sausage and eggs breakfast

My sausage, my bread, and I laid those eggs. Okay, that last one is a lie, but how hard could it be? You poop out an egg through your multitasking cochleae, and go, "Hey! What happened to the egg I just laid?" Then the next day lay another egg and go, "Hey! What happened to the egg I just laid?" Then the next day lay another egg and go, "Hey! What happened to the egg I just laid?" And so on, until finally you stop laying eggs every day and then comes *whispers* your unhappy day.

This sausage is so good I can not stand it. I hereby resolve to never buy sausage again for as long as I shall live. Maybe.

The spinach is wilted in the same little pan the bread was toasted and the sausage was browned and in which the eggs would cook. One after the other, all within minutes. No need even to rinse the pan. A true bachelor's tool there, one that a Tibetan monk could admire if they were given to cook sausage and eggs.

A drizzle of rice vinegar over the spinach. That, plus surplus butter dripping from the eggs constitutes a simple fat/vinegar dressing. Do this some time for your husband or for your wife if you have one of those, and they will know again with a profound certainty that you do truly love them.

gyros breakfast

Well, here we have it, four present obsessions at once. New American breakfast featuring an absence of grain, nineteenth in a series; thin slices of meatloaf with pretensions of being gyros and doing a darn good job of it too; Hollandaise sauce just for fun of it and in imitation of eggs Benedict instead of the expected tzatziki, and made with a portion of coconut oil in place butter and with a touch of Worcestershire aaaand properly capitalized in due respect to Holland, pfffft; with a poached egg on top. POW! A party right there.

Poached eggs take a bit of technique. I am now sufficiently confident to show it.

I think the trick is both vinegar and salt. I've found vinegar itself doesn't hold the white together, neither does salt by itself. but both together, BAM ! Dayidiz: albumen cohesion. Oddly, I have only expensive vinegars. Using a tiny shallow pan conserves vinegar. I'm cheap that way.

Man, oh man, sometimes my camera acts up and refuses to do anything. It always freaks me out because there's no clear reason for it and no reliable fix. I noticed something too: it always happens right at the worst possible moment -- right when I'm trying to take a picture.

Butter mixed with coconut oil and heated to melting. Slowly drizzled into egg yolk plus flavorings while whisking. Poured too fast. Failed to thicken. Doesn't really matter because it's to be heated to 145℉ / 65℃ whereupon it thickens like ... thickens like ... pudding! Tangy, eggy, Worcestershire-y pudding.

I really ought to take the bite off these raw onions. I don't know what's wrong with me. All I have to do is rinse them or zap them a few seconds in the microwave, but I never do. Now I have the most obnoxious onion breath. Hang on.

* brushes teeth *

There. Better.

pork, grapefruit, apple, breakfast

Gone primal again. Reverted to an earlier state. New American Breakfast, eighteenth in a series characterized by absence of grain.

Last night I cubed a pork roast and fried the cubes then pressure cooked the fried cubes to have around for snacks. I could have skipped that last step, the pressure cooking tenderized them but also added a rather unpleasant 'processed' flavor not nearly as pleasant as straight from the frying pan. The lovely depth of flavor gained by browning was altered and forfeited by diffusion throughout the steaming water. That's my guess, anyway. Plus, it wasn't at all tough to begin with so there was no good reason to pressure cook them in the first place. I will not do that again unless the meat really need it or unless I want to shove some new flavor into it, and that can be done otherwise, by using the Foodsaver®, for instance. My version of the Foodsaver doesn't handle liquids very well, but it could handle a dry-rub, and it does have this neat-o attachment that sucks the air out of an ordinary Mason jar. Anyway, these pork cubes are great, in a primal sort of way.

eggs and vegetables with wine sauce

NAB, 7th in a series. You'll notice immediately what could be stir-fried vegetables substituting for a giant pile of filler starch. Grain is present sparingly and judiciously in the form of naturally leavened whole-wheat bread, just a small portion mind you, a little of this dense bread goes a long way. Unless you're a teenage male, in which case a single sandwich made of meat packed between an entire loaf cut lengthwise might hold you off between real meals.

The sauce is red wine with butter and it's surprisingly good on the vegetables.

pork chop breakfast, green beans, applesauce

Strange look'n breakfast, in'nit? New American Breakfast, sixth in a series, extolling the virtue of vegetables and avoiding an over reliance on grain.

Pork loins fried and pressure cooked to tenderness earlier, like probably even a week ago, and held in the refrigerator.

Green beans steamed.

