January 26, 2010

I Feel Kinda Gross

Many curious things happened in the park just now. Whilst eating another of those lovely Shake Shack burgers, pondering the greasiness that was so delighting my tongue and confounding my thumbs, I was set upon by a pigeon!

In the past I have been impressed by the wildlife of Madison Square. Just a few moments earlier, sitting on a bench, a squirrel happened by. “Hello Squirrel,” I intoned. “Say hello to the other squirrels for me.”

(That’s not a joke. I actually did that. I was very hungry, and it seemed important to keep myself amused. I then watched it fall into a trashcan.)

But the birds of the park have proven even more compelling than their earthbound cousins. On my first day at this internship, strolling through the sands of the Square, I noticed some fellow lunchers staring into space. There were too many of them for the whole group to be crazy, so I took the time to tilt back my head. On a higher branch of one of the taller trees—a hawk! (I knew it to be a hawk because one of the people standing next to me said, “I think that’s a hawk.” He seemed very well informed, and so I trust him.) He was perched next to a squirrel, whom I wanted him to kill and eat. He did not, but I took his appearance as a good omen for my time in this office.

And then another time, I saw another bird—not a pigeon!—and it was pretty, with nice colored plumage and other such bird qualities. I cannot speak more eloquently—I am clearly no ornithologist. (Or birdothologist, as they are known in layman’s terms.)

So, back to the recent past. You will recall I was sitting by Shake Shack, greasy burger in hand, when I was set upon by a pigeon! (That’s the part from earlier.) It swooped in laterally, attempting to grab my greasy bun with its fowl talons, then leapt back to the chair from whence it came. I was baffled and humiliated, and the man at the next table had seen it all. He leered. I kicked the chair the bird was on, and it flew away.

I ate the burger anyway—I was so excited about it!—and in retrospect, that may not have been the right idea. I don’t know if the bird actually touched my sandwich, but if it did, are pigeons not airborne agents of germ warfare? I fear that birdiseases are already creeping into my intestines—the more I think about it, the more I can feel them squiggling around in there—and that soon I shall either be dead or converted into some kind of bird superhero.

And not Hawkman or that Nite Owl fellow from Watchmen—I’ll be a pigeon superhero. Blessed with the power to eat discarded pretzels! To hang around on statues! To die on the sidewalk and gross out pedestrians! My only weakness? Being chased around by children. These are dark days ahead, blessed readers.

Oh, and the other interesting things I saw?

  1. A delivery van crunched into the driver’s side of an Acura.
  2. A three foot piece of particle board floated three stories above 20th Street, battered about by unforgiving wind.

Pigeon Man could have saved it. But he didn’t want to.

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January 12, 2010

Writing’s More Fun When I’m Full

The Shake Shack burger is an inelegant construction. Poking out the top of its greasy wrapping, the contents push forward like the hanging belly of someone who can’t admit to a need for more roomy pants. Jealous of each other, the lettuce, onion and tomato jostle for position above the patty, which is itself oversized—a sloppy coagulation of beef held together by salt, fat and shining yellow American cheese.

It emerges ready-to-eat from the translucent pocket of slippery paper, a different, less stable approach than pedestrian sandwiches, which tend to lie prone, their bread horizontal to the plate. Scornful of gravity, the Shake Shack burger stands on end. It is a vertical lunch, and one meant to be consumed standing, or walking across the sands of Madison Square.

Like a birthday boy who’s had too many free shots, the Shake Shack burger is an embarrassing mess. But when it tells you it loves you, even if it’s slurring, it means it.

For all its haphazard glory, the burger is really just an improvement on the fast food standard, and as such demands no special treatment. The price reflects that—$4.25—even if the wait time does not. To eat Shake Shack in summertime is to massacre your afternoon, to sacrifice prime warm hours so that you can visit an awesome, endless line, where office workers huddle, body-warmth lost to hunger, and shiver in the skyscraper shade. It’s a tourist attraction. It should be in guide books.

But in Winter, though the weather’s worse, the line is manageable. Today—high of 35°—only 15 minutes passed from when I approached to shack to when I was able, gleeful, to fill my maw with meat. 15 minutes and $4.25 for a few hours of grease settling in my stomach. In June, I don’t think it’s worth it. But in January it should keep me warm all day.

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January 7, 2010

Bleeeeeach! (Not Bleach, Mind, But a “Yuck” Noise.)

