Making friends with an exceptionally talented specialty pastry artist, I’ve come to know, is always a good thing to do.  If you haven’t befriended one yet — like my pal Melissa Torres, aka Cake Hero — I highly recommend it.  A couple of years ago, I trusted her to create my birthday cake, and boy howdy did she deliver: A giant, pink pig’s head with edible fondant ears, big black Xs over the eyes, and, in its long snout, a wax apple that served as the candle.  And when we cut it open?  You guessed it: red velvet cake.  It was gruesomely fun, not to mention tasty.  So, this past year…

There’s a television advertisement I remember from my youth: Two ranch hands are hanging out on the corral, snacking, when one of them, in an inept attempt to mount his steed, flips over the saddle and spills his treat.  “My chocolate!” he laments, to which the other counters, “is in my peanut butter!”  It’s not long before the two men realize that, as in the case of Newton’s apple, Archimedes’s bathtub, and Alexander Flemming’s famous mold, they’d landed in the lap of genius by way of pure serendipity.  Yes: Chocolate!  Peanut Butter!  Gadzooks, why didn’t anyone think about…

Over the years, I’ve been implored by a number of earnest do-gooders to become part of their organizations, to join hands, fight the good fight and help make the world a better place.  Save Lake Pontchartrain.  Save the Wales.  Ban the Nukes.  Nuke the Wales.  Pave Lake Pontchartrain.  And so on.  But never before has a cause struck me so deeply, so frighteningly close to the bone, as the one I discovered last year, just before Thanksgiving:

Save Our Sandwich.

I leapt to attention, rattled to my very core at the thought of sandwiches in peril.  Dear heavens, I thought, what…