Applesauce -- one large Granny Smith (not recommended by applesauce makers -- too tart) peeled, chipped into pot, cooked on low until tender, with butter, cinnamon, processed with Grand Marnier because it was just sitting there and I thought, "Eh, what the heck."

I have a whole bag of limes on the counter, sort of in the way actually, but for some strange reason, and I do not understand this so I cannot explain the utterly contemptible laziness, but I was completely resistant to simply cutting one and squeezing it over the beans. Then the whole time I was eating it I was sitting there thinking, "This would be a lot better with lime," while they were still there available for cutting and squeezing. I guess I subconsciously figured the Granny Smith was tart enough.

Water instead of coffee because my abject laziness extended even to making coffee, although it sounds pretty good right now.

eggs and oysters

Part of the New American Breakfast series that seeks to eliminate the over reliance on fast-carbohydrate grains that readily turn to sugars and then get stored as body fat if not immediately burned and that characterize the traditional American breakfast.

Where breakfast is served at 1:00 PM.

Odd, I know. But hardly new. My understanding is oysters were actually rather a common item on breakfast menus in the golden days of yore when I'm imagining everybody was thin and active and most likely not consuming so much sugar and refined flour … along with corn, masa, white rice, pre-packaged quick breakfast oats with dehydrated little marshmallows, gigantic sticky buns sufficient to feed an entire Vietnamese village, Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms, packages of doughnuts that are devoured before the shopping bags are unpacked, hash browns, grits, and toast made of white bread. And then blamed their obesity on butter. Before all that.

But this is not a premier New American Breakfast due to the flour and masa used to coat the oysters. An extravagance!

I bought approximately 430 pounds of these haricots, or possibly it was 2 pounds exactly, but it seemed like an awful lot. I divide them in half and used a food saver air-sucking food storage device, marvelous little machine, that cuts a bag from a roll of special channelized plastic then seals the ends. Then stuck that half of the beans in the freezer. The other half was divided in half again and and one half of that was bagged the same way -- with the air sucked out in an effort to extend its storage life in the refrigerator, and the remaining half of that, the final fourth, divided in half ha ha ha ha ha, and cooked. So we're going to be seeing a lot of these beans.

Incidentally, all those so-called vacuum devices, Foodsaver, Seal-a-Meal, Black and Decker, all get deplorable reviews online. Complaints are consistent across the board. Apparently their service department is the worst. So far, mine has been brilliant, if a bit loud. Plus it's fun.

Compound butter with lime juice dressing.

Oysters were drenched in milk dredged in seasoned flour and masa, starting with dusting in the dry mixture, then wet, then back to dry to keep the coating on the oysters, then deep fried in vegetable oil at 350℉ / 175℃

coffee grinder grits

The green and beige stuff on the left is the chicken and mushroom and zucchini and broccoli filling used for arancini down there ↓.

See, the 'popcorn milled in the coffee grinder' experiment had to wait for the arrival of the new coffee grinder. This is what is left of the old coffee grinder.

Poor thing. Autopsy went badly. This old work-horse was originally purchased to grind coffee but then performed double duty grinding spices. Then eventually became devoted exclusively to spices, mostly seeds sometimes breadcrumbs and such. After decades of use, hang on, *counts* yup, decades, I finally accidentally left it too close to a burner and melted the bottom. I thought I could fix it. Hey, I'm a guy, we think we can fix anything. Things were going along rather well until a tiny screw fell off the screwdriver. I imagined it was stuck to a magnet on the motor. I tried to get it. Wouldn't come out. Dug deeper. Tore it apart, and let me tell you, it was a bastard taking apart too. Toughest little machine I ever tore apart. It absolutely would. not. come. apart. I pounded it with a hammer and it wouldn't even crack. The blade wouldn't pop off nor unscrew. The shaft was fixed solidly through the body and would not be removed. I used a dozen tools. Brought out the heavy guns, finally I had to hack-saw the casing in five different places just to get this motor out. The body was in tiny plastic bits, and there was a huge pile of plastic dust by the time I was done. The blades bent upwards, and the tin cup destroyed. But I got the motor. Yay! Anyway, if the new one is built half as good as the old one I'll be quite satisfied. Incidentally, I think I paid $40.00 for the first one, and less than $20.00 for the replacement -- a bargain at twice the cost.

Then I found the tiny screw on the sofa cushion.

So there was that. Here's this.

Conclusion: A coffee grinder can be used to mill popcorn for grits and the result will be a great improvement over pre-milled corn because the oil within the kernels is fresh and every element of the original kernels are in tact with no loss to processing, marketing, or transportation.