As an important early step in my new internship, I’m doing a break room taste test. It should have serious implications in my caffeine intake for the next few months—obviously the benchmark by which any part time, unpaid employment can be judged a success.

I reported in my Twitter yesterday that the new office has, instead of an oldfangled coffee pot, one of those newfangled pod eating contraptions, which accepts a plastic “K Cup” and, in return (to steal from D.A.), dispenses a concoction which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. (Or coffee.) In looking back on the many internships I have held over the years, I am struck by two regrets. First that I have spent so much time working for free, and second that so much of my wasted energy was powered by K Cup or FlavoPod.

No matter. These are not serious regrets—merely the typical musings of one methodically wasting his youth—and they should be put out of mind. I am today in a new office, with new opportunities for goldbricking, and lovely new people before whom I can contort in an attempt to elicit applause.

There is also new caffeine, and this time, I have options. Beside the “K Cup” contraption I discovered a box of Lipton’s tea bags. Plain, reliable, slightly burnt tasting Lipton’s—the most widely sold tea on the planet.

So what’s better? K Cup Earl Grey, or that pathetic old work horse, the tea bag? I have a cup of each to my right, and they both have points. The Lipton’s is hotter, stronger, even burly. It might tolerate a splash of milk if I had the patience to wait in the break room while the bag hangs out in the cup. But at the back of each sip is the familiar bite, which reminds me of airplanes because that is the only time I ever drink it. What’s soothing in the trauma of the air does not necessarily work in the comparative comfort of the ground.

The K Cup Earl Grey is better than one might think. I’ve often found that, confronted by pod machines, it’s best to ignore the fearsome supposition that a single gizmo can produce tea and coffee. As teas go, Earl Grey is a lightweight—the lone flavored tea that can be considered at all respectable—so to run it through such a clumsy, stupid device is only so heinous an act. The bouquet characteristic of the brew—an oil called bergamot—is present in the K Cup variety, and if one doesn’t think to hard, it’s easy to pretend that the beverage is enjoyable. But the “tea,” or whatever you want to call it, has no body. It slides down the tongue and out of the memory, leaving a dry tongue and mildly irritated stomach. If this is the best machine brewed tea can get, I feel very bad indeed for the good Captain Picard:

So which is better? The Lipton, with a bit of milk, might be just the ticket for a tired three o’clock in the office. But the milk is all the way in the kitchen, and I have two rapidly cooling cups—one strong and bitter, one flavorful and weak. Let’s see how they mix.

[splash!]

Huh! A surprise! Together, they are much worse than they were apart. Every good quality seems to have vanished mid-pour. Combined, they taste like lukewarm shower water. Oh well, we’ll try again tomorrow.

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January 6, 2010

Mild Excitement!

Mild excitement is, of course, the best kind. Lunch Matters—and by that I mean I—is back in an office, hard at work doing…well, something. I’ve only been here three minutes and they haven’t informed me yet. A return to employment means a return to the lunch hour, the twenty minute window in which this foolish blog was born. But don’t worry, faithful readers! It’s certainly not a paying job, so my lunching adventures will be confined to exploring the delis and shakey shacks around Madison Square. Cheapness will be maintained.

More to come sometime around, well, lunch time. For now, I’ll work on this bagel I imported from Park Slope.

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January 5, 2010

Breakfast Fast Fast

I’m writing this in the Baltimore airport, home of that fly flyboy Arby’s, but to my left is not roast beef. Rather, I have carried with me a sandwich fragment, as precious and slight as a few lines of Sappho, but without any undertones of forbidden lust. There’s nothing wrong about loving a bacon, egg and cheese, least of all when it was birthed at the Nashville airport Whitt’s. (Just typing that makes me want to eat it. Soon!)

Whitt’s, as I explained yesterday, is a local barbecue place often dismissed simply because it’s so easy to get. But not all good barbecue is far away, just as not all distant ‘cue is worth a slog. Whitt’s happens to be dandy, and their location in Terminal B has been the salve which makes the ceaseless to-ing and fro-ing of my college years tolerable. Pulled pork settles the stomach, bracing my delicate constitution for the turmoil of travel, and it’s gotten so that I can barely fly without it.

