Breakfast from Nothing
An egg, random peppers, leftover potatoes and what might be shallots
Two directives guide me when I make a meal:
Use what I have.
Don’t let anything go to waste.
While this isn’t possible every day, yesterday’s breakfast hit both square on. Here’s what I decided to work with (clockwise from top right):
Burned roasted sweet potatoes I made in the food truck that I didn’t want to waste.
Leftover fries that were nearly a week old.
Some homefries.
These might be shallots, pulled from the garden months ago.
Two peppers I had harvested from the garden. Are they hot and spicy? Didn’t know.
An egg.
Turns out those are shallots, the palest shallots I’ve ever seen. Most I see are purple-tinged. These were white white white. I sauteed those, added in the diced peppers. After a rough chop of the fries, I added in all the potatoes, a sprinkle of salt and a generous coating of cumin and … ack, no ground coriander on the shelf. The combo of cumin and ground coriander has been my favorite seasoning since Samin Nosrat mentioned it in her podcast Home Cooking. Who knew it was so good?! Samin knew, of course.
While that was going on, heating through until just-under piping hot, I cooked up an over-easy egg. By the way, these are more common in my house now that we purchased a ceramic pan. Those things are miracles. Get yourself one.
When breakfast was done, it looked something like this. Actually, no, it looked exactly like this.
Cooking like this reminds me of an episode of The Sopranos. The chef of Tony’s favorite restaurant has late-night visitors, right before closing—can’t remember exactly who it was. But they were hungry and Artie didn’t want to disappoint (or could he not disappoint? That might have been the case, given the types of characters that came through his restaurant).
There’s really not much left in the kitchen and pantry, at least from what had been on that night’s menu. Artie opens the fridge and sees the solution. Rabbit. Said rabbit had been a pest in Artie’s yard, so he had decided to take care of it, much like Tony takes care of his problems.
What’s for dinner? Well, there’s this rabbit.
Not everything has to be gourmet. Not everything has to be from a recipe. Your cooking will flourish when you let go of expectations, become creative in the kitchen and express your appreciation for whatever ends up on your plate.