The result is uneven granules unless you continued to grind the grain to dust which is not what you want with grits. Stopping soon enough to preserve granules large enough to be considered grits results in a few overly large granules that must be removed and either discarded or re-milled. A sifter with sufficiently large holes would be helpful that would allow the right size granules to pass while holding back larger granules for further processing. I don't have one of those, but I intend to keep an eye out for one.

I do believe this concludes my messing around with popcorn for awhile.

raw salmon on sourdough toast

Parents, hide your children.  The little darlings would not like this. 

Raw salmon on sourdough toast.

Pacific salmon from pre-packaged frozen filets. I picked one of the brightest filets in the larger package and carefully sliced, then diced by hand.

Anything, and I mean anything, is better than plain Philadelphia cream cheese, which seems to me a blank whiteboard upon which actual flavors are intended to be written. Therefore, I scribble away. Supplemented with my own handmade ricotta, which wasn't very much, along with commercial ricotta. But then ricotta is hardly much of a flavor improvement over Philadelphia, then is it? Therefore I fortified it with some incredibly strange raw Wisconsin cheddar which is, oddly enough, spreadable. So there's four different white spreadable cheeses and its cheesy flavor is not ordinary. Plus horseradish, and S/P.

The sourdough is toasted to about 85% toastiness because the bread goes Melba if you toast to 100%.

pre-mixed oatmeal breakfast

* 3 cups oatmeal
* 4 Tbs brown sugar
* 1 Tbs cinnamon
* 3/4 tsp salt
* 1/2 Cup raisins

breakfast ingredients maki sushi

Maki sushi.  Rolls. They can be anything combined with sushi rice. (Sugar +vinegar. See? Sweet and sour, the eternally universally excellent combination because it hits two flavor spots simultaneously. Add something salty, like soy sauce, and you got a party going on.)

This is possibly my weirdest invention in the history of sushi. In Japan, they'd give me a medal. Either that or insist I commit seppuku.

American breakfast ingredients mixed with Asian elements.

* Rice instead of hash brown potatoes.

* Egg with a touch of sugar and gently fried as a crepe but without the batter.

* Uncured ham, which is simply amazing, and with no overpowering flavors.

* Broccoli, don't ask, I'm just insane. That's right, I said it, insane.

* Miso, because miso is amazing. 100% of Japanese people have a bowl of miso every morning instead of coffee. <--- possible exaggeration. It's packed with protein, easy to digest -- aids in digestion, substitutes for salt, low in calories. It's a World Power Food, with a thousand uses, and should blow you away. Soon to take over the nation, so brace yourself.

* Wasabi. The real stuff. The really real stuff, not the fake horseradish crap made green with dye and with spinach, foisted upon an unsuspecting and uncritical public. This can be procured in specialty spice shops, is rather expensive, milder than the horseradish fakery, and accounts for the dull green color. Stick wid me, you'll learn sumpin. For the record, I like horseradish too, but it's not wasabi and they should never be conflated. I feel sorry for you suckers who can't tell the difference. *ducks*

* Nori. What can I say? It's algae (a seaweed algae) dried, processed, and pressed into paper. Tastes like the ocean. What? You never tasted the ocean? You really gotta try it. OK fine. It tastes better than the ocean, which is actually kind of disgusting, so I take that back, don't taste the ocean. Fish poo in it.

* You roll these up with the aid of a bamboo mat, like you're making a giant joint. What?   


* Tamari is similar to soy sauce (shoyu). Tamari is a byproduct of making miso, it's an exceedingly dark and flavorful liquid that settles to the top of the vats as the miso ferments, so tamari, the real tamari, is fermented. Soy sauce produced in the US is an egregious fake out that often contains wheat. Bleh. It also substitutes for salt and is a fine flavor enhancer for people on salt-restricted diets, which isn't me.  Having said all that, I use American produced soy sauce all the time, cuz I got no class. 

So there ya go. This concludes my sushi-related pedantry for the day.

* This is just a portion of what I made. I also rolled some with Romaine lettuce instead of broccoli. They were all excellent. I recommend them. Follow in my footsteps, Kid, and broaden your horizons, whydontcha?

tilapia breakfast

breakfast, sugar peas, sweet peppers

A breakfast so totally in the Zone it's not even funny. Vegetables rapidly sauteed in olive oil then covered and finished with a steam of raspberry vinegar with a few teaspoons of raspberry preserves. Sandwich ham, tomato, and pecans placed in pan at the end to warm. Egg cooked in a pan sprayed with Pam™ and finished with a tablespoon of water.

breakfast, bacon, eggs, hash browns

Breakfast in nine images and no words. Except for these words, of course, and these words don't count.