But state law prohibits the sale of pulled pork before 11 AM, and early flights must be faced with bacon alone. Well, not entirely alone. The egg and cheese are its friends, and the biscuit they hang out on is also a welcome companion. Dazed from my early start, it was all I could do at 9:30 this morning but dash on Tabasco and gnaw. It was good three hours ago, but how has the remainder of my breakfast managed the transition to EST and PM? Let’s see.

(munch munch munch.)

Aw hell yeah. Room temperature and congealed to perfection.

Speaking of judgement, there are a couple of cliffhangers that need addressing. First, the hot chicken throw down I hyped last weekend was, uh, thrown down Saturday night, and unfortunately no one was hurt. It was the best fried chicken I’ve ever made—Mom helped too!—but the hot paste, because of an overzealous oil addition, didn’t absorb the cayenne. It was barely above a mild. Perhaps next time I should work out a recipe that’s not so cheekily unhelpful. Happily, spice or no, my parents’ pals were pleased by our crispy crust, and I avoided making a total fool of myself.

I closed yesterday’s entry forecasting a trip to Mary’s Old Fashioned Pit Bar-Be-Cue, and I made good on my promise. I found meaty ribs which proved as much a mouthful as the restaurant’s full title (zing!). Little fat and a tangy, complex sauce made them among the best wet ribs I’ve ever been lucky enough to meet, and went some distance towards making up for the departure of Dee’s. I’d been told the place was takeout only, but the presence of an assortment of booths and tables suggested a recent change. A big screen TV played Ellen, calling to mind the ambiance of lunch time at the old folks home. But atmosphere, as we all know, is for the weak. My only real complaint is with the short rib sandwich. The ribs were sublime, of course, but to label a rack of ribs next to three pieces of bread sandwich stretches logic.

Sandwiches don’t have bones. They don’t all have bread on top, but there’s no such thing as an open bottom sandwich. They also usually don’t need three pieces of bread.

But I’m quibbling. Mary’s has been around over fifty years, and to their judgement I defer. They could call it a rib soufflé, and as long as it’s really just ribs, I’ll keep my grumbling to myself.

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January 4, 2010

Double Terrible News

I’m sorry to report that the Nashville barbecue I championed last week—Dee’s Q on Riverside Drive—has closed. Its owner and pitmaster, Reggie Crowder, died in February of a heart attack, leaving his daughter and wife to carry on, a task which they eventually found overwhelming.

Dee Dee, daughter and namesake of the six year old restaurant, is in college, and stretched herself thin between school and the smokehouse.I was there one afternoon in August when she (at least, I assume it was her) was working the register and tending the smoking meat at the same time, which is a lot of work even if you don’t have a textbook open on one knee. A routine check on the smoker revealed it to be over-heating, or so we surmised by the six foot flames that began to dance on its sides. Completely unruffled, she padded back to the main building and lifted a hose to tamp down the nascent inferno. She put it out easily, but not before her mother arrived, drawn by the thirty foot column of black smoke, to explain why the restaurant isn’t supposed to be on fire.

Besides meat, Dee’s had personality, one very much derived from the family that ran it. The restaurant was an extension of the owners, and if their hearts were out of it there was no point in going on. More sad would have been selling out, or carrying on the late husband’s dream at the expense of their own happiness. Tracey Crowder, widow of Reggie, said that her husband appeared in a dream to bless the closure of the restaurant. It’s lunchtime, and I was all geared up to drive out 65 to pick up a rack of those fabulous ribs, but if the Crowders are happier being closed, then so be it. They’ve been in mourning since February, and I hope that this new year, which comes without the burdens of barbecue, can be a brighter one than 2009.

The Scene article I linked to above said that before opening Dee’s, Reggie worked at Prince’s (of course) and Mary’s Old Fashioned Pit Barbecue, a take-out rib joint in Germantown. With his place closed, Mary’s short rib sandwich be the next best thing. I’ll let you know.

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January 2, 2010

At The Mercy of Badbecue

There’s crummy barbecue out there, people, and I think I’ve eaten too much of it in my lifetime. The problem could be as simple as salt, or as intangible as laziness. Time after time, promised “the best pulled pork/ribs/brisket in the south,” I’ve been treated to mushy meat as flavorful as the bread served alongside. Rarely has famous barbecue risen above humble Whitt’s, a Nashville chain without too much pride to actually season their meat. I don’t pretend to be a barbecue expert, but  The best pulled pork I’ve ever had was at Abe’s, in Clarksdale, MI, and the best ribs came from Dee’s Q, in East Nashville.

