Navel grazing

Let's get serious for a moment and talk about a subject near and dear to my heart: food. Now, on a scale ranging from Kobe Beef And Quail Egg Connoisseur to Ketchup-stained Fried Food Schlub, I'm quite solidly in the middle. a) I'm more intrigued than horrified by KFC's Double Down (though I hear it's disappointing even for the non-gourmand). b) Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits is one of my favorite eating establishments, ranking easily among 400-dollar dinners at top urban eateries. c) I've been known to consider the following as meals in themselves: chunky peanut butter from the jar; an entire papaya, seeds and all; a can of refried beans. But, I also appreciate delicacies generally reserved either for the abjectly starving or the finer palates of the gustatory bourgeoisie: organ meats, fish eggs, mollusks.

That's why I was equal parts titillated and chagrined to read this, a week-long food diary by the New York Times' new food critic, Sam Sifton. Titillated, because the eye-popping calorie counts and daily drink totals redeem my own tendency toward hedonistic overconsumption. Three beers and a tumbler of bourbon? In the SSB household, we call that a Tuesday! Chagrined, because the people who commented on the entry were irascibly self-righteous. How can you eat like this? How can you drink so much? Don't you know that if you don't eat more vegetables/eat less bread/cut out alcohol and coffee and dairy and sugar... you'll DIE?!? Of all the myopic idiocy that happens online, it's incredible to find such a stupefying sense of moral outrage applied to the fucking food diary of a fucking food critic.

Since I'm not a professional eater, I won't bore all two of my readers with a similar project, a week's worth of food, calorie, and exercise totals (let's just say that, calorie-wise, I'm probably not all that far below Sam, scaled to relative size and gender). But I will bore you with the highlights of my typical daily meals, starting with my favorite and most important meal of the day: breakfast!

I love breakfast. If left to my own devices, I tend to wake up ridiculously early, and, generally, the thought of breakfast is what does it -- both because I have a fairly humming metabolism and tend to wake up starving, and because I have a hopeless caffeine addiction and always wake up NEEDING coffee. I love breakfasts out -- decadent eggy dishes, bagels and smoked fish, sides of sausage, bacon, homefries, and biscuits. I also love unconventional breakfast choices, like toast smeared with hummus, or goat cheese, or mashed avocado. But lately, I've settled on a pretty good, cheap, and easy basic breakfast formula. It is as follows:

Coffee

For the past four years, I've been making my morning cup of joe in one of these babies:



The technical term is "cezve" (pronounced "jez-vuh") and in the former Soviet Union, this is still how most people make their coffee. You dump in a few tablespoons of grounds, cold water, and maybe some sugar, put it right over the flame of a gas stove (electric works, too), and let it go till it boils (my little one-cup cezve takes exactly two and a half minutes). Take it off the stove, throw a tablespoon of cold water over the top to bring the grounds down, let it sit for a few minutes, and presto -- Turkish coffee. I'm no coffee snob, but I have no idea why this hasn't caught on yet in the States over the stupid, wasteful dripper thing. I've had French press coffee, so beloved of the hipster coffee-teriate these days, and it doesn't really taste any better. If it's the presence of grounds in your cup (horrors!) that bothers you, you can always strain it through a tea sieve before serving. Plus, cleaning a French press looks complicated. To clean a cezve takes ten seconds at the most: all you do is dump out the sedimentary grounds and rinse it under the tap. You don't even need to scrub. Hot new elite coffee thing in five...

Oatmeal with Parmesan

I got the idea for this somewhat unorthodox creation from cheese grits, which are among my favorite Southern foods, as well as cheesy polenta, a staple of the nouveau highbrow Southern cooking trend. If you can put cheese in other grains with such overwhelming success, I reasoned, then why not put it in oatmeal, that homely healthy breakfast staple? Don't get me wrong; I love oatmeal in all its forms. It's another one of those things I grew up with in the former USSR (hrm, pattern...): every morning, my dad would fix me a big bowl of oatmeal and butter, and every morning I'd burn my mouth because I couldn't wait till it cooled to dig in (hrm, another pattern...). Then, when we moved to the States, we discovered the relative benefits of Quaker Instant Microwaveable Oatmeal packets. Pros: It takes only a few minutes and one dish to make, and it's got a ton of sugar and weird freeze-dried fruit -- the cornerstone of any American teen diet. Cons: By ten o'clock, you're starving again. Having returned to the more wholesome "old fashioned" Quaker Oats in college, I could still never quite satisfy some inherent craving for a more rib-sticking bowl... until one day, midway through 3-minute microwave spin cycle, I threw in a heaping spoonful of ground Parmesan, stirred, and popped it back in the oven. The result was better than buttered oatmeal, or oatmeal cooked in milk or cream. It was creamy, cheesy, savory, and absolutely delicious. To this day, it's my go-to breakfast. I've experimented with various cheeses -- everything from lowfat cheddar (gross) to crumbled feta (doesn't melt right), but Parmesan is far and away the best. This dish will run you about 200 calories with two tablespoons of parm and your regular half-cup oatmeal serving size. You'll also get some protein, calcium, and possible weird looks from your significant other. Ignore. Enjoy.

Apple

Quite simply the single greatest fruit on the planet. Cheap, portable, filling, delicious. Living in places like Seattle, Ithaca, and Boston, I've been continually spoiled by excellent seasonal apple variety. I tend to go for Cortlands, Empires, Macs, and Honeycrips. Braeburns and Galas are okay, too. I get into Granny Smith moods sometimes, but I have terrible teeth and cringe when I sense the acidity eating away at my already paper-thin enamel. I have to be pretty desperate to eat a Red Delicious, but I'll still do it over no apple at all. Unless I'm in a very public place, I eat them whole -- skin, core, seeds, and all -- which means that anyone I've ever loved has had to put up with finding lone, disembodied apple stems strewn about their floors, desks, beds. Apples! The best!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my baseline breakfast.* Simple, filling, nutritious, and just a touch decadent. That's how I roll.

Tune in next time for Lunch and Dinner!

*I say baseline because it's rarely just that for the entire morning. I'm partial to crack-of-dawn five-mile runs, which means that around 9 or 10 o'clock, I need a caloric supplement to make it to noon -- some yogurt or cottage cheese right out of the tub, a spoonful of peanut butter, a (cough) blueberry cake donut from Dunkin Donuts (my favorite!). I am a hundred and twenty pounds of lean, mean eating machine.