The Joy of Comfort Food – Breakfast for Dinner

Her Imperial Majesty is a wellspring of great ideas. I don't know if she had any before she met me, but since we've been together, they've never stopped. Her latest involved a novel I wrote some 15 years ago but never published. Her genius idea from Saturday night was to post the thing in snippets on its own blog and see if we can't gin up some interest. After all, there's no point letting it sit in a box, unread and dusty.

The day after, Sunday, we went to a party at Alex's place in Greensboro and met up with two other writers, Liz and Shannon. Shannon had just acquired representation for a memoir she was working on. That set the water wheels in my head spinning. I haven't had representation since the 1990s; why not take the novel, spruce it up a bit, and send it out. Maybe the time is right.

Ah, things have changed in 15 years. Back then, the internet was new. Nobody other than geeks like me had an email address. Submissions were laborious affairs that consisted of sending stacks of paper from wherever I was to wherever the agents were, with a self-addressed stamped envelope. It was a maddening process.

Ah, close your eyes and drink in the brave new world that is the 21^st Century, with all its technical doodads that make everything go faster and faster. No longer is it necessary to transport the paper that holds the idea, simply transport the idea electronically. At the mere touch of a button, rivulets of information cascade through the cloud and land as if by magic on the right person's desktop. The 21^st Century is pretty cool when it works.

So, in order to spruce up the manuscript, I needed to create a synopsis, a short overview of what the story is, what the themes are and what the characters do. That's what I did on Wednesday. In a frenzied eight and a half hour marathon session, I cranked it out – all 3,800 words of it – a river of words and ideas that fried my brain, leaving me completely exhausted and in no mood to cook.

But right then, Her Imperial Majesty had another one of her great ideas: breakfast for dinner. It was to consist of hash browns with onions, bacon and cheese, simmered in a bit of chicken stock and seared off in a hot skillet. The eggs were to be poached by the Queen in her own fashion.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon of olive oil
  
• Two left over baked potatoes, peeled
  
• One onion, coarsely chopped
  
• Two or three strips of leftover bacon
  
• ¼ cup chicken stock to deglaze
  
• Shredded cheese as a garnish
  
• Two eggs, poached
  
• Salt and pepper to taste
  

Technique

• In a skillet, pour the olive oil. Once it's hot, add your potatoes and cook for about 5 minutes
  
• Add your onions and sauté for about 5 more minutes or until caramelized
  
• Deglaze your pan with the chicken stock and cook until it reduces, making sure it doesn't stick
  
• Remove the pan from the heat and add your cheese. Cover for a few minutes to let the cheese melt.
  
• Plate with your poached eggs
  

I'm not exactly sure why I so enjoy breakfast for dinner. Maybe it's a throwback to my waiter days when I would get off work at midnight and the only place open was fast food (er, no, I don't think so) or a 24 hour diner serving breakfast. Whatever it is that draws me back to breakfast for dinner, I'm glad it does. With the simplest of ingredients and barest of technique, it satisfies at so many levels. It's the perfect food to think about when I've had to think about too many things.

A perfect weekend breakfast – Northern California Style

At the behest of my beloved wife, my lovely  sister gave to me for my birthday Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook. It's beautiful, with extraordinary insights into the mind and professional acumen of one of the greatest chefs in America, if not the world. Indeed, no less than Anthony Bourdain once said he considered The French Laundry the best restaurant in the world.

So this cookbook was in the perfect place to be THE gift of the year, to be warmly remembered for years and years to come, its pages dog eared, with the entire house smelling of the gastronomical wonders of Thomas Keller and my mediocre ability to channel his culinary genius.

But alas, it was not to be. While the recipes looked fabulous and the photography borders on food porn, everything in it is just too complicated for even an experienced duffer like me to pull off. 

But this is not the first time I've waded into the waters of the Northern California restaurant scene by purchasing a cookbook and seeing if I can conjure that same magic in my own home kitchen. No, the last time I tried that stunt, I had a go at working the culinary genius of fellow Chatham High School graduate Alice Waters (class of 1963). Her restaurant, Chez Panisse, was the toast of the culinary world long before there was Food Network and Emeril LaGasse was just a skinny kid doing guest spots on Cooking with Master Chefs with Julia Child. For the record, he deep fried a turkey.

I don't what it is that makes these recipes so perfectly opaque. I can't seem to pull off any of them. Exotic ingredients coupled with high French technique leave me simply dumbfounded. Indeed, the only dish inspired by Thomas Keller that I can actually prepare with any competence comes not from his beautifully appointed cookbook, but from an extra feature on the DVD of the movie Spanglish.

Yes, that silly Adam Sandler movie, Spanglish.

In it, there is a scene where the Adam Sandler character, who plays a chef, is talking to his romantic interest in the film, played by Paz Vega. During a telephone conversation between the two, there sits in the chef's kitchen one of the most perfect examples of a breakfast sandwich ever made – The Spanglish Sandwich. The producers of the film wanted to give the Adam Sandler character something to eat  that a real chef would prepare after a long shift at the restaurant. For technical assistance, they went to – here's your time to guess – Thomas Keller of the afore mentioned French Laundry. During the scene, Adam's character looks at, but never bites into the sandwich.

So much for the willing suspension of disbelief. The thing is such as work of art that everybody watching the flick is waiting for a moment that never comes – the happiness of the first bite of the perfect late night / early morning breakfast.

Interestingly enough, this is actually easy to prepare and makes a wonderful weekend breakfast. It's basically a BLT, with an egg fried over easy with the yolk is just barely runny. Add toasted bread and a slice of cheese and you're off to the races. When you do make the toast, run the slice with the cheese under a broiler or  in a toaster oven to get that slightly burnt cheesy "au gratin" effect. Bibb lettuce works best for this and you can add some fresh basil if you have that on hand. I typically layer it from bottom to top: lettuce/basil, tomato, bacon, egg, cheese. Mayo or aioli is optional.

Bon appetite!