Abe’s is my ideal, setting a standard which is not that high but, to my disappointment, never approached. Driving back from New Orleans this time last year, my parents and I went up state highway 61, tacking on three hours to see the ruins of Windsor and the flat, eerie Delta. Using cellphone and GPS, we enlisted my parents’ friends to recommend places to eat. We considered renowned hotel restaurants and meat and threes, but chose Abe’s because we thought it would be fast, and at sunset we were still hours from home. Quick it was. Five sandwiches and two beers later (for the whole group, not just for me), we were back on the road with full stomachs. (I also took with me the knowledge that Michelob Ultra is so named because it is beyond terrible.)

We made a few phone calls, we pulled over, we ate. It was good. Was that so hard? Apparently. I tried the same thing on Thursday, as a supplement to a trip to Memphis, and the world of slow-cooked meat rebuffed me. A yankee houseguest and I had gone to see Graceland, and were surprised to find that after a three hour drive we passed through the mansion in 45 minutes. Oh well—let’s get something to eat. Before leaving I had put in calls to my parent’s friends, coming up with a list of restaurants which were closed for the holiday. All closed, save one: a place called Bozo’s, about 45 minutes east on I-40. (Famous not just for their meat, but for a legal battle with the like-named clown which went to the US Supreme Court.)

Our GPS got us lost on the way, sending us off the highway onto a road that, though I could see it out my window, was not drawn on the map. Barely containing our panic, we were able to make our way out of the twilight zone and back onto highway 70. We drove until the machine announced “Destination”—an abandoned trailer guarded by a shattered green lawn chair. A call to the restaurant corrected the error, and we were there as the sun disappeared. I’d thought the GPS was simply baffled by the vagaries of state roads, but after we ate it was clear it had been trying to save us from our stomachs.

There was nothing wrong with the pulled pork—there was simply nothing right with it, either. It had the color and consistency of brains, and all the explosive flavor of rewarmed mush. I realized this after I had—thinking I was doing my father a favor—ordered a pound of it to go. It seems the creative power of Bozo’s had gone towards their sauce, a deep red sludge with medium heat and deep, smoky flavor. It took about a gallon of it to render the meat edible, and I think I sprained my wrist smacking the bottle.

I feel bad ragging on their product, for the people of Bozo’s were incredibly friendly, working hard to get us off highway 70 and into their establishment. The prices were reasonable and the baked beans were exceptional. Really everything was good but the pork, and that failure is a tragic shame.

In other news, the fried chicken experiment is reaching its conclusion. Four months ago I declared that I would match Prince’s by Christmas. Though my mother and I have done a lot of good work, we fell short of the December 25th target. No matter—I ate well and enjoyed doing it. We’re having one more test tonight, and this will be the big one. Hearing of our exploits, a friend of my father’s threw down a gauntlet of his own, declaring the cayenne-heavy flavor of Prince’s flat, and claiming that he knows of a Sichuan pepper which makes mockery of the best North Nashville to offer.

Who will prevail? Southern simplicity, or the deep hot pepper of the East? He promised it would have all the sweet depth of Sriracha, and frankly I fear he will best us. I’ve never claimed I was making the most intellectually compelling hot chicken—I just wanted to learn how to do it Nashville-style. If that style is ultimately flat then so be it. We may lose, but we have played the game well.

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December 26, 2009

Jitter Christmas

I ran some kind of analytic on my Twitter account last month, and discovered that the three words I use most are:

  • Chicken
  • Sandwich
  • Coffee

This was not surprising, but slightly frightening, and left me worried both at how much coffee I’m drinking and how much I’m talking about it. It’s not the drinking of it that I enjoy so much as the making, but I could never make it without drinking any, since I am not a sociopath. Although not one to worry about my health, I have noticed that the more coffee I drink in the afternoon, the more likely I am to descend into a nauseous swoon around six o’clock. Lately, on being yanked from the dream-world, I’ve found that my customary rage at wakefulness disappears as soon as I remember the existence of coffee. “Ooh!” I muse. “This is the time of day when I don’t have to feel bad for drinking it!”

