Rambling about Breakfast
Posted on 19 December 2007 under Bed & Breakfasts, Breakfast, Restaurant Chit-Chat | 4 Comments
The cover of the December 2007 issue of Restaurants & Institutions.
The dish shown is the $10 Cast Iron Skillet Eggs, on the Brunch menu
at the 707 Restaurant & Bar in Philadelphia.
Some cooks and chefs just don’t understand breakfast. I recall about a year ago seeing a classified ad in a local paper. One of the more high-end country clubs nearby was looking specifically for a breakfast cook. The ad ran for a few days and then disappeared. About a week later, the same ad was back in the same paper word-for-word, with an addition in all-capital letters: “MUST BE ABLE TO FLIP EGGS!”
Did you ever wonder why most “better” restaurants don’t open until lunch or later? Or why a certain level of cookbook will either ignore morning meals completely or touch on them far too briefly?
Go to a bookstore. Look for whole sections of cookbooks on seafood, grilling, meats, desserts, baking, Greek food, French food, German food, southern cooking … and then, go find the section on breakfast.
Nope. Zilch. Nada. Ain’t happening. They just don’t do that. There’s a few books on the subject within the various sections, but honestly there really aren’t that many.
When he reads this, the chef at our favorite restaurant might feel I’m picking on him. I do tease him on occasion that he’d get a great breakfast crowd if he’d open, say, at 6 a.m vs. 5 p.m. during the week. As that crew also runs the cafeteria at the local college and serves breakfast meals there as part of the catering contract … well, that’s all it is, is teasing. I’d prefer they continue what they’re doing on their regular menu, as that’s enough work … a lot of work. Yeah, he’ll smack me for this anyway, but that’s to be expected.
I have a few nice books on cooking breakfast meals. Great Lakes, Great Breakfasts the first of three such cookbooks from the Michigan Lake to Lake Bed & Breakfast Association, contains recipes from the owners of a number of member inns across the state. I have two copies of Morning Food by Margaret S. Fox, one copy being mine and the other belonging to my son Adam (shown here cooking omelets for residents at Luna Pier’s senior housing center). And nearby there’s The Big Book of Breakfast by Maryana Vollstedt.
Of course, there are countless books in my bookshelves containing sections on preparing breakfast meals. Unfortunately, the recipes in most of these breakfast chapters are far from unique and seem to mimic one another, from the cast iron and camping books having similar recipes for skillets and such, to the larger “do everything” books from the 1940s onward all showing very similar dishes. There’s not much that’s unique regarding breakfast among the larger and more popular cookbooks unless you look outside what’s considered to be a “normal” cookbook.
Think about your local grocery store for a moment. The bakery has donuts and breakfast cakes that may be from today, maybe not. The cereal aisles are identical from one store to another, with even the so-called organic varieties being knock-offs of popular brands. The eggs are in the dairy section, the sausage is over in with the pork or the lunchmeats, and there’s a number of frozen bread products and pre-made, pre-packaged items over in the frozen foods.
How much work would it actually take to create a “Breakfast Foods” section in a supermarket. Sure, the store would have to have both freezer and refrigerator cases in one spot, and the meats gang would have to walk a little further to deal with this area. But is it so far-fetched from separating the seafood out from the meats, as so many grocers have done already?
Speaking of chains, breakfast meals at chain restaurants have been disappointing through the years and continue to be so. I’m known for saying my favorite meal at McDonald’s is their breakfasts. But I have to admit that’s not to say their breakfasts are really anything to make noise about. It’s more my way of saying the rest of their menu doesn’t impress me much either. I make the distinction about their breakfast only in response to my being asked what I like there. Reality is that I prefer Tim Horton’s sausage and egg biscuit over anything at McDonald’s, but I’ll eat breakfast at McDonald’s if there’s no other choice.
