I've thought on it some, and I've found that I spend a lot of time in sandwich shops. (See: Fifty Dollar Cheese Sandwich Standoff). No matter how well stocked your local deli is, they can offer only so many combinations of bread, meat, cheese, and condiments before it gets boring. It's moments like these when you need to get subversive.

The deli I frequent makes the best egg salad sandwiches -- thick-sliced bread toasted until it achieves  the load-bearing strength for a half-pound of golden egg salad goodness inside. Add in a slice of yellow cheese and a dash of paprika, and you've got the best sandwich this side of New York State. Great as the sandwich is, man cannot live on egg salad alone, which is also why they offer foot-long hoagies. Having frequented this deli so often, it was only a matter of time before I ordered a foot-long egg salad sandwich.

The deli man's cocked eyebrow said it all: "Are you sure?" Without waiting for an answer, he got to work, piling into the hoagie bread three times as much egg salad as a normal sandwich -- and presumably a normal human -- should require. The sandwich was glorious, but I'm fairly certain that pain in my chest after eating it was not regret.

At lunch the next day the deli man shook his head as I stepped inside. He reached under the counter for the egg salad and started to made another foot-long, but I stopped him. Rarely have I seen more relief on another man's face. His expression was short-lived, however. It cut short abruptly when I told him I wanted a foot-long peanut butter and jelly.

With America being the land of the free where the customer is always right, it was a foregone conclusion that I would get my sandwich. Freedom to do such dumb things as this was practically written into our constitution.

Compressed into that one sandwich experience were all the summer vacation days of every year of grade school --  endless summers of days in the park, and always with peanut butter and jelly as a packed lunch. I might have lost a few summers -- you know, taken off the tail end -- by eating the whole thing in one sitting, but it was completely worth it if only to revel in the horribly perplexed look of the deli man.

Have a look at the title. Those two words tend not to go to together. The mere mention of the phrase might make a chef make a face like she'd had rank garlic shoved up her nose. Sound preposterous? It is! But brace yourself, dessert soup not only exists (yes, this is in fact a thing) it's also delicious. And what it is is Korean-style shaved ice.

Have a look at the photo above. It looked like that only on its way from the kitchen to the table. No sooner had the waiter set it down on the table than he said, "Take a picture. It won't look like that in a bit." Sure enough, he then pounded the icy confection with a spoon until it was flatter than the surface of a frozen lake.

What a shame, I thought, that something so artfully presented should be reduced to the sugary slurry you see below.

To describe how it tastes, we'll need to construct an appropriately complex metaphor. Picture a certain Japanese cartoon ambassador of cuteness, a purely original and unique character of our own creation (according to our attorneys) named: "Greetings Feline." If all its childlike innocence and whimsicality were to be violently extracted and whipped in a bowl of shaved ice, you would have something about half as delicious. Chocolate syrup supplies the other half to the deliciousness equation.

I consider myself a gourmet, which is why I don't feel guilty at all about eating a fifty-dollar sandwich. Of course, it helped that I paid three bucks for it. Even gourmets live on a budget.

Let's be clear here -- this wasn't some hoity-toity gastronomical monstrosity. We're not talking about an artisan whole-grain French baguette loaded with filet mignon or brisket au jus. Nor was this live Maine lobster stuffed into some exotic spiced Indian naan. This was a lowly cheese sandwich, the least expensive item at the deli counter, ringing up a paltry $2.99 at the checkout line.

It just so happens that the supermarket I frequent is home to a deli counter that also doubles as a sub sandwich shop. It's a match made in heaven, because you can get a sandwich stuffed with any combination of cheese and meat offered for sale. You want a pastrami and Roquefort sandwich? Done. Blood sausage and mortadella with horseradish limberger? Not a problem. Nothing is too esoteric, and no combination is off limits. This is just the sort of place where you'll find bona fide Spanish Manchego cheese at twenty bucks for a quarter pound. 

Yes, it is a pricey cheese. You can pick your jaws up off the ground now.

While several companies produce the less expensive "Manchego-style" cheese, the product is not bona fide Manchego unless it complies with exacting criteria. Real Manchego cheese, among other qualifications, is produced from particular sheep on exclusive farms in Spain. The result is a firm block of ivory cheese that tastes like butter with a hint of nuttiness.

Given that this is a quality cheese and also that I'm habitually light in the pockets, a devious idea occurred to me while standing in the deli line. I could come away with a half-pound of Manchego (about fifty dollars' worth) for a scant three dollars if I asked for it to be put in a sandwich.

My number was called. I sidled up to the deli counter and asked for a foot-long cheese sandwich. The deli man reached under the counter for some generic cheddar and I called out to him, stopping him partway. As straight-faced as I could muster, I pointed, discreetly, to the next shelf over, the one with all the high-end cheeses from parts of Europe with names I'll never learn to pronounce. The deli man's eyes flitted to that shelf and then back to meet mine, as if to say those cheeses were out of my price range.

"Manchego, please," I said, driving the point home.

Grudgingly, the man trundled to the next shelf and yanked out the block of Manchego. Weighing about five pounds, the block in his hands was a small fortune in cheese. He worked the deli slicer with a craftsman's precision, shaving off generous slices of cheese from the block.

"You know that's gonna cost you extra, right?" he muttered as he handed me the sandwich.

"No," I said, taking it. I was half-turned to leave when he spoke up.

"You mean, no, you didn't know that, or no, it's not costing you extra?" he asked, but his tone made clear that the question was purely rhetorical.

I turned back to face him. "Which do you think?"

He muttered something I couldn't hear, but the look on his face was enough to tell me he wasn't amused. 

It was no small feat to contain myself at the checkout aisle. The sandwich rang up as a $2.99 cheese sandwich, which it simultaneously was and was not. It was a cheese sandwich. It was not $2.99.

I got home and dissected the sandwich, carefully removing the Manchego and wrapping it up in foil. That weekend I invited over some friends from work for wine and cheese. The wine was nothing special -- it was that stuff somewhere between grape juice and vinegar that comes in a gallon jug -- but the cheese was the showstopper.

None of them would have suspected I'd brought the cheese home in a sandwich. None of them believed me when I told them.