Sometimes Ease trumps Creativity

Sometimes a full meal takes too long

Four days a week, Monday through Thursday, Jake and I go to the gym at 9 a.m. to lift weights. We have been doing it long enough now that it has become habit. The day doesn’t quite feel right if I miss a day. When I get back at 10 a.m. I generally check the news and some other RSS feeds while eating breakfast and then take a shower.

The past few weeks I have been eating instant oatmeal almost every morning. It’s fairly quick and tasty, but no matter what you add to something like oatmeal it’s going to get boring after a while. Today instead of a bowl of cereal or some oatmeal I had a single large orange. Citrus fruits are some of my personal favorites. I have a bag of maybe 8 oranges in my refrigerator right now, and I am certain that I will eat all of them before they go bad. The bananas, however, will be going to some banana bread later tonight.

Anyway, there is a benefit to keeping breakfast simple. When I make oatmeal I have to keep an eye on how much of anything I’m using and how long it goes in the microwave. Considering I bake bread and make dishes that have to stew for hours, you would think that a few minutes of work every day would not bother me. I think it’s the repetition. I just wanted something different. Something easier. Fruit is perfect.

Now, I am certain that there are plenty of people out there who do not believe that oranges are easy. They are probably the same people who scape off all of the pith. (The white stuff.) The pith is good for you, stop doing that. It has fiber. Anyway, a good sized fruit such as an apple or an orange is plenty filling. I can go until lunch easy with an orange.

Granted, there are easier fruits to deal with. Bananas and apples are about as easy as it gets when it comes to fruit. Incidentally, I am also opposed to peeling the skin off of apples, pesticides be damned. Wash them. If I had remembered to buy any, this post would probably be about grapefruit. Another of my personal favorite breakfast fruits.

I will still be eating oatmeal and cereal most days, but sometimes a good piece of fruit is plenty.

Tags: Breakfast, College, Food, Personal, Time

Gallery Update: Goetta Hobo sandwich

Great name, right? Anyway, if you are like me and from Cincinnati, OH, which I bet many of you are not, then you probably know what goetta is. If not you are seriously missing out. Goetta is a German peasant  dish that apparently doesn’t really exist outside of Cincinnati anywhere. I asked people about it in Munich, Germany and they looked at me like I was crazy.

Well, as it turns out, goetta is about the best breakfast meat out there. Imagine sausage with oats. It has a very distinctive flavor and is fairly filling. Egg in the (a) basket, more entertainingly known as Hobo Toast, is a little more widely known than goetta. It is also shockingly easy to make, so long as you understand how you like your eggs and how to get them that way. Trial and error is probably the best way to go about this, but a knife to stab with and low heat will work just as well. It’s hard to cook a yolk once it’s running all over your plate (or chin).

The hobo toast is probably nothing new to most of you. I imagine in fact that the goetta though is a wholly new concept. Maybe a scary one. I personally think that ground, seasoned meat and oats sounds wonderful. I have also had the benefit of actually eating it. If it hasn’t been made abundantly clear yet, I am not a picky eater.

I also feel obligated to mention that this is not exactly a light sandwich in terms of grease or how filling it is. Goetta and eggs are very filling. To be honest, making a sandwich out of this dish is really just an attempt to make it more portable. As you can see by the yolk all over my plate, I more or less failed. Ah well. The point of cooking for yourself is to make something that is tasty.

When you’re cooking for guests or for customers, then maybe it is time to learn how to make things look good. Cooking for your friends in college does not count as a situation that would require extremely pretty food, by the way. Just a reminder for the people I regularly cook for.

I digress. If you are going to venture into the world of hobo sandwiches, please remember to cook your goetta all the way through and not to burn the egg. A burnt egg is a terrible waste of breakfast.

P.s.: I justified all of the updates, because I think I like them better that way. Thoughts? concerns?

Tags: Breakfast, Food, Gallery

Gallery Update: French Toast

Another gallery update, as well as a few fairly substantial changes to how the site operates. The food page is now more of a gallery hub. That may change in the future, but for now this is how things are going to be.

I actually like the way that the galleries are working. I have to rework the coding for the actual food page a bit though. Right now it’s just basic tables. A click on the picture will take you to a nice thumbnail gallery of the food as well as the recipe used to create it. Feel free to use and abuse that. If you click on any of the thumbnail pictures a sort of slideshow will pop up. If you click away it will disappear.

For now the only foods in the gallery are the red beans and rice, french toast and focaccia bread pizza. The actual focaccia bread gallery page (and recipe) aren’t quite finished yet. You can expect that to be done by the end of the week, if not sooner.

Please do let me know what you think of how I have things set up. Just because I like it doesn’t make it any good. If the site is hard to navigate or doesn’t display properly on one particular browser, then I have not done my job well enough. For the record, I have tested the site in firefox and seen it in Safari and IE. The colors appear to be off in Safari and the font sizes in IE. Otherwise I have not come across any issues yet.

Tags: Breakfast, Food, Gallery

College food: Instant oatmeal

No one in my family eats oatmeal. Not even my mother who - much to the annoyance of my younger brother - regularly eats vegetarian pitas. In fact, I am fairly certain that until very recently I have never eaten oatmeal either. As it turns out it looks pretty gross.

Well, late last quarter I decided that I was going to try and hopefully enjoy oatmeal, come hell or profound disgust. Until just today each bowl of oatmeal was a battle. I have added vanilla, bananas, apples and any number of spices. I have used different amounts of milk or water as well. In the end I would find myself sitting in front of a bowl of what appeared to be very soggy cereal. Today after going to workout with my friend Jake I decided to give my lonely box of oatmeal one more try.

I do believe that I have finally come up with a way to make oatmeal that I can enjoy. In fact, the bowl in front of me is currently empty. Were I not pressed for time, I would consider making myself another. Maybe adding banana. Instead of actually listening to the directions on the box I decided to take the manly approach. I added a shot of maple syrup and cinnamon with just a little bit of vanilla extract to the oatmeal. Instead if measuring out 2/3 c milk like the box claims I added just enough to be seen around the sides of the oatmeal and left the bowl in the microwave for 1:30. What I got, as you can see above, was more of a ball of sticky goop than a cereal like I have in the past. Instead of a thin cereal I produced a dense mash.

More importantly, it was cheaper and more filling than a bowl of sugar cereal. Add to that the fact that it took me two minutes to make and we have something here. Feeding myself on my own money in college has been an interesting experience. I have a taste for good food, but not spending money. That means that any time I can come up with a cheap, decent meal I am very pleased. I expect that my morning routine will be including oatmeal for…as long as I still have milk.

It still looks pretty gross.

Tags: Breakfast, College, Food