A New York woman on a mission to make 300 sandwiches in exchange for an engagement ring is more than half way through her goal and her critics have not been kind.
Stephanie Smith on Tuesday detailed the inspiration behind the challenge in a piece in the New York Post where she is a senior reporter for Page Six.
Smith's boyfriend Eric kept asking her to make him sandwiches, a gesture that he sees as a sign of love. He told her that homemade sandwiches are extra special because "you can't get a sandwich with love from the deli."
When she finally acquiesced last summer, she made a sandwich so glorious that he promised her an engagement ring in return --- if she made 300 more. So she got to work.
Smith bought a DSLR and started a blog to document her sandwich-making journey. 300sandwiches.com includes recipes and photos of the sandwiches she made, details about her relationship with Eric and her travels.
Smith's culinary feat, however, is not without controversy. Gawker writer Caity Weaver is stoking the flames with an op-ed on the piece.
"The story is like something out of a fairytale, one of those weird old German ones you can't read to kids, where an peasant girl's stepmother forces her to make 300 sandwiches for the Devil, and then a series of horrible things happen to the girl, and at the end of the story she freezes to death," Weaver wrote.
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New York Magazine's Maureen O'Connor jumped in the fray with her own snarky response.
"Now, before you get all upset about a modern woman living the punch line of a sexist joke, remember that Stephanie still has 124 sandwiches to go. She could still be radicalized, somewhere around sandwich 172. And then when she gets to sandwich 297, she reveals that she has been poisoning him, slowly and steadily, all this time," O'Connor wrote.
Even Smith has pointed out that her friends were not supportive of her idea. She explained how one friend called her a Stepford Wife, while another friend reminded her that it's not 1950.
There is at least one person who loves the idea and that's her boyfriend Eric, who Smith said offered some advice to other women who want to make their man happy.
“You women read all these magazines to get advice on how to keep a man, and it’s so easy,” he said. “We’re not complex. Just do something nice for us. Like make a sandwich.”
