Breakfast Sandwiches

In Jersey a girl can get a breakfast sandwich as they are meant to be made. This sandwich contains FRIED eggs, cheese, Taylor ham and (optional) salt, pepper and ketchup. This sandwich is best served on an honest-to-God (boiled) everything bagel (with big chunks of salt, garlic, poppy seeds, sesame seeds... NOT pumpkin seeds or spelt or wacky stuff that belongs in granola - This sandwich has nothing to do with granola-like foods). You could also get a perfectly excellent sandwich on a "hard roll" - which is not so much hard as a little firm on the outside and doughy on the inside.

Somewhere west of the Delaware Water Gap, people start futzing with this masterpiece in multiple ways.

• They stop boiling their bagels. (Bagels are boiled. A roll with a hole in the middle is a roll with a hole in the middle.)
• They have no idea what Taylor ham is. (Taylor ham is not pork in its natural state - it is extruded and processed and all kinds of nasty stuff that I don't want to imagine, but it's greasy saltiness is key to the successful and authentic breakfast sandwich.)
• They start making egg sandwiches with scrambled eggs. (I know of a perfectly nice girl with a bagel shop in Oregon who actually microwaves scrambled eggs for her breakfast sandwiches - They turn a strange shade of gray in the middle during the process, and nobody seems to mind...)
• They stop asking if you want "saltpepperketchup?" - and (gasp) actually put MAYO on an egg sandwich. (I remember once sitting at a bagel shop in Vancouver (WA) while I was pregnant with Mags and realizing that my breakfast had mayonnaise on it. It was a slow realization - "Hmm, there's something creamy on my egg sandwich. It can't be that the cheese melted that much... It doesn't seem to have much taste... I wonder... MOTHER OF GOD, THERE IS MAYO ON MY SANDWICH.")

I love the Pacific Northwest. We've got salmon, microbrews, pinot noir, coffee - and those four things are reason enough to stay here forever. (Although I find this nearly impossible to believe, it is true that in NJ, my parents have to drive for half an hour to find a Starbucks!) But, in my humble opinion, we have a gaping hole in breakfast cuisine out here. There is a place in Portland where they actually sell Taylor ham. While I will likely never buy it (it would be too much of a good thing), it's comforting to know that I could...