Apparently holidays are one of those times too. My holiday calendar starts at 10:30 on Christmas Eve, at the massive brunch that my parents have been throwing for some time now. It is the only time I ingest nog, cheese grits or apricot fried pies and, since the guest list is as static as the menu, the only time I see much of my family’s family friends. No matter how lovely the people are—and since some of them may read my blog, let me here emphasis their loveliness—making chit chat with adults requires quick feet and a sharpened wit. At 10:30 in the morning, that means a cup of coffee in between slurping down egg nog and bloody Mary’s. You know—to stay sharp.

For dinner on the 24th we go to my grandparents’ house, where a heavy meal of fillet and chocolate mousse as rich as the Tsar is followed up by what my grandmother calls, “strong Louisiana coffee.” That means its base is a cold drip concentrate, stored in an old wine bottle, diluted and reheated as needed. At the word coffee I bolted from my seat, and helped prepare it as an escape from the combination food & family coma. As I dumped coffeesludge and water into my grandmother’s copper saucepan, I realized that parties are more fun when you’re doing something, and that activity can either give you something to talk about, or a reason not to talk.

Christmas morning? Drip coffee was thrust into my hand.

Christmas lunch? My Aunt makes mounds of bacon, about two dozen scrambled eggs and great coffee to go with.

Post lunch Christmas haze? Well, we just have to experiment with our new French press, don’t we? It’s stainless steel and double-walled, which meant the coffee stayed warm for hours. Being of a scientific mind, I was compelled to check it every half hour or so. I never felt shaky and I never felt sick, but when I finally left the house my legs were ready to go.

In a rare departure from Christmas routine, I took them downtown to LP Field, to watch the Titans get thrashed by San Diego. It was cold and windy, so in between applying long-johns and sweater-layers, I fixed two Thermoses full of hot coffee. Under my father’s watchful eye, I warmed them first and screwed the caps on tight. I passed through security anxious that I wouldn’t be allowed to bring them in—I’d have been sweating if my pores weren’t frozen shut—but my bag was passed over, and I entered the stadium unmolested.

By the time the Chargers were up 14-3, I wanted something warm, something soothing, but reaching into my bag I found that the Thermoses were absent. In my rush to get bundled, I had forgotten to put them into my bag, and they spent the entire game keeping hot things hot on my desk in my bedroom. I cursed silently: “This couldn’t get any worse!” and then, of course, it did. Charger touchdown after Charger touchdown cascaded over me, and my belly remained unwarmed.

Crushing disappointment of a professional sports loss aside, December 24 and 25 were exactly like all the years preceding, with each uncle and strip of bacon in its proper place. The only other difference was the prodigious amount of coffee quaffed, drunk for no other reason than because it was there and it was hot. Perhaps in its own way a small rebellion, a hairline crack in an otherwise unbreakable routine. The holidays are fun without being surprising, and a mild stimulant, when substituted for the mystery and wonder of childhood, works as well as anything else.

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December 11, 2009

Stage III: The Sauce is Strong With This One

I theorized last time that what’s been damning my chicken-work was not a lack of rigor, but too much of it. And so last night’s trial was as casual as a big chicken dinner ought to be. I wasn’t planning on frying at all—I was going to bake, to give my gut a break—but while searching for something to do with black eyed peas, I stumbled onto Cooks Illustrated’s recipe for oven fried chicken. “Oven fried?” I exclaimed to my empty bedroom. “That’s not even a thing!” And yet, apparently it is.

Discarding everything I’d decided about simple preparation, I decided to give their baroque breading a try. The chicken was to be dressed in crushed Melba toast, pulverized by the food processor I do not own. And so from the wild north of Manhattan I imported a sort of man-beast named Joseph to stand in for a Cuisinart. Using the bottom of a pint glass, a cup measurer, a chef’s knife, and finally his fists, he worked for twenty minutes to reduce the 5 ounces of surprisingly stubborn crackers into “sand and pebble texture.” The torrent of grunts and cursing caused the two ladies present to cover their ears, but their blushing was worth it for the resultant grease-free crunch. The chicken was excellent, and baking it was, as baking always is, easy. Like a cruise missile, the chicken was fire and forget. But unlike a cruise missile, it treated our stomachs gently. No one besides our uptown barbarian was fully incapacitated.

