Bananas Foster French Toast. To Start.

"We have salmon, lettuce, simple syrup, beer, key lime cheesecake, a tri-tip, and...erm...butter." Pause. Blink. "Or would you rather go out?" After the usual uncertainty of what to eat on a weekend morning, we headed to Fig Tree Cafe, a local joint with a typical Southern California menu: omelettes, Benedict variations, hash, French toast, burritos and tacos, fresh fruit and salads, plus the sort of sugar-and-spice-lacquered bacon one finds on brunch menus these days. At Fig Tree, it's called Man Candy. Sure. Why not? Bring on the man candy — but that's not why I was there.

Appetizer (n): what you eat before you eat so you'll be more hungry

I was there for the French Toast: four thick slices of bread, batter-dipped, skillet-fried, and dolled up bananas Foster style with sautéed banana slices, brown sugar, and rum. When I asked our waiter to bring a plate of that, he nodded agreeably and asked "To start?"

Yes. To start.

After that, I'd like three pork chops, a pitcher of orange juice, a five-egg Denver omelette, a bowl of yogurt with honey and granola, a mango and arugula salad (check; make that two), two breakfast burritos, an English muffin with butter and marmalade, one of those crab cakes with avocado slices, some sausage, a chicken sandwich, six shrimp tacos, an order of breakfast sushi, and a slice of meatloaf. Oysters if they're good today. And biscuits. Do you have biscuits?

Oh, and don't forget the man candy. I'll take, like, a pound.

French toast to start. Pfft. Who am I, Diamond Jim Brady?

Grousing aside, breakfast was great.

Fig Tree Cafe
416 University Avenue
San Diego, California
(619) 298-2010
The menu

Goes well with:

• While we're on the topic of bacon, sugar, and spices, but certain to make a batch of homemade bacon jam with apple cider. At its most simple use, just spread it on toast. But once you start folding it into macaroni and cheese, potato gratins, waffles, bread dough, and the like...well, then you're onto something quite good indeed. I might just use some in the next batch of bacon dumplings. 
• Fig Tree isn't the only place I like to hit for breakfast in San Diego. The Tractor Room is always a solid choice. The full bar may have something to do with that. 
• Tri tip is a cut we see a lot in California, but less so in other parts of the country. If you get your hands on some, do as I do: grill it. 
• Diamond Jim Who? James Buchanan "Diamond Jim" Brady was a Gilded Age railroad supply salesmen known for expensive swag and an expansive gut, a contemporary of Mark Twain. David Kamp looks into the truth of his supposed and infamous gluttony for the New York Times. 

Masala Chai

On dark, chilly weekend mornings, I shower, quietly slip on soft old jeans and the frayed (but so comfortable) thick white Oxford I wear only at home, putter around the kitchen, and plan the day’s chores.

Before hitting the day’s punch list, though, I usually brew an oversized mug of steaming hot masala chai. Masala chai — or, simply, chai or a chai latte in the United States — is an Indian take on hot, spiced tea, almost always tempered with milk. It's enough to hold me over until the rest of the house is up and we tackle a proper breakfast. With a huge cup of it in hand, I’ll mosey out to the front patio, brush the fallen bamboo leaves from my garden chair, and catch up on international news.

Unlike my iced tea recipe, which is fairly set, my chai recipe oscillates between simple and, admittedly, overly complex. Procedures and ingredients shift around to accommodate my moods. Sometimes I dump everything in a pot and just cook the hell out of it. Other times — like this morning — I use a three-step procedure that’s still pretty simple and still just uses one pot.

Depending on what I feel like, I may include fresh ginger, fennel seed, black pepper, a bay leaf, or even vanilla. But I always use cinnamon, cloves, turbinado sugar, black tea, whole milk, and — the core of any good chai for me — cardamom.

Here’s this morning’s batch. It's not nearly as heavily sweetened as commercial concentrates such as Oregon Chai. Want more sugar? Hell, you're an adult. Add more sugar. 

