#28 Bacon, Egg, & Cheese

Got in to work this morning and didn't like the looks of the day ahead of me, so I walked back out the door and down the road to Tat's to pick up a breakfast sandwich.

In the morning Tat's is like a beautiful sandwich paradise locked away from the cruel outside world. Where you can have provolone and egg and bacon in a soft, warm roll.

I had to go back to work, but for a few hours I thought back on my Bacon, Egg, & Cheese fondly. Maybe next time I'll pick up two of them and save one for lunch. If I did the Bacon again I'd at least get onions on it, if not peppers.

After a few hours my sandwich bliss wore off and it was back to the grind. Better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all. That's what Oprah says, right?

#27 Pizza Steak

Pizza Steak. It's not a pizza, and it's not a steak. It's the third of four Philly Steaks on the Tat's menu, and I'm about to write on the internet about eating that shit.

The menu says "Broiled with Tat's Marinara sauce & Mozzarella." I'd had a really bad week and needed a serious Tat's pick-me-up. I knew I couldn't do the BLT or Roast Veggie this week, and I was thankful I'd saved a few sandwiches that I was excited about. The Pizza Steak is pretty classic, and I've had them other places in abundance in years gone past. Never had Tat's take on it, though, so this has been one of the 52 I've really wanted to get around to.

I hit Tat's late in the afternoon after a bunch of work meetings. More of The Man trying to keep the white middle class man down in his office dungeon. I escaped briefly and rescued a brown bag full of sandwich to bring back to my cubicle wonderland.

Looks like Pizza and Steak have gotten all Gaza strip on each other in this butcher paper. All cheese and sauce and dripping all over the place. But goddamn does it smell good.

That motherfucker is ugly. Just a wreck. Not like Rachael Leigh Cook in She's All That wearing ugly clothes and glasses and staring at the floor pretending she's not super hot but Freddie Prinze Jr is going to come along and turn her into a beautiful swan ugly, like UGLY. War atrocity ugly. DNR ugly. Community fund for plastic surgery ugly.

I closed my eyes and started digging into it, and before I knew what was going on half of it was gone. Just demolished. Unhealthy fast sandwich consumption. This was the vibe I was hoping for with the sausage sandwich. Sweet marinara, super juicy and soft steak, the whole roll warmed through and soaking in the juices.

Gaze into the maw of deliciousness.

I got onions and peppers, and that was a really good call. It ends up like the sandwich equivalent of a SPO pizza. The only thing I'd recommend is not getting it to go. I think less time to stew in its own juices would do better justice to the inner beauty of this monster.

I have intentionally not rated sandwiches on E.A.T. and I am glad I chose that route. That said, this is a top-5 sandwich so far. It's ain't much to look at, but I'll be damned if it doesn't have a great personality.

#26 Eggplant Parmesan

26 menu items down on my road to eat the whole Tat's menu. Damn. After about ten items on the menu I started getting forgetful about what I had and hadn't eaten, so I printed out a menu and stuck it up on my wall at work. I've been crossing off items as I go.

So technically I'm halfway there, but in reality a lot of what I have on my list are salads and sides. I can knock out about 10 of these in 3 meals. It also means a lot of what I have left are sandwiches I've put off eating because they hold no appeal for me. When life hands you lemons, right?

Who coined that bullshit? What a terrible fucking metaphor. Lemons are awesome. You know what's not awesome? Eggplant. It looks like what happens when you OD on Cialis and have an erection that lasts 24 hours... and it tastes like dirt.

When life hands you eggplant, make eggplant parm.

Yeah, that's the worst joke anyone's ever made on dot blogspot dot com, but the metaphor is apt. Eggplant is shit. Eggplant parm, at least done up Tat's way, is entirely edible.

The eggplant is my friend Lauren's go-to sandwich, because she's veg. I'm not afflicted with that particular moral dilemma, so I'd under no circumstances have ordered this sandwich except to get through E.A.T. even thought she swears it's damned good. And she's half-right, if you've got even an inkling of affection for eggplant then this is all you. Somebody got a little zealous with the broiler on mine and it came out half burnt and with 75% of the cheese stuck to the paper rather than IN the sandwich. C'est la vie, as the Philadelphians say.

The menu says "Lightly fried, topped with Tat's Marinara sauce & broiled w/ Mozzarella & Parmesan cheese." The eggplant is sliced thin, breaded, and fried. You get a stack of these eggplant slices with a bit of the house red sauce, which is mild and sweet. The cheese all blends together, and it could use a lot more parmesan to combat the blandness of the mozzarella, but in spite of that the toasted bread and the sweet sauce play off the eggplant nicely.

At some point I've still got to eat the Roast Veggie, which along with the BLT and the Eggplant are my Tat's trifecta of "don't want to fucking eat it."

Why am I doing this, again?