Homemade Alternative to Fast Food Submarine Sandwiches

Yesterday while getting the mail from our mailbox, advertisements for two local fast food restaurants caught my eye. The advertisements offered various submarine sandwiches at different prices.

We, however, like to prepare our own submarine sandwiches at home. We enjoy eating out, but because of our limited budget, we dine out infrequently. The last time we bought a meal in a restaurant was about 18 months ago when we went to a nearby restaurant for a buffet lunch.

Both us enjoy preparing meals at home, which is fun and also saves us money. With this in mind, we like to prepare submarine sandwiches like those in the restaurants.

Preparing our homemade alternative to the submarine sandwiches in the restaurants allows us to keep down the cost per sandwich. This is especially true if we use deli meats that are on sale when we go grocery shopping. To read my article discussing how to shop for deli meats and cheeses on a limited budget, you may click here.

To prepare these tasty submarine sandwiches, we use the following ingredients: long Italian style sandwich rolls, various deli meats, sliced cheese, a nice sized tomato, iceberg lettuce, a red onion, extra virgin olive oil, and vinegar. We usually use red wine vinegar, but balsamic vinegar tastes good too. During the summer, sometimes, we like to add some thinly sliced hot banana pepper or some thinly sliced cucumber from our backyard vegetable garden to the sandwiches.

Once we have all of the ingredients, we start by simply opening (some rolls are pre-sliced) or slicing the long Italian style sandwich rolls. We now prefer to place some extra virgin olive oil and vinegar on both of the inner portions of the rolls. An option could be to use mustard or mayonnaise in place of the extra virgin olive oil and vinegar.

Now we place some thinly sliced raw onions on the roll along with some iceberg lettuce leaves. Next we add the deli meats and cheese to our sandwiches. My preference is only to use one type of deli meat in my sandwich; my husband likes to combine two different types of deli meats and Swiss cheese in his sandwich.

We now top the sandwich with slices of tomato. My preference is thin slices of tomato, while my husband prefers thicker slices of tomato. If it is summer we also add a few thin slices of either hot banana pepper slices or cucumber on top of the tomato slices. Either of them taste really delicious picked fresh from our vegetable garden. To read my article about the hot banana pepper from our vegetable garden, you may click here. The article about the cucumbers from our vegetable garden, may be found by clicking here.

We usually have a green salad and some homemade potato salad to accompany our tasty submarine sandwich. The only thing left to do is to sit down at the kitchen table and enjoy our tasty meal. Yummy!