fried eggs with Maui sourdough toast

Late night snack, wait, I guess it is an early morning snack. Whatever. I'm showing the holes in the bread. See? That is what artisan bread is all about. Rarely will you see that with homemade bread because home bakers follow the usual directions and bake their bread in Pullman pans and at heat much lower and for longer periods than artisan bakeries do. The home bread baker can approximate artisan bread by baking in a cloche instead of a pan, and by using heat as high as their oven will go. Those two things permit a wetter dough which is the third difference. However, the flavor of the bread is produced first by the starter, this one collected on Maui, and by a fermentation period, in this case three days which is just about perfect. The fermentation is more important than any given particular starter, in my humble opinion, the starter being a culture of a  combination of yeast cells and bacteria unique to geographic areas, and the fermentation is the effect of that culture over time.

When the third day rolled around, the baking day, the dough was insufficiently wet. That was corrected by stretching out the dough to a squarish pizza then dampening my hands to dripping wet and applying the water to the top layer and folding the pizza shape into thirds, watering again, folding again, stretching and flattening and watering again, then finally folding in thirds again into a bread shape. That bread shape flattens out on its own over 20 minutes or so of final rising but it is stretched again into a baguette shape as it is dropped into a fierce hot cloche that had been preheating high as the oven goes. Dangerous, yes. I wanted it wet as a jellyfish, more wet than you would imagine could rise and support itself. The wetness made large hole formation possible, the preheated cloche contained the moisture long enough for the dough to expand as thousands of little balloons, and then abruptly SET due to the intense heat having its final way.

If the word cloche seems too scary to bother, consider a clay roaster instead. It's the same thing. The roaster can be used upside down to avoid the dough setting on the built-in ribs intended to elevate a roast.

The current egg scare affects my state. The to do  causes me to want to eat more eggs just to be contrarian. Nanner nanner. It does nothing else but make me suspicious of motive.

My whole schedule is thrown off due to a party I went to yesterday. Met a bunch of really nice people and made new friends. At one point I changed tables and joined another group of people that I hadn't met before. They looked at me a little puzzled as I sat down with them, so I go, "You guys look like you're interesting."  But my abrupt intrusion caused conversation to stall so I continued, "I overheard you talking about visiting Haiti," and conversation spilled out from there. One guy told a story about how life was when he lived in a ghetto area. That caused another person to top that story with another harsher ghetto-living related story that was much more dramatic in which he starred as the hero. I said, "See? I knew you guys are interesting."   I came waaaaaay out of character and drank three sodas, and boy, were they sugary. They could have filled hummingbird feeders. Then the hummingbirds would go, "WUT UP WID ALL DIS SUGAR? YOU TRYING TO KILL US?" Everybody else was drinking beer and liquor and wine but I guess I'm just not into any of that. Dorito chips, which are quite addictive, prepared dips from jars. Cakes from the grocery store bakery. I was starving so I had a sandwich finally at about 10:00PM with sandwich meat and commercial bread. It was mini flat bread that could be sliced into two discs. It was the best choice available, but honestly it still didn't come close to the flatbread I can whip out myself in minutes by making dough and frying it in a pan. <-- FACT.

It's all so clear to me now.

I misunderstood the amount of time between getting the invitation and the actual party. When I realized the error I had only a few hours to crank out a thank-you card, which I prefer to leave on their table rather than mail. There were other things I had to get to too so it was with urgency I cranked out this sweet little pop-up card, if you care to have a look.

hushpuppy catfish cakes with fried eggs

Leftover cakes for breakfast. They're already done! What could be better? I suppose what could be better would be somebody else making them up fresh just for you, then cleaning up the mess. Yes, that would be better. In lieu of that, this is the best.

Really, this sort of thing is best deep-fried. These were pan fried then re-heated in the microwave ⚡⚡dzzzzit⚡dzit⚡⚡dzzzzit⚡⚡ZAP⚡⚡dzit⚡zit⚡ for one minute. Not the best treatment for a bread-y cake or for fish. Yesterday I reheated one in a pan but that took too long. I don't have the patience for that. Grew gray hair on my head just waiting for it. I stood there with an instant-read thermometer and kept sticking it in the cake while it cooked watching the temperature slowly rise. It took fooorrrreeeeever and I hate that.

So what to do? I do not know. I suppose the best thing to do would be to keep a covered pot of oil ready on the stovetop, and uncooked prepared mixture in the refrigerator. Then keep heating up the oil over a period of a few days until all the mixture is used or until the fish begins to turn, whichever occurs first. The mixture also has raw egg in it so that too would limit the whole thing to a mere few days, but it would allow fresh-out-of-the-oil fish-infused hushpuppy cakes or balls. Howz that for an idea? Then the oil could be filtered and put away as if this little deep-frying episode never happened.

That's the only way I would serve these for, say, a brunch. That is, straight from the oil. That way they'd be crunchy on the outside, tender fresh fish with lightened cornmeal on the inside.

fried eggs, curry

I guess I went a little overboard with the red and black pepper. Eggs fried in butter. Prepared curry heated with the butter. This is delicious, and completely over the top with the whole-wheat bread which is a meal by itself. After photographing the plate I forgot I did that and my first bite was POW all over my mouth. I wished they were giant eggs so I could eat 'em all day.

