, I’m craving an assorted sub/ hoagie/grinder right now. For breakfast . 
I really disliked assorted subs from when I was a kid until I was close to 40, and now I crave them as a 50 yo.
My order at the sub shop from age 12-40 would have been roast turkey, tomato, mayo.
I’m still not a fan of including the vinaigrette or dressing on assorted subs /hoagies/grinders , because I always associate the bread becoming soggy with the dressing. I still don’t want mustard anywhere near my assorted sub. 
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If I had to choose a specific type of food group that is my favorite and could be considered a full meal, it would be sandwiches. The fillings can be so diverse and the combinations endless. I didn’t eat many sandwiches out in Japan, but my breakfast at home was a sandwich of ham, cheese and egg for many years. Japanese bread is too sweet and the choices are limited. IMHO, in every way shape and form, sandwiches are better here in North America.
I love egg salad sandwiches, but never understood Anthony Bourdain’s love for the Japanese convenience store egg salad sandwich. Overly fluffy and sweet bread with the crusts cut off. But to each his own…
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Japanese sandos are quite popular in Toronto right now. ( And in San Jose, my cousin has been interested in them too, lately) I have tried various Tamago and Katsu sandos in Toronto over the past 4 years.
This is the newest Japanese egg salad available in Toronto, at Good Behaviour, which is a submarine shop and ice cream shop.
I was obsessed with the idea of fruit sandos before and while I was in Japan, but I never ended up ordering one.
I like that Japanese milk bread!
My last dinner in Japan was a chicken katsu sandwich from the 7-11 at the Kyoto train station.
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I do really like a good katsu sandwich from a coffee shop or from a tonkatsu specialty shop. As for milk bread, I’m not exaggerating when I say that 90% of all bread in Japan is milk bread (known as “shokupan” in Japanese) and rye bread, whole wheat/multigrain bread, egg bread are virtually unobtainable except at some rather expensive bakeries. The same goes for hard, crusty breads. So while Japanese milk bread “may” be good, not having other choices is very frustrating.
Re: fruit sandwiches, in all the years I lived there I never tried one because they seemed more like dessert to me than anything I’d want as a meal.
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I see fruit sandos as a dessert sandwich!
I’m okay with that! I don’t see them as a substitute for a savoury sandwich, or a replacement for a savoury meal. It’s mostly their beauty that catches my eye. They’re a cousin to strawberry shortcake.
I can understand getting tired of Shokupan.
It’s a different market in Toronto, where there are only a handful of places making Shokupan.
Whereas there are thousands of places selling brown bread, multigrain and rye.
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I guess that in my mind, any sandwich should be a savory thing. But yes, fruit sandwiches are certainly lovely to look at. Monte Cristo sandwiches are often served with powdered sugar on them and eaten with jam, but in the very rare event that I would order one, I will ALWAYS tell them to leave off the powdered sugar and not put any jam on it when I eat it. The sandwich is rich enough as it is and hard to finish for me.
As for the bread issue, I think any of us Hungry Onions can agree that variety is the spice of life and that is applicable to almost any type of food. I have been eating roast turkey and Swiss cheese sandwiches on toasted rye nearly daily since returning because all 3 of those things are very hard to get in Japan (especially the turkey…Japanese people really dislike it!) and I’d been craving them for 15 years. I finished the rye bread today and will move on to pita bread from today as I love it, too and it’s also VERY hard to find outside of metropolitan Tokyo and Osaka.
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Try it with sliced butternut squash instead of potatoes and make a romesco sauce/aioli for dipping. I’ve liked this combo!
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Last night we took kiddo to a movie at the community center (after feeding him separately) and ate freshly popped popcorn. After he went to bed (i e., late dinner for us), I spread TJ’s handmade ww tortillas with peanut buttet and Sriracha and filled them with warmed up leftover broccoli, cauli, and carrots that had been tossed in dumpling sauce (red vinegar, soy sauce, sweet soy, ginger). It was not bad in a crunchy hippie kinda way. A few slices of salami on the side 
I’ve noticed that by Friday we (I) eschew cooking dinner in favor of leftovers, takeout, or a big pot of soup. Works OK.
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Did he enjoy the movie??
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Poker night at our pescatarian buddy’s house. Lost a few lady players to a variety of ailments (vapors? melancholy? hysteria? we’ll never know 
), so I invited my bassist to join in the fun. Our host made a scallop & shrimp tomato rice dish he insisted on calling “paella.” It was not. Even. Close.
He’d originally planned to cook the shrimp and scallops for TWENTY MINUTES in the rice, but thankfully I was able to convince him that far less cooking time was required
The seafood was actually cooked perfectly, but paella it was not 
I recovered my earlier losses by the end of the night. We’re having our pesca buddy over for dinner tonight (either takeout sushi or mushroom pasta) & plan on watching American Fiction afterwards.
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As I’m sure everyone does, I have a friend who is (or was - maybe she’s better now) a terrible cook. Years ago, she was making pasta with seafood for us, so she brought the water to to a boil and threw the spaghetti in, along with the shrimp and scallops. A few minutes later she decided that we needed more spaghetti, so she threw that in as well. Once she was sure the second handful of spaghetti was done, she dumped everything into a colander and served it up. It was not a very good meal.
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That sounds positively horrifying 
The dish was actually quite tasty (mostly thx to my intervention), and he’s not a terrible cook per se. It was also a very generous amount of good quality seafood, so I ain’t gonna bitch at him…just refused to call it paella.
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It was. I’m not sure how she’d gotten to the age she was at the time (late 30s, I think) without learning to make spaghetti. But not everyone cares all that much about what they eat.
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He did. Peter Rabbit 2. We adults were mildly amused. 
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Yeah I bet it was hot with Commercial Red Curry Paste!
Sauce I made was:
1 T Oyster Sauce
2 tsp Soy Sauce( you can use half Thai Black Soy or Kecap Manis)
2 tsp Fish Sauce
2 T Chili Jam aka Nam Prik Pao(น้ำพริกเผา)
1.5 tsp Palm Sugar
.25 Ground White Pepper
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I tried the TJ ones once and didn’t buy again, but as a friend in DC said to me, if there’s no other XLB available, they serve their purpose
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