One way that people celebrate retirement is to eat.  I worked for a consulting company, Magenic, and provided services to one of their clients (who I do not have permission to name). People from my client took me out for lunch at the local Green Mill.  The folks from Magenic took me out to a local restaurant, The Loop, for happy hour. Both were very nice, however, the third gift of food was the nicest of all.

Yesterday I got a  pair of packages from Zingermans. My nephew and niece, Drew and Kim, send us a “build your own pastrami sandwich” kit. Here’s a picture of what we got:

I’m not sure that there is enough food in the kit to feed us for a week, but it will certainly take care of lunch for several days.

I thought that I would do a web post covering the un-boxing and kit assembly as a way of thanking Kim And Drew.

We I opened up the box, this is what I got: macaroons and a container of perishable food:

Unpacking the perishable food container, gives us the following:

This is all of the things that you need to build a delightful pastrami sandwich with sides of potato salad and coleslaw. I took these pictures on the second day that we made sandwiches. All the containers have been opened and resealed. We took a couple slices out of the loaf of bread. And to be fair there were brownies in the original package. They did not survive the first day. They were delicious!  The macaroons are standing in for the brownies.

We also had directions for the kit (first the marketing come-on):

And on the flip side, the step-by-step instructions on how to assemble the sandwich:

Here we have sliced the bread, added the Swiss cheese, and are warming it up on the stove:

At the same time we had the pastrami, wrapped in aluminum foil with a couple of tablespoons of water, in the oven. After a few minutes of pastrami comes out steaming hot.  If you look closely, you can see steam in the picture:

We unfolded the sandwich, added some sauerkraut and the steamed pastrami The first day we did not warm-up the sauerkraut but the second day we did. We are voting for warm sauerkraut for the rest of our run with this kit.

We buttoned the whole thing up, cut it in half, added some potato salad and a pickle, and enjoyed it immensely:

We’ve had two sandwiches on this kit so far and think that we will get at least two more before we are done. This is been a delightful present. Thank you Kim and Drew.