Masala Chai

2 cups water
1 4” stick of cinnamon, broken into several pieces
8 whole cloves
8 green cardamom pods, crushed
2 cups whole milk
2-3 Tbl turbinado sugar
1.5 Tbl loose leaf black tea, such as Assam

Bring the water through cardamom to a boil in a pot. Cover, reduce to a simmer, and let burble away about ten minutes. Add the milk and sugar. Bring almost to a boil, add the tea leaves, then cover and let rest about 3 minutes. Strain. Drink it as hot as you can stand it.

Goes well with:

• Fat Lips Spill Sips. Ever wonder why some cocktail shakers, cups, and pots just always seem to spill while others don’t? It might be a trick of physics called the Teapot Effect first identified in 1957. 
• Hot Cocoa for a Chilly Morning. When San Diego gets cold and clammy in the late winter, I'm more likely to break out a mug of hot cocoa than hot tea. This is the recipe I use.

Kenny Shopsin, "Orange Julius," and the Tennessee Caviar Scam

Years ago, I knew a guy who sold caviar: Ossetra, Sevruga, and Beluga, as well as plump red salmon eggs, Tennessee paddlefish eggs, whitefish roe, tiny grains of tobiko, and more. He even imported Scandinavian kelp-based pellets that, given dim light and enough aquavit, might come off as caviar-like. That inky kelp imposter notwithstanding, his fish roe was good, he cared about keeping it under the right conditions, and, when you recall that lightly salted fish eggs are a luxe dish in the first place, his prices were reasonable.

I learned a lot tasting his products. I learned that I prefer Ossetra to the more expensive Beluga; that salmon roe less than excellent is shudderingly vile; and that Southern paddlefish roe — while I wouldn't mistake it for the Caspian Sea article — is worth tracking down. I also learned that the contents of his carefully packed tins were not always what the invoices declared.

Oh, if you were a regular, you’d get what you ordered as long as he had it in stock. Most people did, in fact, get what they ordered. The owner of a football team who regularly had big tins of Beluga shipped to him certainly got the real deal. But if the Caviar Guy was out of something and he thought he could get away with it…well, the Sevruga sometimes shipped out with a definite Tennessee accent.

I hadn’t thought of that asshole in months.

But the memory of him and his various cons washed over me when I was reading Kenny Shopsin’s book Eat Me. Shopsin, the Greenwich Village cook and subject of the documentary I Like Killing Flies, writes about Morris, a purveyor from whom he used to buy turkeys:

One day Morris was bragging to me that he had been on that corner for fifty years. Way back in the ‘40’s, he said, chicken was really rare. When he couldn’t get it, he used to take veal cutlets and sell them as chicken cutlets. He said nobody ever noticed the difference. I don’t know how he expected to inspire trust in me by telling me he sold veal for chicken. He was telling me the story to show how times had changed, but what I got from it was that he was a liar and a crook.

I had seen I Like Killing Flies a few months ago, but the strength of that passage right there is what made me buy the book. It told me that Shopsin didn’t just understand the extent of the sneaks, cons, cheats, and shorts endemic to the restaurant business, but that, like him or not, and despite his protestations to the contrary, he was one of the good guys.

His own restaurant, Shopsin’s, was a New York institution for decades. It's since closed and he's moved on to a new, smaller location on Essex Street. While I knew it existed at the original spot, I always got distracted when I was in New York and never visited. Pity. The menu was about 900 items long and the dishes were, well, not classics since so many bore Shopsin’s own imprint on what they should be, but they were familiar — pancakes and French toast, but also Mac and Cheese Pancakes and Bread Pudding French Toast. Not just ho cakes, but Slutty Cakes as well. One mugshot lineup of griddle cakes in the book includes varieties such as chocolate peanut butter, coconut, cinnamon raisin, oatmeal, cranberry orange, brown sugar banana, bacon, chorizo corn, and a few more. Shopsin is particularly good at running with a basic concept.

