Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Sit-down breakfast

Molly was real nice to me the other day and got me the Muffuletta sandwich from Pullardi's, which is a sandwich that is extremely extravagant. I think it is over twenty dollars and feeds like eleven people, and normally I would have talked her out of it and just had us get the steamed ham sandwich to share, but she was completely in charge and I went with the program. She seemed to like being in charge and it was interesting to see where she took things.

Anyhow since she did this nice thing for me I naturally felt like I had to reciprocate so as not to appear unappreciative. I decided that I would cook a sit-down breakfast for us, using the fancy kitchen at Ray's. I think a sit-down breakfast is a pretty classy event, as in the past breakfast used to be a much bigger deal than it is now (a man presses a whole Krispy-Kreme into his mouth as he falls into his lowest-trim-level Pontiac Grand Am and drives to work at Edward T Jones Investments, where he will have instant coffee in the microwave).

I think a classy breakfast of the old school has poached eggs, Hollandaise sauce in a silver gravy boat with a ladle, sausages, bacon, crumpets, English muffins, home fries, French toast, chopped fruits, and tea with milk. I got up around four AM to get all the stuff ready and transfer it to these nice silver chafing dishes Ray had out in the garage cupboards.

Dang but do you even know how hard it is to poach an egg. I thought it would be easy but the damn eggs would just plop into the water and expand over the whole pan, making like an egg handkerchief. About thirty eggs later I had two that looked reasonable, so I set those aside just as Molly showed up with a pretty bad hangover (she works at The Smoke now and I guess she stayed up doing Jagermeister shots with her workmate Kelly after they closed).

She said she needed to go lie down and went to the living room to nap while I finished the rest of breakfast. Her breath smelled pretty bad, and she hadn't changed clothes, so maybe she didn't even go home. Anyhow, I got the French toast nice and crisp the way I like it, and cooked up a nasty-fine batch of my well-known home fries, and browned the meats all nice. After forty-five minutes Molly was still passed out, though, and she had dumped out this vase to use as a puke bucket, so I started to formulate Plan B. I did not want all the good food to go waste, so I set up a pretty nice tray to bring up to Ray.

I knew that he would not budge from sleep unless I made him a fogcutter of some type, so I set that on the tray and brought it on up. He wasn't in his bed, so I had to look around a bit and found him buried in his walk-in closet in this huge pile of all-Fila track suits. You never can tell what exactly he was thinking the night before when he decided where he felt most comfortable going to sleep.

Long story short, nobody ate any of the food I cooked except me, and it all cost like forty-five dollars, so on that day I had literally thrown away forty-five dollars before breakfast. I sat in the living room with Molly until she was able to get up again, and read old copies of People, which is about the brightest magazine Ray gets.