New York woman makes 300 sandwiches to get her boyfriend to propose

New York Post reporter Stephanie Smith wants her boyfriend to propose — and she's willing to make him 300 sandwiches to get that ring.

Smith's boyfriend, Eric Schulte, had been begging Smith to make him a sandwich for the longest time.

"Sandwiches are love," he told her. "Especially when you make them. You can't get a sandwich with love from the deli."

So she gave in and made him a sandwich — a really, really good one. So good, in fact, that Schulte exclaimed:

"Honey, you’re 300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring!"

Despite her not being a seasoned cook (Schulte is the gourmet cook in the relationship), Smith took him up on the offer.

"Maybe I needed to show him I could cook to prove that I am wife material," Smith writes for New York Post. "If he wanted 300 sandwiches, I'd give him 300 sandwiches — and I’d blog about it."

Since last June, Smith has been documenting her sandwich-making adventure on her Tumblr blog 300sandwiches.com. So far, she's made 176 sandwiches, all wittily named and beautiful photographed — and there's just 123 sammies to go.

"You women read all these magazines to get advice on how to keep a man, and it's so easy," Schulte says. "We're not complex. Just do something nice for us. Like make a sandwich."

Smith insists she's not counting down to the 300th sandwich with any ring-expectation pressure. Instead, she's enjoying the time she and Schulte now spend together in the kitchen.

"Though I still want to get engaged and get married and live happily ever after, I’ve also put less pressure on the race to the 300th sandwich and I’m enjoying the cooking experience with Eric," she writes.

But her pursuit of sandwich perfection — and determination to get to a diamond ring through her man's stomach — has unsurprisingly been met with plenty of criticism, confusion and outrage.

"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," writes Gawker's Caity Weaver.

"That settles it. Eric, spokesperson for men everywhere, has declared it: all women have needed to do this whole time is make sandwiches. Every magazine that you gals like to read can go ahead and close up shop; MEN HAVE BEEN SOLVED BY ERIC THE SANDWICH WHORE," writes Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan.

The L.A. Times simply offered Smith 19 of their best sandwich recipes to help her in her quest for a ring.

Smith insists the blog started as a light-hearted joke, and that her critics have taken her New York Post article too literally.

"I'm reminded of my favourite quote by Andy Warhol: 'Don’t read your reviews. Weigh them,'" Schulte tells Smith in response to their story's backlash, laughing. "Having said that, no sandwiches at all are required for me to marry you and never have been. I already love you and always will."

"300 is a fun, creative project for both of us," he adds. "We both started from an obviously tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek joke. I find it nothing short of hilarious and kind of sad that so many people missed that!"

Schulte tells TODAY that he'll make good on his promise — not that she ever needed to make him any sandwiches.

"Of course, I would have married her without one sandwich."

"Eric is the type of guy that at least deserved one sandwich. And I’m the kind of woman that wanted to make him one," Smith writes in a follow-up article for the New York Post. "I’m no less of a woman because I decided to make him 300 after a flip joke."

Are Stephanie Smith's efforts to get a ring demeaning to women, or is the media blowing it out of proportion? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!