Bad Home Cooking

How to paint a PB&J

The Internets have been good to me; opening hidden doors and pushing me through. I stumbled upon artist Duane Keiser's work perusing Boing-Boing, where I go when I want to waste time. I was rewarded with hours of further procrastination spent enjoying his gorgeous small paintings.

So when I saw the above clip, I realized a marvelous synergy here. Consider the humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich. How dare I take up space on a food blog writing about that most basic of kiddie food?

Well, like the above clip, a good PB&J arises out of nothingness. Nothing to make. No better ideas. No more pasta. No time for anything else before the blood-sugar level of your progeny hits bottom and the screaming starts.

Nothing but two pieces of bread, a swipe of peanut butter and the very last blurp of jelly or jam between them. Nothing but comfort and familiarity to save the day. Nothing simpler to nourish the nits. Nothing like a quick PB&J for yourself as well, because as long as you're making them, one will pull you through 'til dinner, and didn't your mom make them for you when you were a kid? Of course she did. Nothing but memories.

Everybody has a different version they prefer. Certain brands of peanut butter, favored jellies. Some people like honey instead of jam. Lots of people still insist on somebody cutting the crusts off their PB&Js. There's nothing to a PB&J, but we want them like we remember them. Like the ones Mom made us. And so, like the above painting so deliciously illustrates, turns out there's a lot of something to be coaxed out of nothingness.

Tell me a favorite PB&J memory of your own.  

Dumb luck poached eggs

There are very few dishes that remind me of home. My mom didn't really cook, although she recently tried to argue this point by reminding me that she put a chicken in the crock pot almost every week, and between that and her infamous creamed tuna on toast, who was I to continue claiming I grew up in a culinary wasteland of TV dinners and PB&J's made with diet jelly product?

Still, my memories remain. And one of the only  meals I remember fondly from my childhood kitchen are poached eggs. For whatever reason, my mom had the secret of making them, and every so often when she had the time she would spoon them out over crisp English muffins for us, to our great delight.

Because of that, I am often the only one at the diner to order Eggs Benedict, so I can get a couple of egg, poached by a professional and smothered in Hollandaise sauce, over English muffins, with some forbidden Canadian bacon thrown in for extra pleasure.

These eggs have been on my mind lately. I've been coming across scandalously good-looking photos of poached eggs; I've been stumbling on recipes; essays on the egg, and so on. Wednesday, with the nits at their dad's and out of all the usual breakfast foodstuffs (Jack, in his profound late-summer boredom, ate an entire container of blueberries the day before), I tried my hand at the simple-but-often-vexing poached egg.

No recipe, just some vague memories of how it's done. I did quickly peruse Deb's take on how to poach an egg on her blog, Smitten Kitchen, and took her advice to drop a dollop of vinegar into my water. Not sure why that's important, but if she does it I can only blindly follow. Be warned: Her photos are Triple X food porn.

The results, as you can see above, were quite pleasing. Now if I had had better bread, and not Van de Camp's faux wheat loaf left over from beach camping, and some freshly picked tomatoes to go on the side, it could have been a memory. Better still if I could be sure of my ability to do it again, maybe for the kids, and make a memory for them. But that would be asking for too much. So I sat in my sunny kitchen and enjoyed the meal, and the quiet, and thanked the goddess of poached eggs for watching over me.