bittersweet-chocolate bar.
Mushy rice has colonized Eurasia and spread to Africa and Spain. Wild strains exist on every continent except Antarctica. The breakfast of the Chinese farmer usually revolves around leftover rice congee or noodles. I love rice slightly burnt brown in the pot, soaked overnight in a weak chicken broth and eaten, warmed up, with soy sauce in the morning. The same for the gooey noodles. The Japanese sometimes top their breakfast rice with green onions, salmon, ginger-pickled fruit, or roe, flavouring it with chicken stock or miso, as I do. They call this okayu.
Soybean milk-soup. Turnip cakes. Century eggs. Parma ham. Injera (a flatbread). Steamed buns stuffed with sweet red beans. I’ve made tofu French toast for vegan friends. Fermented soybeans. The halva of Pakistan—a sweet made from semolina. Alloo cholay —a spicy chickpea and potato curry with nan bread. Garlic fried rice. Pork tocino (caramelized). Marmalade, fried green tomatoes, waffles, pancakes (flour or potato). Cooked sugar-beet spread. Nut butters. Muesli. Granola. Thousands upon thousands of jams and jellies. Our hunger for diversity is as great as our hunger.
Knowing all this, I am almost embarrassed to admit that Sharon and I often succumb to a simple Western-style breakfast. I try to make my own bacon and have a smoker for that purpose. The same with bread. There’s nothing like home-baked whole wheat or rye bread, still warm, with butter and handmade jams. Throw in some spiced Yukon Gold potatoes and tomatoes and soft-boiled eggs, along with the home-smoked bacon, and we’re in heaven. Sharon eats earlier than I do, yet we still manage to meet for a quick sit-down breakfast a few days a week. Companionship is a fine spice.
Every second year I make marmalade, but the making of marmalade has become such a lost art that Seville oranges appear at our local market for only a few days. You need a sixth sense to know when they have arrived, so you can beat the last marmalade fanatics to the oranges. One year Sharon stumbled upon them and decided to make her own marmalade because mine was always too lumpy and dark. Hers was light and runny, which horrified me, so I rushed out and managed to rustle up the last scungy oranges. Naturally mine came out even darker and lumpier and more unspreadable than usual. So now we have Mama and Papa Bear marmalades, and in truth, the best would be the combination of the two. Still, we aren’t stuck with the flavoured sugar-water that passes for marmalade these days.
I KEEP RETURNING TO the egg. Maybe because it’s so central to my North American diet. It’s my local food, and the other breakfasts are merely an exhibition of my need for exotica. With the egg, I have undergone a lifetime quest for its use in every meal. Since I was a child and had six hens in the backyard, I’ve studied the behaviour and breeds of the chicken and still attempt different methods for growing a proper egg. How do we address the egg? Over thousands of years humanity has learned to put hard-boiled eggs in curry, fry up chicks half grown, or whip whites into desserts. Oh, the banana cream pie with its lightly browned meringue! Egg-drop soup. Cakes. Eggs scrambled with truffles. Egg breads. Scotch eggs. The egg is a paintbrush used to illustrate the enormous range of the human diet. Like tofu, it has the ability to absorb the recipes it’s cooked with, and unlike tofu, it is coveted in almost every culture.
Cooking an egg is a way we judge ourselves. We say of a poor cook, “He doesn’t know how to boil an egg!” Although boiling an egg is an art and a trial, especially when you have eggs of such diverse density, shape, and size as today’s varieties. Consider the histrionic excesses that people will put into boiling a “just right” soft-boiled egg—a near-fetish object in Western society. It’s a lifelong trial for Sharon, who has a knack for cooking every variation except soft-boiled. I usually cook a
Mushy rice has colonized Eurasia and spread to Africa and Spain. Wild strains exist on every continent except Antarctica. The breakfast of the Chinese farmer usually revolves around leftover rice congee or noodles. I love rice slightly burnt brown in the pot, soaked overnight in a weak chicken broth and eaten, warmed up, with soy sauce in the morning. The same for the gooey noodles. The Japanese sometimes top their breakfast rice with green onions, salmon, ginger-pickled fruit, or roe, flavouring it with chicken stock or miso, as I do. They call this okayu.
Soybean milk-soup. Turnip cakes. Century eggs. Parma ham. Injera (a flatbread). Steamed buns stuffed with sweet red beans. I’ve made tofu French toast for vegan friends. Fermented soybeans. The halva of Pakistan—a sweet made from semolina. Alloo cholay —a spicy chickpea and potato curry with nan bread. Garlic fried rice. Pork tocino (caramelized). Marmalade, fried green tomatoes, waffles, pancakes (flour or potato). Cooked sugar-beet spread. Nut butters. Muesli. Granola. Thousands upon thousands of jams and jellies. Our hunger for diversity is as great as our hunger.
Knowing all this, I am almost embarrassed to admit that Sharon and I often succumb to a simple Western-style breakfast. I try to make my own bacon and have a smoker for that purpose. The same with bread. There’s nothing like home-baked whole wheat or rye bread, still warm, with butter and handmade jams. Throw in some spiced Yukon Gold potatoes and tomatoes and soft-boiled eggs, along with the home-smoked bacon, and we’re in heaven. Sharon eats earlier than I do, yet we still manage to meet for a quick sit-down breakfast a few days a week. Companionship is a fine spice.
Every second year I make marmalade, but the making of marmalade has become such a lost art that Seville oranges appear at our local market for only a few days. You need a sixth sense to know when they have arrived, so you can beat the last marmalade fanatics to the oranges. One year Sharon stumbled upon them and decided to make her own marmalade because mine was always too lumpy and dark. Hers was light and runny, which horrified me, so I rushed out and managed to rustle up the last scungy oranges. Naturally mine came out even darker and lumpier and more unspreadable than usual. So now we have Mama and Papa Bear marmalades, and in truth, the best would be the combination of the two. Still, we aren’t stuck with the flavoured sugar-water that passes for marmalade these days.
I KEEP RETURNING TO the egg. Maybe because it’s so central to my North American diet. It’s my local food, and the other breakfasts are merely an exhibition of my need for exotica. With the egg, I have undergone a lifetime quest for its use in every meal. Since I was a child and had six hens in the backyard, I’ve studied the behaviour and breeds of the chicken and still attempt different methods for growing a proper egg. How do we address the egg? Over thousands of years humanity has learned to put hard-boiled eggs in curry, fry up chicks half grown, or whip whites into desserts. Oh, the banana cream pie with its lightly browned meringue! Egg-drop soup. Cakes. Eggs scrambled with truffles. Egg breads. Scotch eggs. The egg is a paintbrush used to illustrate the enormous range of the human diet. Like tofu, it has the ability to absorb the recipes it’s cooked with, and unlike tofu, it is coveted in almost every culture.
Cooking an egg is a way we judge ourselves. We say of a poor cook, “He doesn’t know how to boil an egg!” Although boiling an egg is an art and a trial, especially when you have eggs of such diverse density, shape, and size as today’s varieties. Consider the histrionic excesses that people will put into boiling a “just right” soft-boiled egg—a near-fetish object in Western society. It’s a lifelong trial for Sharon, who has a knack for cooking every variation except soft-boiled. I usually cook a
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