Classics Wednesday.

Do I plan out my food for the day to fit some kind of theme as though there were an editorial board trying to push some zany new spin into my columns?
No. Not very often, anyway.
Today, things just happened to go that way. Sometimes I do plan a meal days or weeks in advance, but this was also not the case for Wednesday. I guess I was just in the mood for some comfort foods.

The breakfast comfort came from breakfast burritos. Two today, to help hold up the cup of coffee I expected to drink later in the morning. Two slices of bacon, two eggs worth of scrambly goodness, and two kinds of shredded cheese (jack and cheddar) wrapped in two tortillas. When you find something that works for you, just go with it.

For lunch I thought I'd mix up an old classic, but it turns out that it was a bad idea. Even though two foods might be great on their own, it doesn't mean the flavors necessarily blend well. For as much as you sometimes get great surprises of flavor matches that seem to thwart your intuition, often things that seem safe enough together turn oddly caustic or upsetting when actually eaten together. In this case it was cabbage rolls and morel-infused mashed potatoes.

I'd roasted some of the morels so that they'd dry out for use in soups and sauces later. Unfortunately they got a little more brown than is ideal, but it accented their nutty flavors very well. I dropped a few in the water that I boiled the potatoes in, and let the water cook off as I mashed the potatoes so that they preserved the character of the morels. They have a nutty character that might go really well with some pork chops or roasted squash drizzled in truffle oil. They don't really go with the sour tomato and cabbage juice of the cabbage rolls.

Something about having the dill and sauerkraut on my palate just made the potatoes seem out of place and the rich tones of the mushrooms were ever so slightly triggering my gag reflex and making a really unpleasant feeling in my stomach. I couldn't quite pinpoint the problem. The potatoes themselves tasted fine, but so much of them were saturated with the juices and sauce from the cabbage rolls, they weren't really worth eating. Such a shame for those morels to have gone to waste like that, but at least I have the knowledge now and can pass it on to you.


Thankfully, my lunch buddy for the day got a wrap from Burrito Box and didn't eat his chips, so I had fresh tortilla chips and salsa to round out my lunch after a third of it proved to be inedible.

For dinner I had a newer classic in my life, although it's been a classic Japanese food item for quite some time. Most westerners are not familiar with Japanese curry, which is similar to its Indian counterparts almost in texture only, although Japanese curries do tend to feature coriander. Japanese curries have more in common with a beef stew or a heavily spiced pork gravy than with Indian curry.

This picture shows the traditional plating method of rice to one side, curry to the other, with the pork cutlet balancing between. GoGo Curry on 38th St. between 7th and 8th Ave. doesn't plate their curry like this. They put the rice in a mound in the bottom of the bowl with the curry over the entire thing and then the katsu (fried pork cutlet) on top. This actually left less room for gravy and didn't allow for as much fine control of the rice-to-curry ratio as you were eating. GoGo Curry, please fix this.

The curry sauce itself was pretty good. I still crave the curry from CoCo Ichiban Curry House in Japan, but as far as my options go in Manhattan this is definitely good curry and worth the trip, especially if you've never tried Japanese Curry before. Unlike CoCoIchi's, which I would eat as often as I eat breakfast burritos here in the states, will be back to GoGo Curry, but maybe only once a month.

Then, as if I hadn't eaten enough yet today, there was some late-night vittles for the heavily relaxing crowd that was hanging out at my apt. In order to help them stabilize after all their relaxing, I whipped up some bacon and scrambled eggs before everyone trotted off home. I didn't eat any of the bacon myself, and just enough of the eggs to gauge how well I did in making them. I didn't have time for home fries and no bread for toast, so I just fried some tortillas cut into triangles in the bacon fat. Remember, kids: DON'T WASTE BACON FAT!!!! IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!!!! Unless you are vegetarian or Jewish or Muslim, in which case I'd recommend just avoiding bacon altogether. You're better off not knowing.

Also, there was the quaint but disappointing final appearance of morels for a while. I went to make floured and fried morels, but when I opened the bag of fresh ones, only two had managed to escape the clutches of mold. Sadly, I had to throw the rest out, and having cut the two survivors in half, I managed to make four small, unattractive, utterly delectable appetizers to the breakfast-at-11 fried-food free-for-all.

Man, irresponsible use of hyphens is almost as fun as rampant run-on sentences.