California-style egg sandwich

Sometimes the past is in the past, and sometimes it nudges into your current life, pushing, prodding, poking at your memory, at the edges of your thoughts. Hey, tap, tap. Hey, remember me. Recreate me. Find me again.

I grow irises in my garden every year just so I can stick my nose in them and catch a whiff of some early year when as a little girl in a sundress I stood flower high and buried my face in the fuzzy beards and pollen dust of the irises in front of my Oregon home.

I am prone to nostalgia. A poor trait in a writer, but not such a terrible thing in a gardener, or a cook. So when the urge to wallow hits, and I find myself awash in memories and memories of memories, my mind filled with the kind of colors and sweetness that can only be the result of a 20-year stew, I pry my fingers from the keyboard and take it to the kitchen. There among the pots and pans, I can clunk my way to a flavor or scent that will sate my sentimental urges without dumping a bunch of schlock onto a page.

Egg sandwiches are as good a place as any to start. Just as irises put me in a sundress on a hill in Oregon, egg sandwiches put me in a red Honda Civic, Scarlet Begonias blasting from the tape player, Nebraska sky, white cliffs in Utah, a Carlos Castaneda book in the back seat and a winding road up a tall scorch of a mountain in Texas’s Big Bend National Park. An open road and the gas pedal down. Egg sandwiches -- squishy white roll, salt and pepper, grill grease and a dab of ketchup. Washed down with cheap coffee, lots of milk. Five minutes and $2 and you are free.

I’m pretty much a purist when it comes to egg sandwiches. I don’t want them fancified. No smoked Gouda or, God forbid, micro greens. But when I make them at home, I do allow a couple of deviations from my truck-stop ideals. First, I let the yolk run. Not something that works when you are on the road, but I can’t resist the silk of a thick, but still runny yolk. The second is something I picked up from a recent trip to California.

My step-mother, Gaby, took me out to a wonderful breakfast at a Latin place near her home in Berkeley. The egg sandwiches came with ham, a runny yolk and a roasted pepper. I think it was a poblano, but it had more fire than what I'd usually expect. The warm heat from the pepper, the salt from the ham and the cream from the yolk made me think growing up might not be so bad after all.

So lately I’ve put aside my youthful egg-sandwich jaunts and adopted the California twist. Last time, I even went so far as to put the whole thing on a ciabatta roll. I’m holding the line on micro greens, though.