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.

Hot Potato

Of all the foods in the diner breakfast pantheon, it's hash browns that deserve more attention; what with bacon hogging the spotlight (looking back, that's a truly awful pun; sorry about that), even sausage has been relegated to the background, coming to prominence only infrequently on things like biscuits, but the minimal attention paid to sausage puts it on the C-list compared to the scoop-it-off-the-grill-and-forget-about-it nature of breakfast potatoes.

Potatoes have, in general, been stuck at the side of the plate for too long, which is a shame considering all the tasty things you can do to them - they're even good boiled, a fate I wouldn't usually reserve to the blandest of foods.

To hell with that, I say. Attention must be paid to potatoes, and breakfast is as good a place as any to start.
The diner breakfast trifecta is familiar the country over - eggs on one third of the plate, meats on another third and potatoes on the remaining third. This recipe brings the starch to the forefront by putting it smack-dab in the middle of the plate with everything else catering to it, for once. You'll notice that the proportions are similarly balanced in the potatoes' favor as well.

Ingredients:

• 1 mediumish potato, cubed
• 1/2 onion, diced
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp butter

• Pinches of Rosemary, Parsley and Thyme
• Dashes of Paprika and Celery Salt
• Salt and Pepper

• 1 Egg
• 1 tbsp half-and-half
  

optional:

• 1 cup (or so) sliced smoked hot Chorizo
• 2 dashes of Louisiana hot - Frank's, etc.
  

The Gist:

Melt the butter in a pan with the olive oil over medium heat, and throw in the potato and onion once the butter is bubbling. Toss to combine.

Potatoes are hardy starches - you're going to have to cook them for awhile at a relatively low temperature to simultaneously cook them and keep them from burning, about 10-15 minutes should do it. Add the spices and chorizo (if you went that way) halfway through - if you ever wondered what makes diner hash browns that distinctive slight-orange color, by the way, it's the butter and the paprika.

Once the potatoes are cooked, beat an egg with the half-and-half, pinches of salt and pepper and, if you like, the hot sauce. Pour into the pan directly over the potatoes and tilt the pan around for an even distribution. Don't touch it after that, just let it cook for 3 to 4 minutes. The eggs will be cooked through but slightly soft on one side, the potatoes will be fork-tender and the sausage will be warm and slightly crispy.

Serve with coffee and, if you think you can deal with the added starch, toast.

Notes:

• Chorizo translates to "sausage," but in practice (in the United States at least) Chorizo is almost always sold smoked, not raw. If the chorizo you have is raw, you'll need to cook it first.
• Sour cream can be substituted for the half-and-half. So can water; it's just a stretching agent.
• And speaking of sour cream, it works wonders here as a garnish.
• So does grated cheddar.
  

This recipe results in a diner-sized portion - I can eat this much by myself without so much as blinking, though you could probably feed two normal people with it. If you're cooking for two hungry people, add another egg and you should be fine. I serve it on one plate with two forks, but that's me.

Would you, could you, in the rain?

Angela's parents came over to visit this past weekend and I went into a bit of a panic - she thought it was no big deal: just clean to parentally-acceptable levels (which aren't that far from the everyday anyway) and make sure we have seltzer in the fridge. Sounds great in theory, but I started worrying about the menu.

Visits to my family revolve around food - before I've even got my bag off of my shoulder after walking through the door to my parents' apartment, my father starts talking about what's in the freezer, or marinating, or left over from last nights' dinner. For me to show up at a family member's house without there being food (or at the very least, beer) on the table is unthinkably foreign.

All sorts of equivocating on my part went into the thing, but the long and the short of it was, we ended up getting an eight-pound ham and went out to a diner for breakfast anyway. The diner was the plan from the beginning (I had missed that part) and the ham was on sale.

Even when you discount the bone, eight pounds is a lot of ham. The bone will go into split pea soup but the trimmed meat is going to be making its way into pretty much everything this week - sandwiches, pasta sauces, mac 'n cheese, but the most satisfying addition to me is to scrambled eggs.
I don't want to annoy the bacon lovers in the audience but eggs and ham, green or not, match better on a plate than bacon and eggs do - the ham negates the need for both salt and pepper at the table, melds better with onions and cheese, and can be fried in butter without going over the top. Plus, you can cube it; try that with a slab of bacon.


Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups cubed ham
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 cup shredded american or cheddar cheese
• 1/4 cup chopped onion
• 2 tbsp cream or milk
• 2 tsp butter
• Splash of hot sauce (Tabasco or Louisiana Hot)
  

• Green onions to garnish

The Gist:

Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat. Add onions and ham and fry until both are lightly browned.

Scramble the eggs in a bowl with the milk or cream; add to the pan. Tip the pan back towards you and scrape the egg away from you so it keeps moving over the heat, cooking slowly. Be patient. Add hot sauce and cheese as you cook the eggs. Keep it moving until the eggs are almost but not quite cooked through and plate immediately - they'll finish cooking on the plate. Top with green onions.

Serve with toast, orange juice and coffee or, if you're like us, just plop the thing down on a table and stick a couple of forks in it. Serves 2 if you feel like sharing.