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Part Three of the Breakfast Travel Series

For a bit of a variant to the traditional Southern Breakfast, and as a means of giving a shout out to the city where most of my family lives, I did make a breakfast that conjures up fond memories of Sunday mornings in New Orleans. Now first, you have to stay out all night on Saturday, finally rolling home around dawn. This is typical N'Awlins behavior and if your neighbors complain about the loud carousing one should firmly castigate them about being so dismissive of others' cultures.

Ideally, you get someone who didn't spend all night out partying to make breakfast. This should result in fewer severed fingers and three-alarm house fires. The main item and a specialty of New Orleans is 'grillades and grits' (the first word, in the quasi-Brooklynese accent that marks a long time inhabitant of the Crescent City, should be pronounced gree-ahts). This is just the thing to sop up excess liquor sloshing around in one's tum.

At last, my opportunity to do the "I'm Right and You're Wrong Dance." It's been two years five months, seventeen days and three hours since the last time I got a chance to tango to that particular tune. In the interim, in her official capacity as the female (I was going to use the adjective 'sensible', but then realized that's just repetitive) in our relationship, Mary on the other hand, has had the opportunity to do the dance approximately eleventy hundred and six times. That, of course, does not count the times when Mary could and has used the devastatingly more powerful, "I'm Right and You're a Blithering Idiot Dance."

In any case the occasion for this happy event was the long delayed visit to the Texas de Brazil churrascaria in Orlando. For something like five or six years I have expressed a slight, nay trifling interest in trying a churrascaria, ever since I read about them in Men's Meat Eating Quarterly. The concept is simple. Sit down and eat lots and lots of meat. Expanding a little on this concept and using the handy little flier on how they arrived at the concept, the churrascaria is an outgrowth of those far ago times when men dressed up in cowboy outfits down on the pampas of South America and grilled various cuts of meat over open fires and served it to other cowboys on skewers. That's pretty much it. Simple, direct and allows you to get right to the chewing of the beef.

Continuing on with our series of Sunday breakfasts based on regional specialties, we come to a particular love of mine - the South. Ahh, Sunday mornings in Charleston growing up, how I enjoyed a sumptuous banquet of Southern specialties...

Oh, who am I kidding. I was a kid, I wanted Pop Tarts. I mean, I wouldn't turn my nose up at biscuits and grits, but I really loved those cinnamon brown sugar monstrosities that they were advertising every Saturday morning on Jonny Quest, Atom Ant and Space Ghost.

It wasn't till much later that I formed an appreciation for the wonders of a full Southern-style morning feed. Which, in our case of not-actually-traveling wish fulfillment, consists of the following menu:

• Eggs - cage free mainly because I think they taste better.
• Grits - NOT instant grits - these are an abomination. Get the regular grits. Substitute milk for ¼ to ½ of the water required for creamier grits.
• Country ham - see below
• Red eye gravy - also see below
• Biscuits - you know what's not bad? Pillsbury frozen country biscuits. Since you're already making all the other stuff for breakfast, these are a real time saver. They're not quite as good as homemade but they are surprisingly decent.
• Preserves - real preserves, like peach or strawberry, not sugared up jams.

The centerpiece of any great Southern breakfast is, of course, the country ham. Real country ham is a salt cured ham that is also usually smoked. Not for us Americans the effete mild, nutty flavor of the air-cured hams we left behind when we emigrated from Europe. No, we like intensely flavored hams redolent of wood smoke and enough salt to dry out Lake Michigan. We want a ham that slaps you across the jowls and makes you sit up in class and pay attention.

Now, it is traditional to buy a whole country ham, but then you have to soak it for a week or so and then there's the mold you have to trim off and all. We find it's not all that conducive to a leisurely Sunday morning feast when you have to start planning for it a month in advance. So we get our country ham the newfangled way - we order it presliced and de-molded and packed in plastic.

To date we've benefited by having family that lives in the South who can go over to their neighborhood grocery store and send us some packaged ham slices for our delectation. Since it occurs to us that not everyone has that advantage, I guess I'll have to conduct a little research and see what online vendors offer the best hams. That will be something for a future entry, and it gives me the opportunity to order and consume a variety of country ham offerings. Oh, the sacrifices I make in the pursuit of knowledge!

