Eggamuffin

There's a whole list of foods that thrive off of indifference. For example: gyros. The more care and concern and love you put into a gyro, the worse it gets. You can make your own cucumber dressing, you can make your own pita bread, you can spend hours making a sandwich that, when all's said and done, still isn't anywhere near as tasty or as cheap as the guy standing behind the greasy cart in front of your office building could have made you in 30 seconds. Your gyro guy is able to do that because he's probably made a lot of gyros in his day and he's to the point where he doesn't actually have to think about it all that much. He's in the zone.

Okay, I might be mythologizing the grease truck guy a little, but the point remains: Some foods taste better without care and attention. Some foods taste better when the guy at the griddle is doing a half-dozen breakfast-related things simultaneously. Some foods have been reduced to the bare minimum steps required to make them both tasty and fast and there aren't many places to take them anymore.

Diners are cathedrals to indifference food.
...but corner delis are the storefront churches where the miracles happen.

It's taken me some time to get to the point where I can make a ham (or bacon, or sausage, or whatever) egg and cheese sandwich that tastes right to me - it became a bit of a priority once I moved out of the deli capitol of the world and had to start making my own breakfasts again. I guess I just...stopped worrying about it.


Ingredients:

1 bagel/roll/croissant, etc.
1 egg, beaten fast but not too much
2 slices sandwich ham
1 slice American cheese
1/4 tablespoon butter

salt
pepper


Don't need a thing more than that. You're in a rush, right?

Put the ham in a dry frying pan and put it over the stove on medium. Leave it until the bottom of the ham chars a little (3-4 minutes), flip it over and repeat (2-3 minutes). set aside. That was your prep work.

Put your bagel (or roll, or what-have-you) in the toaster.

While the ham is grilling, beat the egg and pull the slice of cheese out of the fridge. You're going to have to do the bit coming up a little fast.

In the same pan after the ham's been removed, melt the butter just until it starts to bubble. Your pan should still be hot and over medium, so that shouldn't take more than a few seconds. Make sure the butter has touched the whole bottom of the pan.

Pour in the egg. It will start to cook as soon as it hits the pan. Once the egg has solidified and started to seriously cook (30 seconds or so) flip the egg with a spatula, or, if you're fancy, with a flick of the wrist.

This is the part that requires a little bit of speed and coordination. You should have a circle of egg in your pan. Put the cheese on top of the egg with one side of the cheese touching the edge of the circle, and put the ham on top of the cheese. Fold the egg in half on top of the ham and cheese, then in half again. You should end up with a wedge of egg/cheese/ham/egg/ham/cheese/egg. Put it on a bagel, throw some salt and pepper (and ketchup, if you're me) on it and dig in.

Don't worry about cooking the ham, it's cooked long before it gets to you. Don't worry about melting the cheese, either, the egg will do that for you once it's all on one bun. And coffee - don't forget the coffee.

Baconation

From the "don't knock it 'til you've tried it" department, I wanted to highlight one of my favorite sandwiches of all time: a toasted poppy seed bagel with cream cheese, scallions and bacon. It isn't exactly a light breakfast - it hits your heart like a mallet - but, um...

I was going to try to defend it, but let's be honest here:
you're topping cream cheese with bacon and furthering the injustice of it by sprinkling it with just enough green, leafy material to highlight how completely insignificant that green, leafy material is considering what it's sitting on top of. This shouldn't be a daily thing, is what I'm saying. It's a treat, a Thursday morning pick-me-up, not a Dunkin Donuts, pulled-up-to-the-drivethru-and-realized-you-don't-know-what-you-want afterthought.

I like sandwiches that dance, and this one's got potential. It's salty, but not crunchy-salty, sweet, but not tongue-smackingly so and just a tiny bit earthy and gently bitter, but still lighter than a classic deli bacon egg and cheese, and much faster to make. Everything in it needs everything else: ham doesn't work, and it has to be a bagel, and incidentally? It tastes better with sweet, creamy tea, not so much with coffee.

Ya can't make a BLT without B

I do not doubt, not for a minute, that this is a tasty sandwich, but co-optings of "BLT" seriously irk me.

I've experimented with improving the BLT, but none of those experiments have ever involved removing the bacon, roasting the tomato or replacing the lettuce with shredded bok choy - I've made my own mayonnaise (no real difference, but you can herb it), I've chilled the tomato in a freezer just before assembly (improves the overall texture), I've bought preservative-free smoked bacon from Vermont at local farmers' markets (truly incredible), I've even baked my own bread (still haven't really got the hang of it) but avocado has never entered into the picture. The tofu has stayed in the closet. Soy may make you strong and crush your enemies, but it ruins a BLT.

