Breakfast for dinner

Workout day 51 (lunch-time walk); @postaday 32, #postaday2011

Late blog! Trying to get better! The whole gang is coughing!

Breakfast for dinner. Sounds comforting, doesn’t it? It takes so little to make breakfast for dinner, yet it really seems to please the crowd. I line a cold skillet with bacon and let it cook up slowly, filling the air with its salty and smoky scent. After I drain it, I put it in a warm oven so no one has cold bacon. I then prep the toast, which also goes into the oven.

When it is time, I crack two large eggs per person into a small stainless steel bowl, add a splash of water, and whisked them into a lemony yellow sunshiny froth, air bubbles popping on the top. In the hot skillet of bubbling butter foaming with anticipation, I slide the eggs.

I’ve been doing this for years. In fact, I learned the best way to make eggs while working at the Delran, N.J., McDonald’s in the late 1970s. You give the eggs a minute to set, then you stir along the outside rim, creating an egg wave that gathers more setting egg in front of it.  As the slick, gelatinous mass moves along the pan, everything in its way becomes part of the soft and creamy skillet mountain range, with pockets of glossy, shimmering, yellow fjords and canyons and crevices for blizzards of shredded cheese, melted amidst flecks of freshly cracked pepper and diamonds of Hawaiian salt.

Sometimes my mind wanders when I cook. I think about the people who taught me how to make the dish that is before me, the circumstances of when I first tasted it, and how it might have evolved since I first got the recipe.

Sometimes meals are a disaster. Sometimes something as simple as a pot of chicken noodle soup or scrambled eggs has everyone smiling all over.

Feeding my family feeds something inside of me.