Tea and oranges from China
If you're an artist who can hire Christopher Isherwood to write your screenplay and engage Jeanne Moreau to play the part of the leading lady in the story, you can imagine a woman embarked upon a lifelong quest to recover a moment of fleeting love. In that case you would produce a movie like the Sailor From Gibraltar.
But if you're condemned to a more mundane existence and Australian, then you may confine your lifelong search to finding the perfect breakfast. The Breakfast Blog is one of those oddities on the Internet. It's been around since January of 2005 and chronicles the never ending efforts of Jamie Wodetzki to find the One True Breakfast.
Every one of his articles is accompanied by food photography. And his single minded pursuit has earned Jamie the title of being a breakfast expert. Here's Wodetzki being interviewed on TV.
The Sailor from Gibraltar was about things we reach for, but sometimes never attain. The great benefit of searching for the perfect breakfast, as opposed to looking for a sailor in all the ports of the world, is that in our search we become the sailor.
The Belmont Club is supported largely by donations from its readers.
posted by wretchardthecat at 4/22/2008 11:27:00 PM
8 Comments:
Joy for many of you but blogging ennui has set in here, along with the desire to actually do something a bit more active.
See ya 'round.
I figure the time I've spent blogging over the last three or four years I could probably have gone through law school and now be really unhappy.
Habu
Best of luck to you.
The Belmont Club is pretty good.
But the Breakfast Club? Now that's a blog I can really use.
"Did you say . . . bubble and squeek?"
Sincerely,
Mr. Toad
Toad Hall
The Willows
Around these parts there's the phenomenon of the "all-day breakfast", which is strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms. What it basically means is that the breakfast menu is always available.
But back in the old days I had some interesting first meals of the day. For example, there's the village market breakfast, which you eat in a deafening din, one hand busy shooing off flies and fending off stray dogs. There's the breakfast you get after spending a night on the sidewalk sleeping on old newspapers. You'd go and buy two or three hot rolls from the bakery, poke a hole in them with your finger and push in a slice of cheap margarine which you'd buy by the pat and wash it down with a cup of sweetened instant coffee served in a jar.
One dish that was a feature of a driver's roadside cafe was surprisingly good and I'll share the recipe with readers.
Chop one small onion and a clove of garlic finely. Sweat the onions and the garlic in a pan with a little oil until they are transparent. Drop in the contents of a can of sardines in tomato sauce and season to taste.
Then sprinkle the juice of lemon and soy sauce on the sauteed sardines. Remove the mixture from the pan and serve on a plate. Accompany the dish with sweet roles and butter. Knock back with coffee.
Hey- breakfast is the most important meal of the day! But there are breakfast people, and non-breakfast people, and he non-breakfast people wouldn't understand.
It seems from a brief glance he only features restaurants and only the food, but there is so much more to breakfast than the food. Sticking with breakfast in diners, you ideally get a comfortable booth with room to spread out your paper, good lighting, and plenty of refills.
I'll recommend the Omelette Parlor in Costa Mesa, CA which has cramped tables unsuitable for paper reading, but has good waffles and lots of hot waitresses. Hot waitresses really aren't part of the breakfast experience though. But still it's a nice bonus.
My best breakfast was a cup of coffee and a doughnut. You hold your hands over the coffee to absorb the warmth and pour in as much cream and sugar as you can get away with. Calories count.
I'm more of a dinner man and one of my favorite meals is Pancit. When I was in the Navy some of the Phllipino wives would being these huge trays of pancit and lumpia to potlucks. Lumpia are good but the pancit was heaven. I've since found many recipes for pancit and have become quite an accomplished cook myself, but have never been able to replicate one of those pans of noodles I remember.
Perhaps Orson Wells would have a thing or two to say to me as well? :)
When I was in Basra with the Brits, the breakfasts' were more in line with powdered eggs, stewed tomatoes and awful sausages. Still, when getting teady to head outside the wire, a bowl of boiled mushrooms and beans with a hot cup of instant coffee was surprisingly good.
Post a Comment
<< Home