Thursday, February 26, 2009

I Don’t Know if I’m Allowed to Do This, But . . .

I highly recommend becoming Facebook friends with Avrom Schwartz. There’s more consistently funny humor there than you will find on many a website. His status updates are comic examples of absurd minimalist literature, and his recent note, “Ten Things I’m Searching For. Ten Things I’m Fleeing,” is a funny, poignant, honest, and deceptive catalog.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Chevre for Breakfast

Sometimes it only takes one ingredient to turn an ordinary dish into something extraordinary. This week that ingredient was chevre. After work on Monday, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up four items. Whether it was because I was hungry or because I had a serious lack of supplies at home, I quickly exchanged my basket for a cart, and loaded up for the week. One of my first unplanned purchases was a little package of the tangy goat cheese. Even before I got to the deli counter to pick up the week’s rosemary ham (a staple of R’s Wednesday lunches), there was a woman offering samples of a local chevre produced by Stickney Hill Dairy Farms. By chance, the cracker I tried was topped with a peppercorn chevre. It tasted good, so I picked up a small package of the stuff with no plan for how I would use it.

The next morning, I was contemplating a homemade egg McMuffin, but I was low on cheddar, which I needed to save for R’s lunch and the possible emergency quesadilla if W didn’t want whatever I was serving that evening. Then I spied the chevre. It was a more than perfect substitute. It brought the breakfast sandwich to life. In fact, I treated myself to the same breakfast on Wednesday morning as well.

This morning brought a slight but no less satisfying variation to the eggs and chevre breakfast. I sautéed a shallot, scrambled a couple eggs, then added chevre, sun-dried tomatoes, and leftover salmon. Served with a couple slices of ciabatta toast, it was a wonderful way to start the weekend. You could do worse at any number of restaurants.