Things To Know About Me And Food, Part the Second

I used to love bread, of course, but now, getting older, it just tastes...heavy. It tastes like all I'm going to do is sit there for the next hour and feel full, and have my stomach grumble and my mind go dull, and one of the many, many benefits about getting older is that I can now easily associate those things, the action and the consequences, and the consequences flavor my perception of the bread so that I can easily and willfully choose to not eat it. And not feel restricted, or controlled, or deprived: to willfully and easily choose to not eat it. Like now veggies taste good, because I know I really will feel better if I eat them, and so I eat them, not because I'm told to or because I *have* to, because the editors of Shape magazine are breathing down my neck, but because I really want to.

There are many, many good things about getting older!

Of course, I LOVE bread, or used to, anyway, and still, to my mind, nothing goes better with a good cup of coffee in the morning like a really good piece of bread, toasted, with butter. Not even any cheese--just toast with salted butter, and maybe some heavy cream in the coffee, but no sugar.

Not that it hasn't taken me awhile to come to this conclusion, mind you. I always think, with my More, More, More, mind, that maybe I should add a little cheese to the toast, and maybe a little sugar or chocolate to the coffee, not that I don't love the taste of coffee as it is, but adding chocolate or sugar would make it tastier and more luxurious, somehow, and this is absolutely true. But then I end up with cheesetoast and a mocha, and while I love each of those things, somehow, together they seem a little...overdone. Too much. And I worshipped the idea of melted cheese with a mocha for many, many years: cheese omelets with mochas, cheesy breakfast sandwiches with mochas, a mocha with a baugette and butter and jam, a bagel with cream cheese and an iced mocha in the summer. But finally, I had to admit that I just didn't actually like this combination. It sounds so good in theory, you know, and indeed cheese and chocolate have gone together for eons, in many different cultures. But they usually eat them plainer--just a good piece of cheese and a good piece of chocolate--no coffee and very little bread--and what I'm getting at here is that PLAIN is often the way to enjoy good flavors. Not more complicated. Plain.

Coffee with cream and a piece of plain toast, and the crunchiness of the toast, with the fat of the butter and just that hint of salt, really picks up the sweet caramel notes of the coffee and the heavy cream just carries the mouthfeel, providing a slippery nest for the stretchiness of the gluten strands to stretch and pop over, bursting with flavor.

I'm getting off track, which I tend to do. To be continued!