The Perfect Left-over Turkey Sandwich

From Tim Grobaty's "What's Hot" column, the cultural touchstone of your morning paper:

BUILDING THE PERFECT SANDWICH: On days like this, when we're too lazy to do anything other than watch the Lions play their peculiar brand of football on TV, but are nevertheless summoned to the plant to write a column, we do what all overworked columnists do when it's time for a breather: open our mail and see if anyone's sent us an insta-column, or, even better, a request for a recipe:

"Dear What's Hot!," starts today's letter grabbed at random. "I'm thinking about making a leftover Thanksgiving turkey sandwich using pita bread and gouda cheese. How does that grab you?"

We can perhaps answer that best by giving you our life's story: In our youth, our favorite meal was the day-after-Thanksgiving sandwich.

Later, when we began a tradition of traveling to our mother-in-law's house, we turned stupid and would regularly turn down offerings of leftover turkey and accessory food, because we were so stuffed we wrongly (grievously wrongly) thought we would never want to look at turkey meat until next year, only to spend the following day whining bitterly about our idiocy.

Nowadays, we have the presence of mind to, no matter how much we beg ourselves not to do it, drag an oversized Glad Bag full of fixings home with us.

Now, someone had a question about how to make a leftover turkey sandwich?

Browsing the Web or your own vast collection of cookbooks, you will find no shortage of incorrect ways to build a leftover turkey sandwich. In even a cursory romp through the canon of work regarding leftover Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches, you will come upon such ingredients as the above-cited gouda cheese and pita bread, as well as cream cheese, lettuce, alfalfa sprouts, Dijon mustard, canned pineapple, tomato, thinly sliced Granny Smith apples, canned capers and the phrase "to die for."

In fact (and we know a lot of you are already aware of this, so those people are free to go back to the football game), there is only one way to make a leftover Thanksgiving turkey sandwich, and everything in it's available in every trailer park larder.

Ingredients:

1 fistful of leftover Thanksgiving turkey (white meat)

1 fistful turkey stuffing

1 tablespoon cranberry sauce (or one slice, if you use the canned stuff, and we're not mad at you if you do)

Some mayonnaise

Two slices Wonder brand white bread

Salt

Pepper

Spread mayonnaise fairly liberally (damn the cost!), and salt and pepper to taste. Toss on the fistful of turkey meat, followed by the cranberry sauce and stuffing.

Feeds one.

-Tim Grobaty, Long Beach Press Telegram

I, personally, have reservations about putting the stuffing right on the sandwich. I am usually in the "on the side" camp. But that's a mere quibble. This is the sana doctrina of left-over turkey sandwich making. Anything else and the terrorists win.