Sandwiches

Twenty years from now, I will tell people I was present at the creation. One evening last fall, my colleague Jason Toraldo walked into my office and asked if I could troubleshoot a problem he was having on Facebook. He had recently put up a page for a small business he owned and wanted to connect it to his personal account. I'm reasonably tech savvy, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw. A nervous pig dressed like a middle-aged man, in slacks and an argyle sweater, was entangled in a pine tree and a string of colorful lights.

Don't look for the Roland Park Bakery & Deli in Roland Park. The combination bakery and counter shop is in Hampden now and doing well, where it appears to have filled a niche between the fancy fare of the neighborhood's new spots and the slapdash grub you can still find at the old haunts. A longtime fixture of Roland Park life, Anita Ward's combination bakery and sandwich shop reopened last year on Chestnut Street after 27 years in the Roland Park Shopping Center. The move wasn't entirely voluntary.

Charmington's is just a short walk from the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, but it's an even shorter walk for another thriving community of educators. They live in the same building. Charmington's occupies a sunny corner space in Miller's Court, a former manufacturing plant that provides discounted housing for teachers and office space for nonprofit organizations. Although Charmington's menu of sandwiches and wraps isn't very ambitious, either in size or culinary outlook, the food is wholesome, fresh and affordable.

You can get bread from Hamilton Bakery, including their amazing onion focaccia, at Fleet Street Market, and that alone makes this grocery store, which opened in July, a major asset to Fells Point. The bread is part of the new market's all-star lineup of the area's best produced foods, including Ostrowski's sausages, Springfield Farm chicken, Zeke's Coffee and Dirty Carrots vegan treats. Fleet Street also sells produce from local farms, along with the kind of specialty brands you'd expect to find in a gourmet shop.

The food truck trend has rolled onto the campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art. Set to debut sometime during the week of Oct. 15, the Artist's Palate will ply the university's Bolton Hill campus, bringing students breakfast sandwiches, late night snacks and meals in between. The newest truck in Baltimore's fleet of mobile vendors is one of the country's first for a university setting, according to Christopher Bohaska, the MICA's director or operation services. “A food truck is an idea that we've had for a while,” Bohaska said.

To introduce its new braised pork, Noodles and Co. has introduced a Barbecue Pork Mac and Peppery Pork Sandwich, both available for a limited time. The Broomfield, Colo.-based fast-casual concept said that the braised pork, which can be added to any dish for $2.69, is its "first naturally raised protein. " Press materials said that the pork "has decadent flavor without a hefty nutritional price tag. " The company uses lean cut, from the pork shoulder, it said, and cooks it sous-vide style.

After 120 years of continuous operation, Fields of Pikesville has closed. The last day of operation was Saturday. Although Fields has had a long stretch of struggling on Pikesville's main street, the store's general manager Jeffrey Levin said there was a drastic drop in business in recent months. Even though the pharmacy stopped operating in 1998, the establishment was still called Fields Pharmacy by its loyal clientele, who continued to gather at its well-known lunch counter, enjoying club sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate snowballs.

Back-to-school season means dusting off the lunchboxes and stocking up on brown paper bags. It's lunch-making time. For many kids, that means a daily dose of PB&J with a side of sliced apples. But sandwiches get boring - both for kids and for lunch-packing parents. One way to get out of the sandwich rut? Go ethnic. Ethnic flavors have been commonplace in American cooking for years. Salsa outsold ketchup for the first time back in 1991; in 2008, U.S. salsa sales totaled $931 million, compared to $621 million for ketchup.

Roopa Marcello grew up eating Indian food at home and sandwiches at school, but today she writes about a variety of vegetarian-friendly cuisines on her blog, Raspberry Eggplant (www.raspberryeggplant.blogspot.com). Her version of the Vietnamese sandwich banh mi chay is easy to make and adds crunch and flavor to lunch. Makes: 2-3 servings For the pickled carrots: 1/2 cup rice vinegar 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 carrots For the marinated mushrooms: juice of 1/2 lime (about 2 tablespoons)