I meet an out-of-towner friend for early cooked breakfast at Balthazar. I find myself struggling over what to do with part of my full English breakfast.
ME: I'm don't want the bacon and sausage. If I order it on the side, will you eat it?
FRIEND: Sure, I'll nibble at it.
ME: Okay, but will you really? Because otherwise I won't get it.
WAITER: I can just bring it to you on the side.
I'm a little embarrassed to actually articulate why I don't want to get the bacon and sausage -- I don't want to explain my project. I wonder what the waiter thinks, if he thinks I'm just being picky because I don't want the foods to touch each other. I also wonder how often he gets requests to omit part of a platter.
Of course the bacon and sausage come, on the side, and my friend, as promised, nibbles on a slice of bacon and a link of sausage. The waiter clears the rest of the untouched meat away, and it doesn't even occur to me until later that I could have taken it for lunch or dinner. I'm so used to leaving food on the plate that asking for a to go container doesn't even cross my mind -- because it's too inconvenient to shlep around, because I don't really do leftovers, because the food wasn't that interesting to begin with.
I also leave a very sad "fried" plum tomato with no flavor, a wan, sad little thing that kissed a hot pan. It's a lot easier to eat all your food when you're in control of how it's cooked and served.
Side note: Why is the brewed coffee at Balthazar so terribly acidic? Blech. Does that work well for cafe au lait? Also, in case you were wondering, Balthazar's breakfast beans are not close enough to canned Heinz Baked Beans for my taste. I forgot how much I lurve fried bread, though.
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Linky linky:
Three Ways to Cut Your Food Bill on the Motley Fool -- mostly common sense, but some interesting Brit stats in there:
One shopping list, one meal from scratch, five leftover variations. Nice idea, but I'm skurred of oatmeal herrings.
The scoop on the Bagel Scoop (Grub Street)
This is no new trend. Ladies of a certain wrist circumference have been asking for scooped bagels for as long as I've been in NYC. I've certainly done it a few times -- mostly because I don't want to eat a whole bagel. Let's be frank, though, those doughy innards are just giving us doughy innards. Who needs that many straight-to-your-ass simple carbs in the morning, all lubed up with fatty cream cheese? I save my bagel consumption for the rare occasion when I've got a little smoked fish from Russ and Daughters on hand. Bagels really ought to just be a lot smaller; I could totally go for Smitten Kitchen's mini-bagels with a little cup of whitefish salad and egg salad.
ME: I'm don't want the bacon and sausage. If I order it on the side, will you eat it?
FRIEND: Sure, I'll nibble at it.
ME: Okay, but will you really? Because otherwise I won't get it.
WAITER: I can just bring it to you on the side.
I'm a little embarrassed to actually articulate why I don't want to get the bacon and sausage -- I don't want to explain my project. I wonder what the waiter thinks, if he thinks I'm just being picky because I don't want the foods to touch each other. I also wonder how often he gets requests to omit part of a platter.
Of course the bacon and sausage come, on the side, and my friend, as promised, nibbles on a slice of bacon and a link of sausage. The waiter clears the rest of the untouched meat away, and it doesn't even occur to me until later that I could have taken it for lunch or dinner. I'm so used to leaving food on the plate that asking for a to go container doesn't even cross my mind -- because it's too inconvenient to shlep around, because I don't really do leftovers, because the food wasn't that interesting to begin with.
I also leave a very sad "fried" plum tomato with no flavor, a wan, sad little thing that kissed a hot pan. It's a lot easier to eat all your food when you're in control of how it's cooked and served.
Side note: Why is the brewed coffee at Balthazar so terribly acidic? Blech. Does that work well for cafe au lait? Also, in case you were wondering, Balthazar's breakfast beans are not close enough to canned Heinz Baked Beans for my taste. I forgot how much I lurve fried bread, though.
----
Linky linky:
Three Ways to Cut Your Food Bill on the Motley Fool -- mostly common sense, but some interesting Brit stats in there:
"These days, no one can escape noticing the steep rises we're all paying for basic foodstuffs. According to the Daily Mail's cost of living index, a basket of basic foods that cost £41.34 in May 2007 costs £49.24 now -- a rise of 19.1%. Ouch! Butter has risen by 60%, bread by 20%, cheese by 25%, and rice by 60%, And, of course, all those other household bills haven't been standing still, either."The Kitchen Revolution:
One shopping list, one meal from scratch, five leftover variations. Nice idea, but I'm skurred of oatmeal herrings.
The scoop on the Bagel Scoop (Grub Street)
This is no new trend. Ladies of a certain wrist circumference have been asking for scooped bagels for as long as I've been in NYC. I've certainly done it a few times -- mostly because I don't want to eat a whole bagel. Let's be frank, though, those doughy innards are just giving us doughy innards. Who needs that many straight-to-your-ass simple carbs in the morning, all lubed up with fatty cream cheese? I save my bagel consumption for the rare occasion when I've got a little smoked fish from Russ and Daughters on hand. Bagels really ought to just be a lot smaller; I could totally go for Smitten Kitchen's mini-bagels with a little cup of whitefish salad and egg salad.
We were JUST discussing that very Grub Street entry this morning, when I said that if they just made bagels at the ideal size (3 ounces--like mine!), we wouldn't have these problems. But everyone's got to super-size it... Btw, did you see that article a couple years ago in the NYT Dining Section about how much our bagel size has grown in the last fifty years?
Whoops--that last comment was from me, but I'm on my FIL's computer!
Hi Deb!
Ah yes! By Serious Eats' own Ed Levine: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E1D7103EF932A05751C1A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
My introduction to the bagel was Noah's Bagels in Northern California. I ate blueberry bagels. With strawberry cream cheese. Or Asiago bagels. With sun dried tomato cream cheese.
Forgive me, I was young, I didn't know any better!
They were like donut-shaped muffins covered by a pleathery skin. I was told that the shmear was made by whipping the cream cheese with seltzer.