I mean, let's face it: in any other circumstance, lettuce and tomato is a garnish - turkey, lettuce and tomato isn't a TLT, it's a friggin' turkey sandwich. Raising another sandwich to a BLT level of perfection without some serious thought is sacrilegious.

A BLT should look something like this:
...or it absolutely doesn't count.

A recipe isn't really necessary, but some pointers never hurt.

• Cook the bacon slowly and flip it often; bacon burns if you don't pay attention to it.
• As I mentioned before, pop your tomato into the freezer before you start cooking the bacon. It will make it easier to slice and bracingly cold to the teeth.
• And speaking of tomatoes, very, very lightly salting the slices can bring out their flavor, but too much salt will leave the bacon with nothing to do.
  
• The lettuce shouldn't be too crunchy; you can avoid that by cutting out its central ribbing and by layering the leaves on top of each other.
• You can compromise making your own mayo by blending regular mayo with herbs and / or garlic. Don't overdo it, though - the bacon should be the star of the show.
• The bread should be light; toasted white or croissants work great.

Whistle a Happy...you know what? That's a truly awful pun. Never mind.

Sometimes I over-think things. Combine that with my urge to show off and sometimes I get bitten in the ass.

Take yesterday, for example. When going over what to eat for dinner with the girl, everything either of us felt like required one (usually embarrassingly basic) ingredient more than we had in the cupboard. If our cravings were strident and we were missing everything to make the dish in question except half a stick of butter and some salt, a trip to the market wouldn't feel so out-of-place, but to go out just to get pasta felt wrong.

So we (ie, she) decided that I should make one of the easiest meals available on short notice: tuna melts.

I mean, come on. The only tricky thing about a tuna melt is the Jenga-master reflexes necessary to keep the contents of the thing from sliding sideways out from its bread when flipping it over to toast its other side, and we have an extra-wide spatula specifically for flipping grilled sandwiches because I have excellent reflexes and terrible spacial coordination skills - I can catch a falling salt shaker in mid-air but will more often than not manage to stub my toe while setting it down on the counter.

Anyway. It seemed to me at the time that a good many restaurant tuna melts are one step behind where they should be because they use the same tuna for cold sandwiches as they do for hot, but that toasting the thing in butter fundamentally alters the way your teeth are going to interact with it. Fried bread is salty, crunchy and mildly sweet, so the tuna in question should be less salty, less crunchy and spicier than the stuff you'd be putting on toasted white.

So instead of yellow onions I used green ones (same flavor, less crunch), threw in some celery to make it just a little bit crunchy but less crunchy than the onions would have, halved the salt and doubled the pepper. And it was good tuna salad...and then I made two really silly mistakes: I put tomato on the thing, completely wrecking the balance I had crafted, and I forgot that a tuna melt is a very different beast than a grilled cheese when it comes to cooking it.

It was good, but it could've been better. I will admit, though:
...it takes one hell of a photo.

Ingredients:

• 1 can solid white tuna, in water
• 1 large handful green onion, chopped
• 1 rib celery, finely chopped
• 2-3 tsp. mayonnaise
• 1-2 tsp lemon juice
• pinch of salt
• heavy shake of black pepper
• 2 slices deli American cheese
• Your choice of bread
• 2 handfuls fresh leaf spinach
• butter for frying
  

The Gist:

Combine the first 7 ingredients in a bowl; mix with a fork.

Melt some butter in a pan over low heat. This is the non-tomato-related thing I screwed up - grilled cheese, you can cook over medium because the cheese is always within a quarter-inch of the pan, and it's going to melt fast. But a tuna melt is a much more delicate thing. Fry it gently: you'll need to heat up the tuna and melt the cheese before you burn the bread.

Anyway. Put together your sandwich. From bottom to top it should go bread / tuna / spinach / cheese / bread, and it needs to go into the pan upside down first, with the cheese on the bottom. This will melt the cheese enough so that, when you flip the sandwich to fry the other side, the cheese will melt down into the spinach and the tuna.

If your heat is low enough, it should take 5-7 minutes to a side. If you can't hear it frying, you need more butter. If it starts to smoke, your pan is too hot.

You don't strictly need the spinach, but I like it. It tricks me for a little bit into thinking this thing is even remotely good for me.

One can of tuna prepared like this makes two melts with a bit left over.