Amazing egg sandwich
The light comes in my room really early in the morning, tricking me at 8am that it’s 10am, setting off all my internal body clocks. I am a morning person. It is something I recognized only semi-recently and have totally embraced. Once you recognize your morning-person ness, you truly become a productive person. I shower, make coffee, dress myself, eat breakfast and often assemble a lunch to go, eat breakfast, drink coffee, clean dishes, dry hair, put on makeup, fix my bag all in an hour and ten minutes. Sometimes in the morning - particular weekend mornings where it is even more sinful to be up at such an hour - and especially when my boyfriend is fast asleep - I scurry around at 8:45am, cutting up ginger and zesting lemons for Balthazar ginger tea, resentfully doing my roommates’ dirty dishes, arranging my clothing rack and refolding my clothes to fit it in all the tight places, even dusting/bustering the floor.
One one these mornings (Sunday, as in yesterday) I also made the most amazing egg sandwich. I probably came up with it when I was in still in bed kicking myself for being so awake. I decided, after deciding what I wanted to wear that day (Gap shirt blue striped ruffled shirt dress with black Uniqlo tights and black booties with the cream colored American Apparel egg jacket) I wanted to defrost a bagel, toast it, fry an egg and make a ‘gourmet’ egg and cheese sandwich with my Ouray cheese (Saxelby Cheesemonger, but the cheese is from Poughkeepsie) and use some of the cured salami I had sitting in the fridge. I made it after I did the tea, after I showered, after I got dressed, after I put away and rearranged the clothes. It was fucking amazing. Bagels trump the roll for the egg-cheese sandwich.
It reminded me of the best egg and cheese sandwich I ever ate, which was in Luang Prabang, Laos. Except there we were up really early in the morning because we were about to get on a 13 hour bus ride. Lindsay still had to do her morning run and came back with two egg and cheese sandwiches from the Western bakery in town (for me and her) and watermelon (for Logan). The sandwich itself probably wasn’t spectacular but the fact it was an egg and cheese bagel sandwich, something so foreign to me after so many months abroad, it truly something more than a miracle. The Luang Prabang egg and cheese sandwich was on a bagel that wasn’t Americany and the egg wasn’t decadent and oozy like mine, rather a thin, flat egg with a fully cooked yolk. I don’t remember if that bagel had sesame seeds or even the right texture for the bagel, but to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have even known. I sat on the bed, kicking my falling-apart gigantic suitcase filled with stupid trinkets and smelly clothes, and ate the sandwich in less than five minutes. My fingers dripped with oil and I drank lots of water after, washing my hands in the bathroom where the shower was just a single sole showerhead. It did not take me very long to learn that you should never be ashamed of your food cravings, even if it is an egg and cheese bagel sandwich in Laos.
Yesterday’s sandwich, however unforeign and completely common it was, was consumed in a very similar fashion. I didn’t even get to squeeze any hot sauce on it, which I was ready to do.
