What “breakfast sandwich” means to me

OK, I’ve been absent from the tribunal for a while–had a bunch of life stuff to deal with, plus the sandwiches from last month I could easily get access to were um, not very appealing to me (no, I am not a fan of bologna, nor, more surprisingly, of bacon. I know, I know). But this month I certainly planned to participate, and with multiple sandwiches, no less! But now I find myself staring the end-of-month deadline in the face and needing to pull together a couple of posts in only a few hours’ worth of free time. Yet I soldier on–even in spite of Jim’s breakfast sandwich post making anything I do today look ridiculously anti-climactic. What the hell–that’s never stopped me before.

For me, breakfast sandwiches were never a part of the legendary “most important meal of the day”–a meal I haven’t eaten on any kind of regular basis since moving out of my parents’ house when I was 17, for the record. As a kid, breakfast traditionally meant cereal, some toast or waffles, and orange juice to drink. On the weekend my mom might feel like putting a bit more time into it and make french toast, pancakes, or bacon and eggs, but mostly, it was about cereal. The only time I ate bread for breakfast as a kid was when it was toasted and buttered.

I found out about breakfast sandwiches when I got my first job the summer after my senior year of high school. The nearest McDonalds to my house was willing to give me 40 hours a week for the summer, but I had to take opening shifts to get it. We opened at 6 AM, so I had to be at work at 5, and I lived half an hour’s drive away, so I had to get up at 4 AM every workday that summer. Gross. We switched over to lunch at 10:30 every day, but I’d get hungry long before that, and I used to take my shift meal in the form of an Egg McMuffin and a couple of hash browns. This summer of greasy fast-food breakfast sandwiches has formed a permanent impression in my mind of what a breakfast sandwich consists of, and to this day, whenever I imagine such a thing, I think of something greasy, from a fast food place.

I think for most people biscuits are the preferred breaded delivery system for greasy meats, eggs, and cheese first thing in the morning. I get that but I’ve always felt like biscuits are just a bit much. Sure, once or twice a year I’ll order a couple of egg and cheese biscuits from Hardees and let the butter and starch seep into my arteries and jack up my cholesterol count, but it’s got to be a very rare indulgence if you want to stay off the highway to heart-attack hell. Not that the health quotient of a breakfast sandwich is much improved by eating it on a muffin, but it at least seems slightly less bad.

These days, when I’m having one of those mornings where I’ve gotten out of bed early enough not to have to rush straight to work, and I feel like indulging myself a slight amount by having a very rare breakfast treat (seriously, I eat that meal maybe three times a year), I tend to end up at McDonalds. It’s cheap as fuck, is one reason. Waffle House is too, but it takes longer and is a bit more of an ordeal, plus there’s always the temptation to purchase a triple order of hash browns with cheese, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, and jalapenos, and no matter how tasty such a thing might be, it will destroy your entire day. Nope, one breakfast sandwich is just as greasy and unhealthy as the next (unless you go for some kind of frou-frou egg-white-bagel-with-arugula type concoction from some health-food type joint, which probably costs you $12 and anyway seems totally antithetical to the entire raison d’etre of the Sandwich Tribunal in the first place, so let’s just ignore that such a horrifying possibility even exists), so you may as well order it from the ultimate evil empire of cheap fast-food crap, right?

This morning I went for it. It’s Saturday, I don’t have work, there’s nothing else to do when I wake up at 9 AM but get on the internet, so why not run by McDonalds and start my day with some greasy deliciousness? These days I am a fan of the Sausage McMuffin with Egg rather than the plain ol’ Egg McMuffins I ate as a teenager. That weird disc of “canadian bacon” they put on the Egg McMuffins tastes weird and rubbery, and if I can have a sausage patty instead, I’m gonna take it. Plus, it adds a bit more heft to the sandwich as a whole, and can help me keep from ordering two breakfast sandwiches in one sitting (I’m really trying to get better about my compulsion towards overeating–which makes continuing to write for this blog a super great idea, right?). I got one of those little hashbrown patties Mickey D’s is also famous for and drank a Diet Coke along with it (coffee is gross–sorry, y’all. I’m killing sacred cows all over this post).

So what’s the verdict? Well, no surprises there. If you want your breakfast sandwich to kick off your day with a greasy, fatty adrenaline shot, a McDonalds Sausage McMufffin with Egg will do the trick. And if you enjoy fast food the way I do, it’ll be fun to eat. Plus, you get to watch the old-timers sit around gossiping and clucking their tongues at the news coming over CNN. That was always my biggest clientele during Mickey D’s breakfast hours back when I worked there in my teenage years, and it seems nothing has changed in that respect. But for the record, if you want to live to be one of those gossiping oldsters hanging out at a McDondalds ordering senior-citizen coffees (25 cents each), you probably shouldn’t get yourself a breakfast sandwich from that place very often. I should probably drink a wheatgrass smoothie for lunch just to make up for it. Yeah, as if.

Drew

I’m a transgender weirdo who loves music, books, comics, and all kinds of other geeky crap. I edit an arts/music/culture magazine in my hometown of Richmond VA (rvamag.com). But let’s not talk about my day job. Let’s talk about food. I love food.