Appetite of Champions

You know what’s so completely unfair and annoying? My appetite. Many people, when they are upset or terribly stressed, can’t eat. They lose weight in all sorts of graceful, stressful and sorrowful ways. At least they have something to show for the shitty time they are having, right? Me? Nope. I am just the opposite. I eat. I don’t know what it would take for me to lose my appetite. Not illness, not stress (hello, dissertation), not heartache (not to sound dramatic). Those things just make me eat more, and eat with abandon. So now, after all the dissertation-writing nonsense, not only do I have a dent in my couch and a corresponding flat spot on my butt, I also have some gym time ahead of me.

Lest you think that I was dying a slow death by Cheetos the whole time I was writing… well, I sort of was. But this death was punctuated by episodes of food bliss. Among those, my new favorite breakfast – a breakfast sandwich. My favorite is not just any breakfast sandwich. This is THE breakfast sandwich, prepared by the supervisor himself. It makes waking up worthwhile, even if it’s already 11AM when you are out of bed.

So here is what you do. Take some good sliced bread and toast it. Fry eggs (a one-egger sandwich for me, a two-egger for those with bigger appetites and/or hands big enough to hold the ginormo sandwich) to over-medium in olive oil. You want the yolks still runny, but starting to thicken just a little. Layer eggs on the bread with slices of cheese (I can’t force you to use smoked cheddar, but I can tell you it won’t be THE breakfast sandwich without it), basil leaves, some form of breakfast pig product, like sausage or bacon (although I think prosciutto is the way to go), and top it with the key to the sandwich, almost as important as the smoked cheddar (or more so, if you listen to the supervisor himself) - tomato slices. Longest sentence ever? Check.


Now that you have assembled the king of all breakfast sandwiches, you have to eat it. This process involves a ritual of its own. Here’s the thing, the yolk is still liquidy (do it, it’s awesome) and when you squeeze the sandwich or bite into it, the (hot) yolk breaks and runs all over your hands and the plate. That’s the best part. Here comes the ritual. The rules are: 1) you can’t put the sandwich down once you start (because it will be an even bigger mess than the one you have in your hands) and 2) you dip the entire sandwich into the pooled yolk on the plate. Don’t be a sissy like me and tear off a piece of the bread to dip into the yolk or the supervisor will scold you, like he did me. I was ashamed. And then I went to the gym.

Like Butter on Crack

My dissertation has been turned in! I can hardly believe it. It has been hanging over my head inconspicuously for seven years and aggressively for two months, and now it is done. The word relief doesn’t seem to do my present state justice.

I now have some time to describe my diet of the last two months. In a word: eww. Picture everything and anything that is not nailed down in one’s pantry or refrigerator. Picture those food stuffs consumed in no particular order or ritual, just for the sake of being consumed with the hope of keeping my meager attention span tuned to my work for just another little while longer. Yes, I have eaten everything in my house. I can’t say I enjoyed it because frankly, I can’t remember it. It was like sleep eating. One thing does stand out from this past month of bleary-eyed dissertation hell. It takes a bit of a story to explain fully, so here goes.

I ran away to the Tavern with the supervisor one evening to get a break from the soul-numbing dissertation writing and to get out of the house. Here is what I learned that evening – three drinks in one night are ok, but not if they are red wine, vodka on the rocks, and beer, in that order. That was not smart. It might also explain how we (ok, I) wound up picking up a stray French cook at the bar and bringing him home with the promise of good foie gras. I don’t know how it happened, so don’t ask, although it's fair to assume that it had something to do with my ill-advised booze trifecta.

That's whole duck liver, for the non-Francophiles. The ingredient list is brilliant - Foie, booze, salt and pepper. I don't know what else one needs for complete contentment.

If I ever get a tattoo, it will be of that little duck, somewhere private and personal. Because that's how I feel about foie gras.

And the foie gras? It has been teasing me from the back of my fridge with its yellow duck fat and crack cocaine-like addictive contents. I have had it stashed for over a year - my parents brought it back from Paris for me. So to make a long and boring story short, we brought the stray Frenchman home and had drunken foie gras at three in the morning. We huddled around my kitchen counter because the rest of my house was covered in an even layer of dirty mugs and papers papers papers, eating big chunks of foie on toasted bread with olives and salty roasted fingerling potatoes and cold beer. It was perfect, drunken, and decadent. The foie was unctuous and melty, supported by the crunch of the bread. Like a pale beige butter with a slightly animal quality to it. I could have easily finished the entire jar by myself. Luckily, I was too drunk to stay up long enough to accomplish that not-at-all-challenging feat.

Yes, I have been living in grad student dissertation squalor for the last month. It wasn't pretty. Didn't smell that great either.

And when all the foie is gone, the yellow duck fat will remain, to make for amazing meals of eggs and potatoes fried in duck fat. Browned mushrooms sauteed with duck fat and thyme. Toasted bread smeared with duck fat. Oh yes. Duck fat = crack.

Mmmmm... duck fat. Drool.

Chips and salsa after a long night out? I don’t think so.


I really hope I manage to con the Frenchman into cooking for me someday soon. He is suspiciously (perhaps, wisely) not replying to my emails...

I Can't Wait to Be Done

The list of things I want to do once I am done with this defense business is growing longer. I can't wait.

An update

Non-Mexican Breakfast Tacos

Ok, ok, so I am totally cheating. I think the vote for the last Choose Your Own Adventure post was evenly split between my grandmother’s spectacular blini and my own, somewhat less striking, breakfast tacos. Here’s the thing. I am painfully short on time these days. I will write about the tacos first because they are, well, tacos, and therefore easy. I will leave my grandmother’s blini to another day, which will hopefully be soon!

So. The breakfast tacos. The inspiration for these was part my newfound love of home made tortillas and part a brunch that Awesome Archna and I had at a wonderful Mexican place, Tu Y Yo. Archna ordered scrambled eggs with chorizo and they were wonderful. The sausage was ground up and mixed in with the eggs, coloring the whole business a burnt orange color (sigh, I am such a girl) and infusing the eggs with the oily chorizo loveliness.

I wanted desperately to make these eggs for one of my Battling Brunches with Maiya, which I have fallen so behind on (stupid thesis). I have long since stopped trying to wow her because that’s not really possible. This is after all, the woman who deep fried poached eggs in front of me. I wanted to make something that would taste simple and simply good. This turned out to be more challenging than I thought.

It appears that there are a few types of chorizo out and about – Mexican and Spanish/Portuguese. Mexican chorizo, like the stuff I had at Tu Y Yo, is sold raw, out of the casing, as basically a big pile of ground, spiced meat. The Spanish chorizo, on the other hand, is fully cooked and sold in links. I couldn’t find the Mexican stuff anywhere. I tried so hard. I even went to a butcher shop, but even they would only sell me the prepackaged, fully-cooked stuff.

With a heavy heart, I dragged my non-Mexican chorizo home to make faux Mexican breakfast tacos. The cooked chorizo tasted like a spicy kielbasa, which was really not the flavor I was shooting for, but beggars can’t be choosers. I fried chunks of the sausage in a little bit of olive oil till they became brown and crispy (oy yum. I could really just eat an entire plate of fried chorizo chunks). I then tossed in beaten eggs into the same pan, to scramble them in the chorizo oil. And uh, that was it. The end of the super un-complicated breakfast taco procedure.


The eggs were creamy and suffused with the chorizo oil, and when topped with fresh avocado and pico de gallo, and all wrapped up in a fluffy and slightly chewy flour tortilla, they were pure, non-Mexican taco breakfast beauty. I was happy with them, if not awed by their complexity. Sometimes that’s ok too.