Page 9: Current Events

Currently listening: Band of Horses, Infinite Arms
Currently drinking: ginger ale
Currently watching: my cat bat around a hair tie

Remember when Xanga was a thing? Xanga was my very first introduction to the idea of blogging. This was in college where there were a lot of feels happening to a lot of people who all lived very close to one another. It was horrible. But there was always a spot in the format of writing the post that said, “Currently” and you could pick “listening to”, or “reading”, or “watching”, or something. And so you got to say, “Sure, I’m a typical emotional college kid but look at this cool, obscure band that I found that no one else has ever heard of.” I swear, there were months where I thought Fall Out Boy was supremely indie just because I’d never heard of them before. Nope. I was incorrect about that. Now, though, I don’t even care how obscure the band is that I’m listening to. Did I download The 20/20 Experience at 6:00 am on the day it released? Do I have regrets? Not really but, frankly, half of that album is a little disappointing to me. I mean there’s a song about space boning. You can’t possibly be serious, Justin, right? I mean, tell me this is a song that was rejected by The Lonely Island.

Currently, I’m riding high from the dinner I just made. The thing is that when I was thinking about what to have for dinner, I was like “well I have eggs and I have a loaf of bread that I should probably eat.” So I’d resigned myself to plain, ordinary scrambled eggs and toast.

And then when I got home, there was a package on my door step. My frozen, stupid, ice encased doorstep. I opened it to find my copy of the Joy The Baker Cookbook! I’d forgotten that I’d even ordered it! Honestly, I haven’t even had a chance to flip through it, yet. But I think that it was something about having Joy sit there on the counter with me that prompted me. I whisked up the eggs, sliced my bread and then thought, “Woah! I’m nearly to French toast!” But I’m not a huge lover of sweets. Not to the degree that I want to eat them for dinner. I saw an onion and a vine of tomatoes on the counter and boom–that was it.

And here’s the closest thing that you’ll get to a recipe:

I caramelized the onions in a little bit of butter. Recipes will tell you that it takes 10 minutes to caramelize onions but they are liars. It takes half an hour over medium heat.

When they’re done enough (trust your discretion), slice up one tomato and mince a clove of garlic, toss in salt and pepper and dry basil and oregano. Let them sit with the lid on for a little while. It’s done when the tomatoes get sweet and fall apart and it generally looks like a mess.

Whisk up two eggs in a bowl with a big pinch of salt and a medium size pinch of black pepper and a small pinch of cayenne. Soak two hunks of grainey bread in the egg mixture and then fry them in a skillet with 2 tablespoons of butter.

Then you just put it all together. I put a little of the tomato-onion stuff (I’m sure there’s a better word for that. “Compote?”) on the plate. I set one hunk of bread on top, a little more of the tomato mixture, and the last hunk of bread. And then I rained freshly grated Asiago cheese (which I bought on a whim last week and have not even remotely regretted despite knowing nothing about it at the time of purchase) down over top.

Frankly, it wouldn’t photograph well even if the lighting was excellent in my house, I’m pretty sure. But after every bite, I thought, “Oh my Lordy!” And to think that I was going to have plain, ‘ol scrambled eggs for dinner.  Thanks for being my spirit animal, Joy.