how to eat like a bird: an heirloom tomato sandwich

Goal: To use bounty of summer as chance to wax poetic about Harriet the Spy, favorite childhood heroine who adored and insisted on a tomato sandwich for lunch every day.

Things Held in Common with Harriet: Fondness of own habits; fetishism of notebooks.

Things Not Held in Common with Harriet: Have never actually had a tomato sandwich; lack of domestic staff.

Project at Hand: Purchase some heirloom tomatoes from the farmer's market; make homemade mayonnaise, using Julia Reed's mom's recipe. Slice tomato, slap between two pieces of bread lightly slathered in the homemade mayonnaise.

Execution: Not Good. Sigh...

Instead of listing a litany of things that went wrong, I'll list what I learned (too late): unless very fit in upper body, it may prove fruitful to invest in a $6 whisk, rather than try to whisk with a dinner fork, really fast; when your homemade mayonnaise is separating on you, you can add an egg yolk instead of chucking out the whole thing; fancy sourdough bread from the farmer's market doesn't really fit the bill--what you want is a soft, yielding bread like plain old supermarket Pepperidge Farm white bread; and lastly, a simple tomato sandwich is best enjoyed when it's simply put together at moment's notice, not when it's labored over.

Here is a lovely story on just this topic by Julia Reed, who can really make you nostalgic for times you never had. Notably, her family had domestic staff as well.