Breakfast Vacations

Well, with Wall Street melting down and our 401(k)'s doing submarine imitations, we decided that frivolous vacation-like trips are on the back burner for a while. As opposed to frivolous business-like trips, which we have to do even if our savings now consists of two sticks and a small piece of string. But it's a pretty piece of string!

Ah, well. As a pick-me-up after looking at the financial section of the New York Times on Sunday, I recently decided to do a round of regional breakfasts from this great and heavily indebted nation of ours. Every other Sunday, I have committed to researching and preparing a breakfast that the typical inhabitant of places like Boston or Savannah would eat, at least if they don't go to McDonald's for an Egg McMuffin. Or in the Bostonian's case, Dunkin Donuts, since there seems to be one every fifty to sixty feet in that particular city.

I started with New York. New York was fairly easy, in that we went with something we both love that we associated with the city - bagel and lox and a schmear. Though in this case we used gravlax instead of lox, since we had an enormous amount of it.

See, we got another large bunch of fresh dill from our neighborhood CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) organization, and what better use of fresh dill than to make gravlax. Gravlax is really fairly easy to make, when you get down to it, though it's not really something for those who demand instant gratification.

We popped over to Costco and got a nice big piece of fresh salmon that I halved and then rubbed all over with loads of salt and sugar, all of the dill, and a dash of vodka, because it's only proper you send the fish off with a toast. Wrap it all in Saran Wrap (and dear god please get the name brand stuff - the store brand plastic wrap is just absolute crap), weight it down in the fridge and three or four days later - gravlax!

Couple this with some fresh bagels (which are not all that great here in Colorado, as they come from Einstein Brothers -- we live in the rear end of Nowheresville when it comes to bialys), some cream cheese, a copy of the New York Times, and it's Sunday morning in the Big Apple.

Next up: country ham, grits, red eye gravy and a touch of Tums.