Starting of with a grilled cheese sandwich for each fatty melt, then adding the fried eggs and the patty. We added tops too, but we had to wait for them to finish toasting.
We made about a dozen porcupine meatballs — enough for four sandwiches and a snack.
Fatty Melts and Porcupine Meatball Subs
When she isn’t working, Kara reads food blogs. She reads them for hours at a time. She never rarely makes any of the food she reads about. But a few weeks ago, when she read about fatty melts on Serious Eats, a social information network for foodies, they sounded crazy enough that I asked her for the link to the recipe page so that I could send it to my youngest brother, Benjamin. As I expected, he went off‐the‐walls crazy about it (he’s easily excitable, even for an almost‐eleven‐year‐old), and the more I thought about it, the more it did seem like a good idea. So I pledged that Kara and I would make fatty melts and tell him all about them, knowing full well the improbability that he would ever convince our father to make such a dish.
Here’s why. To make a fatty melt, one takes a hamburger (Adam Kuban, the originator of the recipe, recommends a quarter‐pounder.) and sandwiches it between two grilled cheese sandwiches. That means one uses four slices of bread, two or four slices of cheese, and a quarter‐pound of ground beef, plus accessories like onion, tomato, and lettuce. My father, a man of wisdom and economy, never even makes a hamburger patty without first having blended the beef with rolled oats. To him, the fatty melt would be a mere unhealthy extravagance, and unpalatable to boot.
When we made fatty melts two weeks ago, we ended up changing the recipe a bit. First, we decided to make cheesy western fatty melts. This means that we added a fried egg on top of the burger. Normally, one adds cheese as well, but since there was already cheese in the grilled cheese sandwiches, we decided to skip that step. Second, the meat we had available was a blend of ground mutton and lamb which we had found on sale at Tesco. This replaced the beef. Third, we didn’t use anywhere near a quarter‐pound of meat. There may have been a quarter‐pound between the two sandwiches we made, but all the labels were in metric, so we aren’t sure. Last of all, we added jalapeños to one of the grilled cheese sandwiches on each burger. This was to give the burger a little “kick”, but in the end, there was so much flavor, I didn’t really notice them.
When we ate our fatty melts, they were so big that after the first few bites we ended up eating the fried egg on one sandwich, and the burger patty on the other sandwich. Nonetheless, we were able to give Benjamin a very favorable report, and we plan to eat them again this coming week.
With the meat left over from the fatty melts, we decided to make meatball subs. But not just any meatball would do. We decided to make porcupine meatballs by adding cooked rice to the breadcrumbs, mutton, egg, and seasonings. After Kara mixed them up, she shaped them, and we browned them in a skillet. Kara says next time, somebody else (presumably that means me) has to mix and shape them and deal with raw meat under the fingernails. We let the meatballs simmer for a while in some tomato sauce, and then placed them on top of toasted sub rolls prepared with olive oil, salt, pepper, seasoning, and grated cheese. They went back into the oven to melt the cheese and get the sauce piping hot. It turned out to be an excellent way to use leftover meat.