What food would you say is your specialty?
When I love someone, I love their food. I make breakfast the best, in my estimation, because I spent so many hours bonding with Dana over our brunch program (chef and ex-wife for those just joining us)… but it wasn’t just that. We loved to cook together more than life itself, and breakfast was the thing that made her face light up. Breakfast food comes easily to me, because now I picture what Dana would do and how she would do it every morning of my life. This is not a bad thing. We’re not together anymore, but I decided to stop spending time with our negative memories a long time ago. I will talk about them to use them as an illustration, occasionally, but I would never talk shit about her just for sport. Our fights make us both worse characters, because our joy was so apparent. I am also not in love with her anymore, which I know is confusing…… and yet not, in my brain. I can write about her in all the romantic terms I want because of the tense. It may sound like I’m in love with her, but not when you look at all the “used to” instead of what is happening in my life right now. Remembering someone fondly is easy. In your memory, they become the people who fucked you up, and it doesn’t matter because you’re at peace with the fact that you fucked them up, too. No one is 100% a victim…. or at least, that is the case most of the time. I am sure there are examples, but by and large everyone contributes. Just like when I cook.
Because breakfast food is my love language, I used to have dreams of cooking Supergrover breakfast, and I don’t mean that in a sultry “morning after” kind of way………….. anymore. 😉 I mean that I could have been the chef, directing everyone as to what to do. That’s my happy place. Lording over a kitchen in order to teach other people how to fend for themselves. I want to go into a kitchen where I am given that authority without the responsibility. For instance, everyone saying “you should do it because I’m not a chef.” That’s not helping me, that’s succumbing to fear. If you don’t teach other people to work with you, over time you’ll become the cook all the time. “You’re just so good.”
That’s what’s great about marrying a professional cook. They work on you from day one, and it’s better if you want them to do so. They are not going to be your personal chef. I, like her, started with the basics. An egg. Diced vegetables……… repeatedly. Respecting first contact with eggs and knowing when to flip them. Interestingly enough, learning to make an omelet is so storied as part of a cook’s education, but Dana never taught me and I was never in a restaurant where it was on the menu and had to get up to speed fast. I play around in my own kitchen, but I’ve never folded anything successfully…. and because of anything but effort. I can only get better so fast, because I can only feed myself so much. I can only store so much when I make it ahead of time. Getting good at pancakes and oatmeal took a week or so of doing multiple iterations every single day.
Breakfast is also the only time I bake. I do everything from a can or box, but still. My favorite are orange rolls. The bread is the same as a cinnamon roll, it’s just the at the icing has orange or orange juice in it. They’re pretty divine…… If I’m in a savory mood, though, scones are stupid easy and forgiving. You can throw anything into them and the dough will react like a pancake, adjusting so that the food doesn’t take a left turn at Albequerque when you used a teaspoon and a quarter of something because you didn’t measure it. Cooks, by and large, hate baking because they’re used to tweaking by hand. You can do that with dough and pancakes. You cannot do it with cakes. In general, dinner service and pastry are two different fiefdoms, and bakers’ personalities are more laid back because they’re not in the same pressure cooker that the brigade is. Of course, there are exceptions. But most restaurants don’t sell as much dessert as they do main courses, anyway. Most nights the restaurants I’ve worked in could have had only one person on pastry, because we didn’t need more than a pie’s worth of dessert all night. Dessert went out of fashion with Atkins and South Beach. For people who aren’t foodies, dessert has been passed over for more bacon.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The only thing I don’t use much is chocolate. I mean, I’ll put chocolate in pancakes a lot of the time, but it’s just a flavor note. I don’t make chocolate pancakes with chocolate chips and chocolate sauce because I’m not a Death by Chocolate sort of chick. Black raspberry chip vs. New York Super Fudge Chunk.
Ice cream is the dessert that’s my specialty, but I don’t have an ice cream maker, so I haven’t done it since Tapalaya.
First, you take a bunch of bacon and cook it in a rondeau. Then, you strain the bacon and put it aside, making ice cream base in the pan loaded with bacon flavoring with the drippings from straining it and re-adding it to the base. But the bacon just makes it insane when I prefer plain sweet cream or Mexican vanilla. Mexican vanilla is the one place skim milk is a good application, because you can make an amazing ice milk with it. Ice milk, to me, tastes better without fat because you can tell a difference between it and ice cream.
I would rather have ice cream with 23% butter fat and just eat less of it.
Except on the nights when I’ve been too tired to cook and it was immediately available. I can save my cooking for the morning, when I have the most energy for it. Getting up early and eating breakfast sets the tone for how much energy I’m going to have later. If I just drink coffee because I’m too lazy to eat, I don’t have enough strength to mask and I recede inside myself rather than sounding like a put-out dickhead because I can’t cope with my environment and it’s not personal but it sure sounds like it. I take precautions not to be that guy. I can’t get by on a piece of toast. My body needs a load of energy early on. So, I need eggs at a minimum. Eggs with more butter than people usually add and probably peanut butter toast and some Greek yogurt (full fat). Vegan sausage patties if I have them, and I don’t care whether it’s Just Egg (plant based eggs) or actual chicken eggs. One doesn’t really taste that much different than the other when I add all my spices. I love Old Bay or simply salt, pepper, and garlic. Season eggs like you would season a chicken. For instance, Montreal Chicken Seasoning is really amazing in a scramble. So are Tony Chachere’s, Paul Prudhomme’s Chicken or Red Fish Magic, and Slap Ya Mama. SYM is Cajun spice like Tony Chachere’s with the heat turned up. It’s probably beyond most people’s comfort level, so use sparingly when cooking for white people.
Another breakfast favorite is extraordinarily thick Greek pudding with cinnamon and nothing else. It makes your brain *find* sweetness in the cinnamon rather than sugar. If I had an Instant Pot, I could learn to make my own and I would, because I like it thicker than most companies make it. Yogurt is particularly good with fruit like raisins, prunes, and dried cranberries, because if you add them and put it in the fridge, they’ll plump back up. Yogurt with plums sounds more legit, right? Raisins are good in ice cream base for the same reason, particularly rum raisin and putting the alcohol in the base at the end so that the alcohol doesn’t all cook out. The bite of alcohol stands up to the fat of ice cream base very well. It will also make you feel tipsy immediately. Tread carefully. It will hit you before you really know what you’re doing.
Two scoops would have done it.
That’s an old joke for three people.
I think I’ll wrap it up there, because I have so much to discuss that doesn’t have to do with food. But I’m going to go make some breakfast first.
Stories That Are All True 