Fast meals for people with lots of lunch meat

Think fast!

Family Circle Fast Meals Cookbook (1978) is coming at you, and it's got some... uh... interesting ideas about what constitutes a sandwich.

We'll start out with the healthy-sounding Mediterranean Medley...

...which is just a fancy name for deli macaroni salad plopped on a bun and topped with sliced egg, cucumber, jarred olive salad, canned shrimp, and anchovies. (Diners can slather this mound of nastiness with additional salad dressing as they see fit.)

I'm pretty sure when the doctors recommend a Mediterranean-style diet, they don't mean macaroni salad sandwiches.

The book also has a strange affinity for making sandwiches out of lunch meat slices rolled around other sandwich fillings.

Want to enjoy a deliciously salty and smoky ham sandwich? Well, Ham Bounty won't send you on the tried-and-true ham-n-cheese route. Instead, wrap some of those ham slices around the most cat-foody of all dining options-- tuna salad-- and the rest of the slices around (why the hell not?) cold canned green beans.

Now instead of the satisfying simplicity of a typical ham sandwich, you can ruin the ham with nasty fillings and run the risk of the filling shooting out the end of a ham roll and landing on your shirt. It's a real lose-lose!

If you prefer your cold cut roll-ups to look a little jauntier and taste a little slaw-ier, there is always this option:

I have to admit that I am in love with the yellow wax pepper . Kind of feels as if the sandwich is trying to give us the finger.

This time, the cold cuts are "assorted Italian" and the filling is cole slaw, but the soggy, oily risks to your shirt are exactly the same.

The book isn't entirely filled with terrible sandwiches, though. Here's a '70s version of meat-lovers' pizza:

Provolone, salami, smoked link sausages, pepperoni-- all piled on top of a "ready-to-heat" pizza so it will taste at least kind of homemade.

The part I love, though, is serving it with the cherry tomatoes. No, it's not a super-surprising or disgusting move, but look at how they serve the tomatoes in the picture:

Put them in a basket and plop that basket right down in the middle of the nice hot cheese!

(Okay, if you look closely, you'll see that they've pulled the pizza apart and the basket is not actually right on top, but I wanted you to do the same double-take as I did.)

Happy Wednesday! I'm going to go wrap some Tofurky Italian deli slices around some Watergate salad and serve them on bread topped with a big scoop of German potato salad. Ha!