Anyhow, with any good country ham breakfast one also needs to make red eye gravy. This is actually pretty simple. Fry up the country ham slice in a cast iron skillet. You want to form a fond, as our Frenchy cousins would say. We Americans would say crust in the pan. After the ham is done, remove from pan and add a pat of butter and water to dissolve the fond. For real hardcore Southern red eye, use some coffee with or instead of the water. Let the gravy boil down until slightly reduced. It's going to be pretty thin. Now make a little crater in your grits and pour the red eye gravy over it. Ahh, perfection. One warning: the gravy will be pretty salty, so unless you're me, you won't want to add any additional salt to the grits.

After a breakfast like this, it's traditional in my family to lie around on the couches, idly glancing at the Sunday newspapers until it's time for football to start. Since we often have this breakfast in June, it means most of the summer is shot.

I've mentioned Community Supported Agriculture a few times in the past couple of months and I thought I'd expand on the subject a little. Basically CSA's are cooperative ventures where you (the consumer) invest in a farm or collection of farms. In return for a fee paid at the beginning of the season you (still the consumer) get a portion of the farm's output. I suspect the concept is a bit of a hard sell in the Great Plain states, as most people are apparently not that interested in a few hundred bushels of hard winter wheat. In our case we are part of a CSA

The advantage of the CSA is that the consumer can get very fresh produce that hasn't been bred to look good after a week in a rail car. The disadvantage of the CSA is that you share the risk with the farmer. Or I should say - the farmer shares his risk with you. If there's a drought or early frost or hail storms or biblical end times, then your selection of produce might be drastically limited and your immortal soul might be in peril. For instance, some friends of ours invested in a CSA last year and they ended up with nothing but zucchini week after week. Such are the breaks. On the other hand, when it's a good year it can be pretty spectacular.

Our CSA cost us $465 for a half share. This means we get a box every week for 26 weeks. What's in the box is usually a surprise and is based upon what is ripe and available at the farm. So early in the year it's a lot of fast growing things like lettuce or green onions. Later in the year it's tomatoes, cauliflower and the like. What we've found is a half share is a lot of veggies for two people.

For example, last week's (early October) food box contained the following:

1 head of cauliflower

1 head of red leaf lettuce

2 zucchinis

2 yellow squash

4 ears of yellow corn

1 bunch of carrots

2 pounds of green beans

1 bunch of Tuscan kale

1 eggplant

1 bunch fresh dill

1 bunch flat leaf (Italian) parsley

1 bunch cilantro

For all that we paid the equivalent of around $18.

As an experiment I went and checked the prices of all these items at the local Safeway. Now all of the produce we receive from the CSA is organic. Around half of the items were also available at the grocery in organic varieties while half were not. The total for the regular grocery produce was $30.51. And that's conservative since organic produce is typically something like 20-30% more expensive then non-organic varieties.

So it is a nice savings. This is great for us since we love veggies. Someone whose idea of extra veggies is ordering the jumbo colossal order of fries from McWendy's will probably be a little unhappy. Even we, dedicated devourers of helpless plant life, had a few problems. Like the period of several weeks early in the summer when we routinely got up to four heads of lettuce in each delivery. I like salad but sheesh. On the other hand, I did discover that you actually can grill heads of romaine lettuce. Next up - battered and deep fried lettuce heads.

Besides the actual vegetables we also got quite a lot of herbs. More than any two people could eat by themselves. We ended up trying out a couple of things that also resulted in substantial savings for us. I used the fresh dill to make my own gravlax. My outlay for salmon, dill, salt and pepper came to approximately $7.50 a pound. The very cheapest prepackaged lox at the grocery was $16.76 per pound. That is a savings of around 56%. Earlier during the summer we also got a large amount of basil. This we used to make pesto which also freezes very well. Savings were similar to the gravlax. And finally, I replenished my stocks of several dried herbs by drying my own.

If the opportunity arises to get in on a CSA, I'd recommend that dedicated vegetable fans look into it. Mary found ours through the following site - LocalHarvest.org.

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.

Mary and I were sitting around a few nights ago discussing cookbooks, because this is something people with wide ranging interests and a few glasses of wine under their belts do, if you ever wondered. I think the discussion was prompted after we started going through Julia Child's two volume opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which we'd just picked up at Costco.

While Julia Child's books are really exceptional, they are a bit of a slog for the tyro cook. I don't find them all that difficult but some people -- like a certain sibling of mine for instance, who considers microwaving a Krispy Kreme donut to be a culinary feat worthy of inclusion on the Food Network -- might have some issues. And rightfully so. I just don't think the Art of French Cooking is suitable for a rookie cook. I also checked and Julia doesn't cover microwaving of deep fried breakfast pastries.

