Bread and a Palindrome...

When we first started eating salads in the afternoon, we noticed some remarkable metabolic benefits from day one.  Our typical salad of greens, fresh fruit, with a few cold cuts on the side immediately supplied an invigorating surge of energy that propelled us right through the day.  We were astonished that we no longer felt any kind of mid-afternoon drag that often results from eating a big sandwich.  

Don't misunderstand me, we were huge fans of "the great sandwich."  We spent a considerable amount of time thinking about combinations of ingredients that would make the perfect sandwich.  Years ago, when we ran a business in Baltimore, we hired a talented young man with a culinary flair to make us sandwiches.  As we ate his remarkable sandwiches, the most frequent and most heated topic of discussion was about bread.  When you make a sandwich, if you don't have the right bread, you've got nothing.  Moreover, the bread that you do have on-hand literally determines the sandwich that you're going to build.  There's an uncompromising tyranny to bread that really pissed us off, until we discover some really great bread, and then all would be forgiven.

A few months ago, on a whim, we bought some Tandoori Naan from the grocery, and suddenly, bread was back in our diet.  More than that, bread was back to dominating our lunch, where each salad was made to compliment the rich flavor of the naan.  I'm not sure how they did it, but every bite of this naan tasted like they had somehow infused it with a full stick of butter.  Heated in the toaster and  served warm with our salads, we came to realize that a salad without a few squares of Tandoori naan might not be worth eating.  For a couple who swore off the evils of bread at lunchtime, bread was back, and it had immediately claimed its old position as the center of the meal.

This naan was so good that we didn't care about the carbs.  If I found myself staring at the keyboard at 4:30 in the afternoon, trying to remember exactly where home row might be located, I would have to concede that the naan was more important than mental acuity and boundless energy.  If a carb crash was the price to pay, so be it.  But strangely, the crashes never happened.  There was enough balance in the salad to offset the bread.  Eating a meal that consisted mostly of greens, fruit, nuts, and the side of turkey was able to hedge the metabolic gamble of eating a few pieces of naan.  Blood-sugar levels remained stable with a salad, whereas with a sandwich, it was just a little off, just enough to cause a crash.

I will leave it to the professional nutritionists to explain the chemistry of blood-sugar balance, and how the combination of bread with a well-rounded salad is good, while cold cuts and bread with a huge dollop of mayo is bad.  But irrespective of how it all works at the chemical level, we're really grateful to have our bread and eat it too.