Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Backwards Day

In Junior High, Backwards Day was the day everyone wore their clothes backwards. My sister, Elaine, wrote me that I should make a blog post on a kind of Backwards Day in today's New York Times cooking section in two ironically contrasting articles.

She suggested that I should check up on Ending the Day Where It Began about "upscale restaurants that serve desserts that are variations of breakfast favorites. The desserts included using the milk from the bottom of a cereal bowl (after the fruit loops or whatever had soaked in it) to flavor panna cotta." I think she may share my memory that we were forced to eat up all the milk in the bottom of our cereal bowls when we were kids. I for one did not like it. The author quotes Pichet Ong, the chef and owner at the trendy restaurant P*ong:
“It makes sense to use the same ingredient pantry for breakfast and dessert,” said Mr. Ong, who tops chocolate-oatmeal cupcakes with browned-butter butter cream frosting with bacon fat and maple syrup. The distinction between muffins and cupcakes, he said, can be just a little sugar and vanilla.
Then, there's Your Morning Pizza -- suggesting that one should eat savory dinner food for breakfast instead of sweet cereal, pancakes, and donuts. The author mentions pizza of course and also polenta, "black olives, quinoa, miso, dried tomatoes, sesame oil, bok choy, wheat berries, roasted carrots." No thanks. I'll stick with smoked fish when I don't want oatmeal with brown sugar or dry cereal. Never did like donuts that much for breakfast OR dinner.

Thanks, Elaine!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In a nice coincidence, today Tracy was in a store that was selling interesting syrups, so she bought some on spec, because we've been asked to host another in our ongoing series of Math, Pizza, and (possibly Wii) Bowling evenings. She'd recently heard that college students like breakfast food at supper time, so she thought that instead of pizza, we might try some combination of pancakes, waffles, and French toast. I promised to ask the experts, three students with whom I talked about the pending event last week. Today I saw one of the three, my independent study student. After an hour of playing with irreducible polynomials over Galois fields on the computer, with an eye to creating some new error-correcting codes, I asked her what she thought. "You can't go wrong with pancakes or pizza", she replied. So we'll have a math backwards day after spring break.