Ooze and "Ahh"s....
Breakfast Ju(i)cy Lucy | Grilled Ground Beef and Sausage Burger Stuffed with Fried Egg and Cheese
I HAVE A THEORY. I now believe that your more pedestrian and popular breakfast options—your breakfast burritos, your McGriddles—were created not just for, but by habitually hungover people.
Only when I have been hungover, dehydrated, achy—and with a headache that feels like someone's trying to kick my eyeball out from inside my skull!—has the word "Croissan'wich" ever come out of my mouth. (And usually around 10:57 a.m.)
When you're hungover, you can't care less about plates and silverware; just put egg, meat, cheese between two pieces of bread and hand it over!
So was my creative inspiration this hungover morning, as I recalled a "hangover past" and watching the Travel Channel's FOOD WARS television show as its host, Camille Ford, mediated between two of Minneapolis' famous Ju(i)cy Lucy Burger.
A Ju(i)cy Lucy (the spelling dependent on where you order it from) is a burger cooked with the cheese stuffed inside, so when you bite into, it oozes with hot, bubbly molten cheese and drips down you're chin along with the burger's juices. (Sounds yummy when you're hungover, right?!)
Reminded of that episode this morning, I decided to make a breakfast version of a Ju(i)cy Lucy, substituting raw sweet Italian beef sausage (extricated from its casing), forming the sausage meat into two large, very flat patties. I then fried an egg and placed it on top of one of the patties along with strips of the equivalent of two slices of American cheese. I then placed the other patty on top, and molded the patty, mashing the edges together to completely and securely seal in the egg and cheese.
The patty was grilled in a hot cast iron skillet (covered to increase the internal temperature of the patty to melt the cheese), then placed on a buttered, toasted roll.
This was wholly satisfying; it hit all the right spots. The flavors, of course, are common are familiar to many of us; yet having the cheese be that much hotter in temperature—almost liquid in consistency—was an absolute bonus. The sausage patty had plenty of spices in the meat that wound up in the juices of the beef's rendered fat, and possessing a nice caramelized exterior. The homey flavor of the egg still managed to break through as well, and all of it went down handily with a glass of iced orange juice with coconut water cocktail.
Once sated, I used several paper towels to wipe the excess from the sides of my mouth and washed my hands. Then, after popping an Advil, I completely undid the knot of the draw string in the waistband of my sleep shorts and crawled back into bed. The increasingly blurred memories of the night before began to fade as the food coma set.
And, either because I had a flashback of one particular moment from the night before, or because I awash in the contentment of my breakfast and my upcoming nap, the last word that came out of my mouth before I went to sleep was, "Ahh...."
Bun Apple Tea!
.kac.
Breakfast Ju(i)cy Lucy | Grilled Ground Beef and Sausage Burger Stuffed with Fried Egg and Cheese
