It’s Spring, and Time For A Grilled Breakfast “Banh Meat” Sandwich

After a long and cloudy winter, spring has broken across my Alphabet City neighborhood and granted me the gorgeous morning I had been waiting so long for. It was bright and clear and when I woke up I knew that the first thing I wanted to do was to befoul it with smoke.

Now don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t polluting out of sheer perversity. My carbon footprint was child-sized, and temporary at best. I just wanted to start grilling.

Of course, in the morning, you are limited as to what you can make. It’s too early for hamburgers, and barbecue burritos take far to long to cook; by the time they were done it would be lunch, and that would mean hamburgers. No, the only thing for it was to make a Breakfast Ban-Meat. What is a ban meat, you ask? Obviously, it’s a banh mi but with a lot more meat. In this case, breakfast meats.

I walked across the street to my unimaginably crappy C-Town supermarket, and took stock of what they had by way of banh mi fillings. Cilantro, no; daikon, no? Pork pate - well, yes, they had that in the form of Underwood Deviled Ham, and I grabbed it at the last moment. And while I was in that aisle, I grabbed some Spam, as well. But you need a lot of meats for a job like this, so I also got bacon, Brown n Serve sausage, and some Hebrew National beef salami. Some butter, some eggs, a package of Kraft Deli Deluxe American cheese and a long french bread later, and I had all I needed for my first grill of spring.

One thing I didn’t bring, though, was a heavy coarse brush of the kind that regular people use to clean their grills with. Mine, predictcably, had been left uncleaned after the last boozy barbecue of fall, and, having never had any actual grilling tools of my own to speak of, I had no choice but to just attempt to burn off the gunk, hitting the grill like a blacksmith banging his anvil. When the fire was hot enough, I put on a heavy pan, melted some butter in it, and pressed the split french bread in it. I then put the pan aside, grilled the bread, and cooked some scrambled eggs in the butter. When they were halfway done, I moved the pan onto the roof ledge; the pan’s residual heat was used up in cooking them, and what was left after that kept them warm. Then the spam, sausage, and salami, dry meats that don’t flare up; and lastly, bacon, because it does. I laid a base of grilled spam slices across the bottom, the followed with a layer of cheese, sausages, eggs, bacon, more cheese, and some deviled ham on top. Just because you can’t have too much meat in a bahn meat.

Grilling season is back!