Simply Sandwiches » sites

Skinny Girls Big Sandwiches

Ben — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:11:46 +0000

This site (skinnygirlsbigsandwiches) is both hilarious and completely mesmerizing. Actually, it’s not that strange: what else would you want to look at online?

Ladies: skinnyboysbigsandwiches is still available! Get it started!

Gender-unidentified: genderunidentiedpeoplebigsandwiches is also still available! Go go gadget sandwich-blog!

Sandwich Wars: Scanwich vs. Scanwiches

Ben — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:26:17 +0000

What a strange and bizarre world it is when everyone goes bananas for sandwiches all at once. So much enthusiasm is fantastic, finally the sandwich will have it’s time in the spotlight! So much enthusiasm brings lots of new players to the field and they, apparently, lack creativity. Just like Unbreaded (see below), food blog du jour scanwich (also see below) is a remade version of Scanwich, albeit with a nicer design and more updates. Unfortunately it seems like sandwich culture is becoming rather cut-throat, full of copying and CSS.

What do you think? Is this healthy competition or non-devotees trying to ride the wave while sandwiches are popular?

We Love Sandwiches (Too)!

Ben — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:58:21 +0000

A new site has sprung up to collect and rate sandwich recipes, aptly named We Love Sandwiches (Who can say that and not smile?). It is basically the same idea behind the Sandwich Project (covered here). The site is new and has a charmingly simple design(logo above) that is much more intuitive than the sandwich project. It’s so new that it doesn’t yet have many sandwiches (add them here), an open ended search turned up about 30 sandwiches. It looks promising, though I have no idea how it’ll get around the problems found on the sandwich project:

Lots of bizarre and terrible sandwiches
Even terrible sandwiches get decent 3-star reviews, making it hard to tell what is worth trying and what is just voted up

I hope they find a way to cull out the terrible sandwiches and get to a really good catalog of sandwiches. Good luck!

Quick! What Compliments Liver?

Ben — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:01:26 +0000

In my constant quest for the bleeding edge of sandwich excellence and progress I found the Sandwich Project. (Yes, it’s from the UK, no it’s not a pun on the town Sandwich.) It’s a site dedicated to collecting and rating user-submitted sandwich recipes. According to the ‘about’ page it started in 2002 and has a few thousand recipes submitted. Like a lot of boom websites, it started smaller and is still growing into it’s bigger shoes ( evidenced by the coolsiteoftheday.com link and the strange email to submit photos to).

I can’t vouch for the quality of the sandwiches and a cursory glance shows a lot of really disgusting ones: The random sandwich that appeared on the homepage was ‘Cold Baked Beans and Mayonnaise’ served on white bread; 3 stars after 31 votes. The second random sandwich (“Jonny’s Ultimate”) was made with meatballs, salsa, bacon, Doritos, chili peppers, BBQ sauce, pepperoni, marinara sauce, and some garlic marinated chicken, on any type of bread. Does Jonny want to obliterate his heart and tastebuds?.

The ingredient search is useful for identifying complementary ingredients, though given the low quality of the sandwiches, I’d read through a lot of the recipes before making a good connection. For example, searching for avocado, yields 9 of 30 avocado sandwiches that include bacon and 11 of 30 that include tomatoes. Surprising? Not really. Try this one: Liver sandwiches.

This type of librarian cataloging pursuit is noble — if only there was a way to filter out duplicate recipes and find a better method of rating them than stars. Even nasty sandwiches seem to have 3 stars. [Aside: one of the reasons I've avoided the star scheme on this site is that it too quickly glosses over the subtleties of sandwiches. They are meant to be savored and not simply rated with stars.]