Breakfast Sandwiches

Hello all,

I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of Harvard students are less than thrilled about their daily breakfast offerings. With the exception of freshmen who still get hot breakfast, in the upperclassman dining halls the food can be less than appetizing five days out of seven. It is an unchanging offering of cold hard boiled eggs, un-shelled warm hard boiled eggs, cold cuts, sandwich cheese, tomatoes, refried beans, hummus, bread stuffs, cream cheese, jam, jelly, butter, and margarine. Oatmeal or some variation thereof if you want it, and the ever-present cereals. Now if that were what we had to eat a few days out of the week, it might not be so bad. But really, who wants cold cuts and oatmeal every single morning? Especially when Harvard's reasoning for cutting hot breakfast is that it's poor with an endowment of just $35 billion. Yeah, right.

Since I like breakfast, I've gotten creative over the years. This year though, I think I've really hit the jackpot. I make a delicious breakfast sandwich every morning that is piping hot and delicious. It starts off like this:

The start of a very beautiful, very short relationship with a sandwich.

What is all of this? Well, here's an enumerated ingredients list:

2 slices of turkey (or ham)

2 slices of cheese

~3 tablespoons of refried beans 

Sriracha or Frank's or Tabasco to taste

2 slices of tomato

1 hardboiled egg sliced in your dhall's handy dandy egg slicer

1 english muffin or wheat thin, toasted

The first thing I do is mix hot sauce with refried beans. Coming from Texas I find the refried bean offering pretty bland, so I hit it with some hot sauce to make it taste better. While I'm doing this, I've got my bread toasting in the toaster until it's extra crispy (since it's going to go in the microwave I overdo it so that it resists sogginess). 

Next, I dry off the tomatoes with some napkins, because when I microwave the sandwich all the water just leaks out of the tomatoes and gets everything wet. Then, I pepper or salt the tomatoes and egg, depending on my mood. Sometimes I leave it plain.

To assemble:

Put the refried beans on one piece of the bread, then put a slice of cheese down followed by either ham or eggs, then tomatoes, then another slice of cheese, and then the other half of the bread.

Zap it in the microwave for about 35 seconds to get the cheese melted and everything heated up without un-crisping the bread. You can also patiently wait on the panini press if you so choose, which will keep crisping up your bread, but I usually don't have time for that in the mornings.

After that, you're all done! Voila! Your beautiful, delicious breakfast sandwich awaits you:

Take that, cold breakfast. Mmmmmm....

If you want a neater sandwich to eat, just leave out the egg and/or tomatoes to make it flatter and more stable.

Happy eating!