Larger chains such as Bob Evans have let me down. Back in college in the early 1980s I ate a lot of Bob Evans breakfasts. I lived on the west end of Columbus in the apartment complex behind Westland Shopping Center and the Bob Evans on W. Broad on the other side of the mall was where I had breakfast on occasion. My favorite item was those biscuits, warm and flaky, extra butter please. But even at Bob Evans the breakfast servings have gotten smaller over the years. I might be imagining things, but I think their plates might have gotten smaller at some point as well … What’s really torqued me off though was, at some point, having to ask for a second biscuit as only one was served with the meal. I haven’t been back to Bob Evans too much after that happened.
It’s the independent operators who seem to have a serious handle on breakfast meals. Even smaller chains are more-or-less locked into what they’re allowed to allowed to offer on their breakfast menus. We were fortunate at the Big Boy in west Columbus in 1983 to be able to try something new at the time, a thing called a “breakfast bar”. Using a portable steam table that plugged into an outlet at the end of a rebuilt in-place salad bar, we tried a few things before realizing they weren’t right for use in steam tables (i.e., pie fillings as pancake “toppings”, grits and oatmeals, toast, etc.) Of course it caught on after a while … although the cook seemed rather irritated that she had to take time out from cooking other meals to take care of my constant requests on weekends. Twenty-four years later though, even a lot of the Big Boy breakfast buffets seem to now be standardized … i.e., ”normal”.
But that Big Boy wasn’t where I regularly had breakfast in Columbus. At that time, Izzy’s out of Cincinnati attempted an expansion. They opened a location at High & Broad Streets downtown, across the street from the statehouse. You literally couldn’t get into the place at lunchtime, particularly on weekends, with a line forming outside even when it was raining or snowing hard. Their menu doesn’t show it now, but at the time they were offering a corned beef omelet (the corned beef being made from scratch in the basement kitchen) with one of their crisp potato pancakes on the side. Visiting them 4 - 5 times each week I was one of their more-frequent customers, and it got to the point where they stopped letting me pay! I have no idea why that location would have closed, but I was disappointed in 1997 to find something else had unsuccessfully replaced it.
Would you like a good restaurant breakfast? Stay clear of the bigger chains. Even a mom-and-pop place in the tiny business district of a small village community is more likely to have fresher breakfasts cooked with greater care than any chain place, large or small. They’re also more likely to have something unique on their menu as well. I’ve always gravitated toward those restaurants where the owner is not only actively involved in operations, but is also likely to be on-site as well. Chef Dan Bloomquist at the Trout Town Country Café up in Kalkaska, Michigan will probably ask how you enjoyed his Specialty French Toast with the corn flake and pecan coating (pictured above) as he’s making the rounds of the tables in the two dining rooms in his smallish restaurant. And Chef Silverio Conté at the Bolles Harbor Café (up the road a few miles from us) will probably relate the story of his Lumberjack Breakfast Skillet Special (shown left), telling you the prime rib in this beautiful dish was intended for the dinner special and ended up in your exquisite breakfast instead.
Of course, neither of these gentlemen can really top the breakfasts made for you at home or when you’re visiting family, the meal made either by yourself or by someone who loves you. A couple of my kids (teenagers) have become rather adept at making my father’s version of Eggs In A Frame (pictured at right). When the kids are in town I can be almost assured one of them will offer to make me this breakfast at some point. If not, I can normally tell when they’re starting on their own plate of it and I can piggyback my order onto theirs! Of course, Adam can and does flip eggs (sometimes without a spatula), and with my help he can knock out four full-size omelets in 5 minutes flat. These kids are also privy to those huge southern breakfasts made by their aunts and great-aunts, women raised in the south who will happily and without hesitation load a table to the breaking point with hot food before even thinking about starting to wake guests for breakast.
Certainly the next-best thing to eating at home is eating at a truly excellent bed & breakfast. These people aren’t generally out to make a whole lot of money in their business. When having people visit from out-of-town, we’ve decided the best place for them to stay is the B&B Breakfast Depot in Oregon, Ohio. We stay with them as well as we simply love the place, and owners Nate and Linda Brinkman are such great people. Nate keeps the place (and its ridable trains) running smoothly, while Linda cooks immaculate breakfasts for guests, such as her French Crepes with Whole Fresh Cherries (shown at left). There are other incredible dishes from Linda’s repertoire, such as her mouthwatering Seafood Scramble. But what’s even more special about bed & breakfasts such as this one is a beautiful location (just east of Maumee Bay State Park on Lake Erie), and the warm home (below) commercial contractor Linda has put together to fulfill her dream of owning a B&B.
