Grits & Cookies

I briefly toyed with having a mushroom omelet for breakfast so I could title this, “Breakfast of Champignons,” but the truth is I’ve never made a mushroom omelet for breakfast. Occasionally I eat cereal for breakfast, but not very often so that ruled out “Cereal Killer.” And although I bought fresh fruit yesterday, I decided against “Fruit of the Loam” because the pears and bananas are still unripe. So I decided to skip the puns and just eat what I often eat on a Sunday morning — grits.

For those of you unfamiliar with grits, they are a form of coarse corn meal and a staple in the Southern United States. The best grits are stone-ground and are extraordinarily good. But they take an hour or so to cook, which is far beyond what I’m willing to invest in an ordinary breakfast. So, as a rule, if I’m having grits for breakfast I go with Quaker Instant Grits. This fits my Sunday morning routine well.

I typically sleep late on Sunday mornings as I did this morning. I woke up at 7:00, went back to sleep until 7:45, and then spent another luxurious 20 minutes drifting in and out of that wonderful half-dreaming state — dreams lit by morning sun filtering through the blinds — reserved for lazy Sundays when nothing more important than a little housekeeping is planned.

Rising, I pulled on my robe and headed downstairs where “Weekend Edition” from NPR was playing on the radio. Sweetthing, my cat, was waiting patiently for her breakfast and the coffee was hot and waiting for me to pour a cup.

I pulled open the blinds, letting bright sun shoot across the living room floor, and stepped out onto a frosty walk to get the paper. Sitting on the couch I took a big gulp of hot coffee (black, no sugar), lit a cigarette, and released the Sunday paper from it’s orange rubber bands.

Sweetthing stretches out in the sun pouring through the patio door as I divide my attention between the news in the paper and the news on the radio — pausing to play the puzzle game with Will Short. I finish my first cup of coffee and pour another, lighting a second cigarette. At 10:00 the radio shifted to music, “St. Paul Sunday.” Sweetthing has had to shift position once to stay in the sun and the sun is finally beginning to spill across my dining table. In 15 minutes it will be perfect for photographs. Another 10 and it will be gone.

I put some bacon in my cast iron skillet. The bacon is made by a local man everybody calls “JS.” JS makes great country ham but I think it’s his bacon and country sausage that are most deserving of acclaim. The bacon is deeply smoked and already half cooked from it’s two-week stint in the smokehouse. The sausage, coarser than any commercial product, is richly seasoned and manages to be comfortably familiar and strangely different in flavors too subtle to identify.

I pull out a block of Sweetwater Buttermilk Cheddar (made at a dairy south of here) and, when the bacon is done, I slip the bowl of instant grits and water into the microwave. A minute later the grits are ready. I add fresh butter made by an Amish collective down near Atlanta, salt and pepper, grated cheese, and crumbled bacon. And because I made cookies yesterday for IMBB and SHF, I added a couple of applesauce cookies to the plate. (More on them later.)

Aside from the cookies, this was a pretty typical Sunday breakfast and morning: News, coffee, music, cat, grits, bacon.

Technorati: Food | essay | meme | breakfast

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