So we were talking about it, and it turns out that when we both moved out on our own the one and only cookbook we were sent out into the cold, cruel world with was the Joy of Cooking. I still use this cookbook religiously even today. Not the same copy I left home with, all those years ago, knapsack over my shoulder, seeking the folkways of America, questing for the correct roasting temperature for rack of lamb. That finally fell apart some time during the Nineties.

There was a brief dabbling with the 1997 edition, which a lot of people consider something of a disappointment. Mary has a somewhat dissenting position, considering the 1997 edition an abomination fit only to line the bottoms of the cages of demonic hell spawn. Or something like that. When talking about that edition, she tends to speak in tongues and froth a little, so sometimes it's hard to understand her.

So when the 75^th Anniversary Edition came out in 2006, we were both happy. Mary is of the opinion that it deserves a national moment of silence in appreciation, but efforts to convince the Federal government of this have gone nowhere. The Anniversary edition does have a few of the quirky recipes I remember from years past, but the mainstays are the common sense recipes that are pretty easy for a newbie to follow. We both concur that if there is one cookbook everyone should have, it's the Joy of Cooking.

Well, we're all booked up for a visit with my family this Thanksgiving in New Orleans. Or as Mary refers to it, the "Home of the Drive-Through Frozen Daiquiri."

Yes, Lousiana is actually the Land That Time Tried To Forget. Several years ago they finally passed a law prohibiting open containers in moving vehicles, but they left a 'loop-hole' available for the booming frozen daiquiri industry. One can still drive up to the window at one of these stands, order up a frozen alcoholic confection, and as long as one doesn't actually put the straw through the lid, one is quite okay to drive around, careening off parked cars and over small animals. The drinks are available in a variety of flavors and sizes up and including the Gallon 'o Fun.

I'm not going to say that every car I've ridden in while in New Orleans over the years has a back seat full of discarded Styrofoam drink containers, because that wouldn't be true. But there have been more than a few. Mostly owned by my family members, of course. And people who claim to be family members (hey it's a friendly town), but who I certainly don't remember sharing a bathroom with growing up. And random strangers.

Will we partake of these icy cocktails while we're in N'Awlins? I would guess not. I've never been a real fan of Slurpees and adding alcohol to one doesn't make me any fonder of them. Still, as far as I know, it's something you really don't find anywhere else, and I like to celebrate diversity.

In my quest to agitate for better food selection at airports I thought I might mention a few new developments in this vital area.

USA Today has a article out on changes for Terminal 5 at JFK. Terminal 5 is going to be dedicated to JetBlue, an airline I really, really promise that I'll check out someday. Hopefully. In any case, they've really attempted to ramp up efforts to deliver food service that is not exclusively based on breaded, deep fried, and/or coated with wing sauce type foodstuffs. Not that I have anything against wing sauce but it really just doesn't belong on a salad.

The most interesting development is the introduction of a dining option called re:vive. Seriously, don't you hate how punctuation is now a slave to the dictates of marketing? Then again, if you're not a grammarian (and is that a real job, can you get a piece of paper that says "Certified Grammarian"?) do you really care what they're doing to poor defenseless colons and commas?

Interestingly enough I suspect that the real reason they decided to go with the strangely punctuated title of the concept was that plain ol' revive is a little close to 'Revivals' - the name of the arrival lounge that Virgin Atlantic maintains in Heathrow. In any case and leaving aside questions about copyright infringement, re:vive is potentially quite an interesting concept. Basically there are a number of tables or clusters (I don't know what this really means either) that besides electrical outlets for laptops and such, will also have flat screen displays which will list flight times and menus for food and drink. Select something to nosh on and swipe your credit card and someone will bring you eats and drinks in around 10-15 minutes accordingly to spokesmen. Sounds cool. I like the whole not standing in line aspect.

Besides the high tech offerings there will also be a total of 9 full service restaurants that offer Asian, Mexican, sushi, steakhouse and so on. On top of that there's a food court area that purports to offer a 'modern take on the traditional food court'. Since the offerings include pizza, philly cheesesteaks, and burgers, I'm going to take that particular contention with a grain of salt.

Finally there's also some gourmet markets that will offer prepackaged food stuffs probably suited for eating on the run or in the air. There will be vegan kosher, organic and other healthy alternatives that will probably taste somewhat better than cardboard but not greatly. I mean, really how good could it be if it's not dripping in wing sauce?

I approve highly of plans like this and would like to see more airports institute this type of innovation, especially hubs. It would make the delays less onerous.