I was sitting there poking the bread into the yolks and getting a little bit sad thinking about my father and what he missed all those years with his daily ritual of fried eggs over easy with catsup and his Wonder Bread® toast. He did enjoy hot and spicy food but my mother hadn't a clue how to begin with them. OK, that's a lie. She did have a clue how to begin -- sage in the turkey stuffing, whole clove stuck in the ham. I do believe that's about it. They did at length discover the intrigue of wasabi but that took an overseas tour and it had limited application, and much later, like around retirement, they discovered the joy of Srirachi and of kim chi but those are spicy prepared products and not spices per se. She also discovered garlic powder but by then she was pretty much completely over cooking which for her was a chore. See? Now I gone and done it. That does make me sad.

fried eggs

Oh, my God!

I freak out every time this happens.


Actually I'm instantaneously transported through the decades to the past at that spot when I totally freaked out about this the first time, when I was five years old and shown by my mother the eggs she opened into the pan. They're twins! This never fails to make me a little bit sad. I was aware then, at five years of age, the eggs would develop into chicks, if they were left alone by us and if they were fertilized, just as the fruit seeds I planted in dirt developed into plants, so I was aware then that by eating eggs I was destroying the potential for darling little chicks, and that can put a boy off eggs permanently. I contrive in my mind a farm scene where a hen is sitting on six eggs and then one day seven chicks appear as if by magic -- it's a bloody numerical miracle! -- another of the awesome and delightful mysteries of life. Slain.

Speaking of regret over being a baby chicken killer; by cracking open four eggs to whip out a batch of cupcakes, like yesterday, I'm admitting to myself of being a serial chicken-abortionist, and that makes me a little bit sad too. This happens every time I crack open an egg and especially happens whenever I crack open a number of eggs at once, and that transport to childhood happens automatically every time I open up a double-yolk egg. "They'd be twins!" My inner child yells inside from a long-distant past that is still quite present. Then the taint of remembered boyish sadness descends. Then I lift the emotional pall, deftly by practice, and turn to heat up some home-made green chili in the same pan the chicken pre-fetuses were fried, because what would a plate of aborted sadly unfertilized unusually doubled Gallus gallus domesticus ova be without green chili when it's already right there on hand in its little plastic container? Nothing, that's what. I have tortillas too, but they're frozen, and frankly, on chicken-miracle day I can not be bothered with thawing.

See how our big fat scientific selves obfuscate with language to assuage and to put a distance between the reality of what we're doing and the experiences of our precious littler emotional selves?   

fried eggs, uncured ham, trail-mix oatmeal

This is a new batch of prepared oatmeal that contains several ounces of some kind of tropical trail mix scooped from the bulk bins at Whole Foods®. The trail mix contains sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, almonds, Brazil nuts, raisins, dried papaya, mango, and has an overall slightly green coloration. I got it because it was different. The oatmeal is about ten or twelve cups, the trail mix is about a cup and a half, and the pile was augmented with more raisins, pecans, dried cherries, dried cranberries, brown sugar, salt, and a ton of cinnamon, and by ton I mean a few full rounded tablespoons.

Uncured ham. Try this some time, you'll fall in love with it.

Eggs fried in sweet butter, that means unsalted, with a few dots of Chulula® sauce.

Dairies salt butter to prolong its shelf-life. Salt masks a multitude of sins. It's a way of cheating really, otherwise, they'd have to be a lot more careful about handling, processing, transportation, storage, etc. Unsalted butter keeps everybody honest down the line. There's just no way of disguising rancidity.

Chulula is made with arbol and piquin chile peppers. Arbol means "tree," and pequin connotes "tiny," (pea-ken, as in pequeño). These tiny piquins are the most fiercely hot of the annum type of Capsicum cultivars. I have two stock funny personal stories regarding piquin pepper plants that involve their fiery hotness and human scrotums but I must leave them for another day. Annums are the most frequently encountered types of chiles. They're distinguished from the Chinense which includes the extremely hot habaneros, called Chinese because of their resemblance to Chinese paper lanterns, but this is a misnomer because all chiles, ALL chiles originate in the American continents, that is notwithstanding all the exotic African types, Thai, Japanese and Indian, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and Austrian paprika. Got that? American. So, if the Indian Tezpur or the Zimbabwe Birds Eye is billed as the hottest chile pepper in the world, be assured it's actually nothing more than the Central American piquin that found its way to India and to Africa via Portuguese explorers, because I said so.

Birds are immune to the affects of capsaisum, an alkaloid evolved by plants to deter mammals but not to deter birds. These tiny birds' eye chiles are easily dislodged from the plant by birds, ravenously consumed, and their seeds broadcast within convenient packages of organic fertilizer. Along with the extremely popular annum and the very popular, generally much hotter Chinense chile types, there are also the less frequently encountered Frutescens, Pubescens, and Baccatum types.

Arbole chiles are just beyond midway on the Scoville scale of hotness, they'd be a 6 out of 10. But that scale is bollox. Piquins would be a 7 out of 10 on that scale, but really, they're much hotter than that, hotter than Thais and they rival the heat of habaneros and the Indian Tezpur. I know, I've grown them. So there.

My dad used to put catsup on fried eggs and that totally grossed me out.

breakfast, bacon, eggs, hash browns

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