Of course, I didn’t mind toying with the chicken itself because the chicken is not the real experiment. Like the first caveman to don a labcoat, I am trying to invent fire. Past experiments have suggested that our best method is to refine the spicy paste that won the 2008 hot chicken cook off, and based on some work my mother and I did over Thanksgiving, it’s become clear that the first step to refining the paste is to make it not a paste at all. Combining the spices in butter instead of lard allows it to flow evenly all over the meat, and prevents clumps of pepper from forming. My wild man supervised the sauce, and though he added paprika, red pepper flakes and all sorts of other red things, the most crucial addition was approximately 1/8 of a pound of cayenne. I finally found someplace that sells it by weight: a market underneath the three chilli pepper Indian restaurants on First Avenue and 6th. A quarter pound bag costs $2.50 and a whole lot of mouth-ache.

That’s right! I said mouth-ache, because we finally crossed the pain threshold. We added the sauce in two different ways, spicing half the chicken while in the oven and half after we had taken it out. We thought baking it in would help some of the heat seep into the meat—a feat I’ve yet to accomplish—but instead it just dried it out, and cut down on the heat. Cooked cayenne hurts less, apparently. But pouring the molten sauce on chicken fresh out of the oven, then flipping it over and doing the other half, yielded evenly spiced meat that hurt like hell. I’d put it somewhere between Prince’s medium and hot, which means that in terms of heat, we’re actually about where I want to be.

The work is not yet done, of course, and will not be until the heat is seared straight through the meat. The next batch will spend the night before its debut soaking in a brine of water, salt, sugar and peppers. I’m skeptical that this will actually impart spice, but if nothing else it will make the meat more tender. But for those keeping track, here’s the rough formula for the Sauce That Worked:

  • 1 stick butter
  • 1/8 lb cayenne
  • Some vegetable oil
  • A bunch of other stuff

I’ll take leave now. The sun is falling and I need to get back before it gets really cold. Home is where the heat is, after all.

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December 5, 2009

I Am Eating and I Am Awake

In two weeks I will embark on what academic calendars call “Winter Holiday.” As I will theoretically have graduated college this time next year, this is to be my last. I’m hoping to spend most of it asleep.

Observant readers have by now noticed the bizarre hour at which I am writing this. It’s certainly not lunchtime. While 9:07 AM is a normal rising hour for bakers, coal miners and astronauts, it is an unfamiliar place to a college student, especially on a Saturday. But this is that season when students are assaulted by work, and for two weeks find themselves, like the aforementioned black lung victim, forced to complete tasks on certain days by certain times. In a student in such a state wakes up early on a Saturday, the feverish racing of his mind combines with self-pity and a thirst for coffee to make returning to sleep impossible.

Being awake at this time demands a hearty breakfast. It’s the farmery thing to do. And a bleak winter morning like this, a few hours after the first frost has (hopefully) descended on the mosquito population of Manhattan, demands hot cereal. To wit, oatmeal.

“Oatmeal?!” you cry. “Does he mean it?!”

Indeed, I do. I have some stuck in my teeth right now.

Since I first made oatmeal freshman year, I realized that it is apparently something I do wrong. While other people are slathering them with butter, honey, sugar and maple syrup, I was always happy to consume it plain save for a pinch of salt. When I say that people usually retch, so if you just choked on your breakfast burrito, I apologize. The fact is that oatmeal (and its superiorly mushy cousin, Cream of Wheat) is bland, and the sort of person who is awake in the morning doesn’t have time for blandness. Frankly, I don’t blame them.

But for me, the smell and texture of these strange grains flavors their white weirdness with a remembrance of breakfasts past. The winters of elementary school were built on hot cereal, and it was always served plain, since a man who rises before dawn (as my farmer-like father likes to do) isn’t going to want to fill any tiny people with sugar. (My mother, a late riser, was the opposite. On the rare days that she fed us and drove us to school, she usually made cinnamon toast. In a word: wowwee!) Every morning my brother and I chose—oatmeal or Cream of Wheat—and were thrilled by the blandness.

Apparently the conditioning has stuck. I can’t taste dry, dull Cream of Wheat without feeling like an eight year old again, and my brother spends his breaks trying to collect the energy to let my father show him the correct way to make oatmeal. As far as I remember, the method has two steps:

  1. Ignore everything on the back of the box
  2. Undercook

If oatmeal were a steak (and what a breakfast that would be!), my father would serve it cold in the middle. Good rare meat doesn’t need A-1 sauce. Good hot cereal doesn’t need syrup.

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