The recipes are strong on breakfast foods — or, at least, the sorts of things I like to eat for breakfast. But there are plenty of salads (“I think a lot of salad eaters are dishonest people — people who eat for reasons other than sating their true desires.”), soups (“I put something like forty soups on the menu all at once, and from there I kept adding them, one at a time or ten at a time.”), and sandwiches (“In addition to sliced roast beef, turkey, shit like that, I also had pork loins, smoked ham, bacon, Canadian bacon. You could get roasted chicken, grilled chicken, fried chicken, red onions, grilled onions, fried onions, fresh tomatoes, roasted tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, fried green tomatoes.”).

Shopsin’s writing is vulgar, opinionated…and sounds a lot like me in my own kitchen.

Here’s his take on an orange drink I myself had seen when I was a kid, but was never allowed to have:

“Orange Julius”

When I was a kid, Orange Julius was strictly a California thing. I didn’t discover it until late in life, and then I fell completely in love with it and had to have it at my restaurant…Legally speaking, I am probably not allowed to call this an Orange Julius because the name must be copyrighted or some crap like that, which is why I put the name in quotation marks. I could have called it an Orange Julius-ish. Or maybe I can get away with it if I just say that this is my idea of what an Orange Julius is. The truth is that mine is different from the original. It’s better because we squeeze the orange juice fresh.”

1 cup fresh orange juice

1 tablespoon powdered egg whites

½ cup powdered sugar

2 cups crushed ice (or 3 cups ice cubes)

Put the orange juice, egg whites, and sugar in a blender and blend quickly to combine the ingredients. Add the ice and blend until the ice is finely crushed and the drink is frothy. Do not overblend, or the ice will begin to melt and the drink will start to flatten.

Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreño (2008)

Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin

Knopf

ISBN: 0307264939

$24.95

Lemon Buttermilk Pie

I prefer to eat out for breakfast rather than for dinner. There's something nice about starting the day with a great meal and then trundling off to work. This is nothing new. I've been a sucker for great breakfasts for years and when I find a place I really like, I tend to go back again and again.

In the early 1990's, Paradise Cafe in Lawrence, Kansas was one of those places. My friend David was a waiter at Paradise — and a big part of the reason I went. But nearly half the reason I made the short walk to the cafe was its lemon buttermilk pie. Available most days, but not always. Some mornings, my breakfast was simply tea and a slice of that pie.

Paradise Cafe is now closed and David moved to New York, but before we left Lawrence, he scored for me the recipe for the pie. I made it on a whim last night for the first time in years and was reminded of why I liked it in the first place; a light, sweet custard spiked with lemon zest and the tang of buttermilk that just collapses in my mouth was a fantastic way to cap the night.

These days, if I were to muck about with flavors, I would consider adding cardamom or a tot of rum, but the simplicity of the pie still resonates with me after all these years and I made it as I always do.

The original recipe called for making two pies at once, so — unless I plan to give one away — I scale it back for one. Here's my slightly tweaked recipe:

Lemon Buttermilk Pie

1.5 c sugar
3 eggs (4 if they're small)
2 Tbl all purpose flour
¼ c melted butter
¾ c buttermilk
1 lemon, zest and strained juice
pinch of salt
1 uncooked pie crust

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Combine the eggs, sugar, and flour in the bowl of a mixer. Mix until well blended and the mixture is a light yellow. Beat in the melted butter, buttermilk, lemon, and a pinch — just a knifepoint — of salt. Pour into the prepared pie crust and bake for 30-40 minutes until the center is just set. Set on a rack. It will thicken on cooling. 

I like it at room temperature, maybe slightly warm. Whipped cream if you like, but that would be overkill for me.