One of the more common phrases that’s made the rounds over the years is that of, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. A current ad for Jimmy Dean’s Breakfast Skillet products shows the father (the guy in the sun costume) cooking one of the skillets while each family member makes an excuse as to why they’re unable to have breakfast. While the ad is one of the few of these ads without a decent punchline, the point it attempts to make is a good one: We’re just no good in the morning without a decent breakfast. We can try to be supermen or superwomen, getting by on a granola bar and a cup of coffee. But when it comes right down to it, is that granola bar and cup of coffee what you really want for breakfast. Can you … must you … should you do better?
Think about it.
Recipe: Improvising Breakfast Skillets
Posted on 10 December 2007 under Bed & Breakfasts, Recipes | 7 Comments
Lately, Mary and I have been getting into the whole Breakfast Skillet thing. We’ve always enjoyed them at restaurants where decent ones are served. Of course, there are restaurants where a so-called “breakfast skillet” is nothing more than layers of ingredients from different parts of the kitchen. Open-face biscuits topped with browned sausage topped with shredded cheese topped with gravy topped with over-easy eggs … that’s not a skillet. That’s just a bunch of stuff piled together … a cook who doesn’t understand the concept.
More recently, our deeper enjoyment of Breakfast Skillets started with our trying those Jimmy Dean frozen skillet packages. (You know the ones … the ads with the guy in the sun suit?) We found we liked both the Southwestern and the sausage varieties, while the ham version seemed a bit dry. Disliking the fast food skillet burritos, we found it’s easy to create similar and better-tasting burritos with the Jimmy Dean packages, 10″ tortillas, salsa and sour cream for large numbers of teenagers. (We haven’t tried the bacon version of the Jimmy Dean skillets yet as we haven’t found it yet up here. (Strange, that.)) I then had the prime rib-based Lumberjack Skillet special at Bolles Harbor Café and have been hooked on the concept of skillets ever since.
It turns out that, made properly, a Breakfast Skillet can fall under the category of the Weight Watcher’s Core Plan. Use lean meats or poultry (rabbit?), potatoes, fresh vegetables, olive oil, Egg Beaters, and fat free cheese, and your Weight Watcher’s diners can enjoy a skillet with you.
Going the other way, a large cast iron skillet and a campfire at deer camp is all you need to cook a hearty breakfast to warm the bellies of hunters before heading out for the day. Bacon or smoked sausage, potatoes, chunks of cheddar, eggs if you have them … the guys will ask for this breakfast every morning.
The trick to making a decent Breakfast Skillet isn’t in the preparation of the ingredients or even in the planning of which ingredients you’ll use. The real trick is in the timing, as in, when the different prepped ingredients hit the pan. Every type of ingredient will have a different cook time, and that’s where your mind needs to be. Once you wrap your head around this, you’ll be able to create a skillet from just about anything you have on-hand.
Here’s the basic procedure …
Preheat a 10″ skillet over medium heat. If you’re using bacon or sausage, cook that off in the skillet. Remove the cooked meat to some paper towel, leaving the oil behind in the pan. If you’re not using meat, add olive oil to the skillet and let it heat up. Add minced garlic to the heated oil, letting the garlic infuse with the oil while you chop the potatoes into 3/8″ cubes. While the potatoes are starting to cook, coarsely chop a few slices of onion. After a beat or three, add the onions to the potatoes and toss together. While those start to cook, coarsely chop some bell peppers. When the peppers are chopped, take a couple sips of coffee prior to adding them to the cooking mixture and tossing them. While the mixture cooks some more, beat the eggs together (three for each diner). When the potatoes finally start getting brown, move the mixture to one side of the pan. In the other side, add a touch of olive oil and pour in the eggs. At this point (not before), add salt and pepper. While the eggs start to cook, scramble the eggs with the spatula while occasionally taking a break to chop tomatoes. Squeeze the chopped tomatoes between your hands to remove excess juice. (Don’t forget to pay attention to the eggs!) When the eggs are almost done scrambling throughout the mixture, add the tomatoes. Toss over the heat for about 20 seconds. Remove from the heat and serve, topping with shredded cheese and maybe some freshly-chopped chives.
