I Just Invented My Favorite Egg Sandwich Of All Time: The MEC
When I realized the acronym of my new favorite sandwich meant "guy" in French, I was soooo happy because this IS a guy sandwich! I just happened to have made it before ...the guys did.
Enter: the meatball, egg and cheese, or MEC. Friends, meet the sandwich who knows what you're expecting, then surprises you with what you really want instead. This kind of logic is why I'm single and very much into sandwiches right now. Me and Blenda the Good Witch have been staying in, roasting things and making compound mayos. Well, I roast things, she makes compound mayos. Before I dive any further into my relationship with my food processor, here's how this sandwich came into existence. It starts with me berating a friend.
FR recipe developer Paul Harrison and I were eating spaghetti and meatballs before a particularly dancey show at Terminal 5 last Saturday. We needed our strength. There were two meatballs left in the pot, exactly enough to make myself mini-brunch the next morning. Maybe some sort of meatball and cheese scramble if that's what my state of being demanded. Then Paul ate one of them, and I was silently like, "noooooo!" But the fact of the matter was we needed our strength. That's a lie, screw you for eating the second to last meatball, dammit. But I make seriously good meatballs, so I moved on, wrapped the lone survivor in foil and stuck him in the fridge to deal with his losses.
In the morning I was like, "nooooo!" again, but for a different reason. Immediately, my brain switched to "egg zombie hangover" mode, in which I am a zombie until I consume eggs and maybe go back to sleep after. I had eggs, cheese and bread. It was not enough. I had salami. That does not necessarily go in an egg and cheese sandwich under these circumstances. This story is getting long. I saw the lone survivor and unwrapped him — he looked awful. Then I realized that since he was stone-cold I could thinly slice and fry him and create a layer of sausage-spiked, tomato-infused meatball for my pre-second sleep-in brunch. I usually squish at least one Italian sausage link in with my meatball mix. Do you not?
I didn't go all whatever with extra tomato sauce and melted fresh mozzarella on a ciabatta bun. This was not some kind of parm hero. This was a flash-fried egg, a good old-fashioned American single (which is how I'm remembering 9/11 this year) and a layer of fried meatball on sandwich bread, grilled briefly in the pan.
It was AMAZING. <-- story climax.
Then, totally satisfied, I went back to sleep. But the single best thing about this sandwich, besides everything, is it's 100% appropriate for any meal of the day. I want one for lunch right now. I can't make one cause I'm at the office and no sandwich spots have invented the MEC yet. This is the burden I carry.
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