A family favorite which was not Italian

In our house we always had lots of cream cheese around. My family had some really different tastes, I'll tell you.

One of the favorites of all time was Cream Cheese and Olive sandwiches. Now this was a specialty for my cousins even. When they came to visit, mom usually made CC&O for them as well. It was made on either still warm Italian bread, or really mushy Wonder bread. I preferred the Wonder bread when I was growing up, but now I prefer the Italian bread, and I like it even if it is a tad stale.

The quick method is to slather your favorite amount of cream cheese on a piece of bread. Take about 10 olives and cut them into small pieces and sprinkle them over the cream cheese, cover with another slice of bread.

My mom's method was to chop a small jar of olives, you know the ones that have about 12 olives in the whole jar? She'd chop those olives really, really small. I like to have larger chunks, or maybe I'm lazy. Then she would mix them with the cream cheese in a small bowl until the mixture was well-mixed and spreadable. Then she'd THINLY spread the CC&O on a slice of bread, and put another one on top of it. That was her version of CC&O.

The other cream cheese sandwich-- which I couldn't stomach, but which my mom and I think my brothers liked -- was cream cheese and jelly. Ugh! Alan loves the stuff. Ugh! I prefer cream cheese plain to CC&J any day.

The only thing I didn't like about taking a CC&O sandwich to school was that by the time I got to my lunch the outer edges of the cheese had started to turn brown from the air hitting the cheese (even though mom wrapped it in a wax paper baggie). I had to close my eyes until I had bitten all around the edges of the sandwich, then the CC&O was just fine.

TTFN