It takes very little thought to figure out variations. How about that prime rib or BBQ’d pork left over from the previous evening? Chop it up and add it just before the eggs so the prime rib will heat through without overcooking. Making burritos? Add black beans and whole kernel corn at the same time as the bell pepper, adding some cilantro with the salt and pepper. Like seafood? Add crab meat just before the eggs, and top it all with sour cream and fresh dill.
There’s no reason not to cook a full skillet for breakfast. It takes very little time, is simple to personalize, you can easily use what’s on-hand, and, with a little extra preparation, it can be cooked for quite a few people rather rapidly.
Recipe: Linda’s Refrigerator Pickles
Posted on 17 August 2007 under Bed & Breakfasts, Michigan Cuisine, Recipes | 1 Comment
Oh, wow … these are sooooo good … and so easy to make! We learned about them this past weekend while staying at the B&B Railroad Depot Bed & Breakfast in Oregon, Ohio. Our hostess, Linda Brinkman, had found out about my dad’s affinity for pickles, and planted a bowl of these sweet little puppies next to him … for breakfast! That’s exactly the kind of “at my expense” thing my dad just loves for people to do to him. Normally, Linda and Nate don’t provide anything other than what’s on their breakfast menu, but what Linda did to dad with these, quietly and non-chalantly sliding them in next to his plate and then walking away, was downright funny!
The day after we came home from the B&B, LunaPierCook reader Dorothy handed us four major cucumbers, each about 18 inches long? What was I going to do with them?? I was instantly off to call Linda for this recipe. Come to find out, these freeze quite well, too, so if you like them, and you have a ton of cukes, just load up the freezer with …
Linda’s Refrigerator Pickles
2 cups sugar
1 cup cider or white vinegar
2 Tbsp Kosher or pickling salt
18 - 24 inches of cucumber
sweet onionWash the cucumber, and slice it as thinly as possible. (If you have a mandolin that slices super-thin, this is a great recipe to use it with.) Cut some of the onion into wedges, and slice it just as thin (although chunky can also be cool, like I did). You should end up with about 8 cups of vegetables … set these aside.
In a large glass bowl, whisk together the sugar, vinegar and salt until the dry ingredients are suspended as much as possible. Using a slotted spoon, stir in the vegetables, making sure everything gets covered. There’ll seem to be a lot of liquid, which is fine.
Transfer everything into a covered container and refrigerate for at least 24 hours. Enjoy!
Note: Try adding other veggies, such as red onion instead of the sweet onion, or chopped pimento, red or yellow bell pepper, or sliced, sweet cherry tomatoes, for even more interesting flavor. You could also add poppy seed or celery seed … this is quite a versatile little summer recipe!
Photos, Food and A Train: B&B Railroad Depot, Oregon, Ohio
Posted on 12 August 2007 under Bed & Breakfasts, Food Destinations, Photos, Restaurant Chit-Chat | 2 Comments
What does the 7.5″ train in the above picture have to do with the amazing breakfast in the following photo, which I ate? (Er, the food, not the train.)
House Special: Crab Soft Scramble — Soft-scrambled eggs with
crab meat and cream cheese, served with fried red potatoes
and biscuits
Well, lemme tell you about a great weekend we had with the wonderful folks at the B&B Railroad Depot Bed & Breakfast in Oregon, Ohio …
More mouthwatering breakfast photos, and the complete story, after the jump …
I’ll Be Adjusting to Sudden Unemployment
Posted on 10 August 2007 under Bed & Breakfasts, Food Destinations | 10 Comments
I’ll be off till Sunday or Monday as the family and I go to the B&B Railroad Depot for the weekend as planned. Maybe this time will help me adjust to my sudden unemployment that was effective yesterday morning as soon as I was informed. In a couple days, I promise great pics of great breakfasts from the B&B!
Sponsors