Goes well with:

• William S. Burroughs' Birthday Beer, another tale of mid-90's Lawrence, Kansas.
• Chocolate Pie with Dos Maderass PX Rum, a different diner-style pie I recently made.
• The ever-popular ginger pie, inspired by a college viewing of Harold & Maude. Easily the most read post I've ever written. 

Paczki — Donuts with Vodka

I spent this last weekend in and around Appleton, Wisconsin, about three hours north of Chicago. Work-related, but there was time enough to explore the area, check out local restaurants, bookstores, liquor stores, bars…and bakeries.

Oh, yes, bakeries. As a kid growing up in Missouri, baked goods were some of my favorite treats: cream horns, cookies, pies, stollen, crumb cakes, and—from St. Louis’s long-closed Lake Forest pastry shop—a rare gooey butter cake. All vestiges and extrapolations of Northern European baking traditions, heavy on German and Swiss varieties.

So when I dropped by Manderfield's Home Bakery in nearby Menasha, I expected some of the bakeshop treats of my youth. Many were there, naturally. But also paczki, fried doughnuts that, while new to me, are probably old hat to anyone who grew up within driving distance of Chicago’s substantial Polish communities.

Paczki (pronounced in those parts “poonch-key”) are tacitly Catholic raised donuts generally available only from Fat Tuesday until Easter. They are often filled with fruit or, sometimes, cream. Some are glazed, some dusted in sugar. Others have no coating at all. And—get this, boozehounds—vodka is sometimes incorporated in the dough ostensibly to keep it from absorbing frying oil. I’m not sure I buy the story at all. Well, the rationale, anyway. Seems like temperature control would keep the oil in check. I’ll defer to the judgment of bakers on the effect of vodka in donut dough.

Since the bakery sells filled paczki only on Fat Tuesday itself and I was engaged elsewhere that day, I walked away with an unfilled version dusted simply with sugar. Where you’d expect a hole in a common American raised donut, each of Manderfield’s paczek has a flat, crisp disc covering one side, something like a tire's hubcap.

Sitting in the car, I cracked open a window to let in the smell of sugar and vanilla that swirled around the parking lot. Pulling apart the donut and cracking though the little crisp disc, I sent a cascade of sugar crystals down my black pea coat. I don’t need paczki every day, but I’ll make a special effort to be near a Polish bakery the next time Mardi Gras rolls around. And by next Lent, I'm going to get the bottom of this vodka thing.


Manderfield's Home Bakery
811 Plank Rd.
Menasha, WI 54952
920-725-7794
www.manderfieldsbakery.com

Stanley — Breakfast all Day on Jackson Square

Stanley on Jackson Square in New Orleans is one of my new favorite breakfast joints. Yeah, they’ve got sandwiches—good ones like chicken clubs—but I’m a whore for solid breakfast and Stanley delivers.

The high ceilings, tile floors, and marble table tops give the feel of an old ice cream parlor, but the food is upscale diner: eggs, pancakes, corned beef hash, bananas Foster French toast, and plenty of ice cream sundaes. Most dishes go for about $12. A predilection for hollandaise sauce, though, is what keeps me coming back.

Among the egg dishes, benedict variations take the fore—Eggs Stanley (cornmeal-crusted local oysters, Canadian bacon, hollandaise, on an English muffin); Eggs Stella (cornmeal-crusted softshell crab) and the Eggs Benedict poor boy (yeah, the usual ingredients done as a poor boy sandwich). But for me, the standout was the Breaux Bridge Benedict. With the coarse South Louisiana sausage boudin, poached eggs, smoked ham, American cheese, and thin “Creole” hollandaise, the dish is rich enough to be completely satisfying and small enough not to slow you down in the sometimes oppressive heat.

For Tales of the Cocktails attendees, you all are in good luck: Stanley is a mere six blocks from the Hotel Monteleone and opens at 7am. Breakfast and lunch are served all day.

See you there.

Stanley
547 St. Ann
New Orleans LA 70116
504-587-0093