Egg McMuffin

McDonald’s had turned the idea of takeout hamburgers on its head by reducing service time from 20 minutes to 10 seconds.  They then asked, if they could do that with lunch and dinner, why not do the same with breakfast?

From this simple concept, the Egg McMuffin was born.  A simple combination of Canadian bacon, four-minute egg, and cheese in an English muffin, the ingredients may not have been complex enough to deserve their own song (think Big Mac), but the protein  was sure there, and its compact structure assured tidy eating on the road, a McDonald’s must.

Of course, time has marched on.  Donut shops have grown exponentially, and include breakfast sandwiches on their menus.  Bagel shops have also taken hold, replete with bagel breakfast sandwiches.  Add in breakfast burritos, and the field is full of to-go competitors—along with places like Denny’s, which hold their ground on breakfast and insist that it is a multi-course, multi-plate, waist-expanding meal.

All of this has left the once groundbreaking Egg McMuffin in the dust—and it kind of looks a little weather beaten.  The yolk in the four-minute is solid, but it makes the rest of the egg a little rubbery, leading one person to refer to the egg portion as “a protein packed hockey puck.”  There’s also concern about the serving size of the Canadian bacon, which has always been less than generous.  An option exists to replace the Canadian bacon with regular bacon, but that results in two half-strips of bacon being inserted, with one of them invariably jumping out of the English muffin.

A few ideas for helping out the Egg McMuffin come to mind.  For me, the first one is a natural—add Hollandaise sauce.  Egg, Canadian bacon, and English muffin are practically begging for this classic sauce as an add on, and would make for a much richer taste.  As is the case with the Big Mac, not too much sauce should be added, in order to avoid roadside spills.  In addition, Hollandaise isn’t the easiest thing to keep warm—and the cheese on an Egg McMuffin is often pretty gelatinous as it is. But seriously—isn’t the notion of having an item named Eggs McBenedict too tempting not to try?

Other ideas come to mind—adding the ever-trendy kale, changing the cheese option to the more fashionable feta, offering a double-layer version with an additional sausage patty—but even a little blue-skying over saving the Egg McMuffin quickly leads to two sobering options.  Love it for what it is, or order something else.

And there’s the life lesson.  How often do we find something in life, respect it for what is at first, and then decide over time it needs to change?  Is this really a case where we’ve stuck around long enough to see its flaws, or is this more about us simply needing something different, or—heaven forbid—asking for too much?

It’s easier to think about these questions with breakfast foods, but what happens when we apply the same scorecard to relationships—and when we do, how fair are our answers to the other person? Is that something we even consider, or is it just too hard to sort out the answers?

I’ve almost come to terms with the Egg McMuffin—it’s a sometimes food, often becoming second choice to the Starbucks egg bites (oh, that gruyere)!  I’m still holding out for Eggs McBenedict, but I’m not expecting my Egg McMuffin to ooze in creaminess.  I know what I’m getting, and when I make that ordering decision, I happily stick with what it means.

Kitten

It honestly doesn’t know
That swatting at something that far away
Will lean them off the bed.
Miraculously, it doesn’t matter.
They rattle the bell in that too-big collar
By shaking from head to toe
Then go see if that red dot
Has made a return engagement to the travel tunnel.

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