Actually after 7 years I went off the Atkin’s lifestyle.

Feeling quite the martyr, and wondered what it was all for. I had a small taste of potato salad on Easter…first time in seven years! And my first banana this week!

I can take on bull mastiffs attacking another dog…but I crumble at chocolate ice cream. sheesh.

Cuban is probably a little less imposing than Mexican can be but it is not the kind of diet you have mentioned as your preference. Atkins, I believe with an occasional bit of celery soup. :p

So I looked up Cuban cuisine on Google. There are a few listed, two of them food carts, most of the rest marginal tavern affairs. There are a couple of what look like reasonable places.

I’ll head over and check out the sandwich in a few days, though I have nothing to which to compare it.

Of course, in Cuba today its hard to get any fixin’s for the sandwich, particularly meats. You can’t get very far without meat or cheese. However, even when times were good and food plentiful and varied, the Cuban Sandwich as we know it was not very common, if it could be found at all. My cousin, who lived in Havanna until he was 16 (he’s about my age) never saw one until he got to Tampa. He couldn’t imagine why everybody called these foot long hoagies “Sandwiches Cubanos”.

Cubans in the old country weren’t much for sandwiches, they preferred full meals. The most common sandwich was the “media noche” (the “midnighter”) which was usually served at cafes as a snack for people coming out of the theater late at night.

It was a ham and cheese on a round bun a little bigger than a hamburger and would be cut in half so a couple could share it.

A large sandwich suitable for a full meal was a North American thing, where factory workers were paid by piecework and couldn’t afford to take the time off to walk down to the corner and get their usual lunchtime bowl of rice and beans.

The one place you can’t find a Cuban sandwich.

I keep on forgetting that was over 20 years ago. I remember a few months ago I was looking through my old Mountain View neighborhood on Google Earth and everything had changed, I couldn’t find my way around.

20 years. Jeez. I know its trite and cliched to say it, but it seems like just yesterday. It just slips through your fingers.

Cluck cluck

Ford Aerospace got bought out a while back. The facility across the road from where Joe’s used to be is now Loral Space and Communications.