My bloody mary tells me I’m old now

I was fifteen years old. A family I babysat for invited me to watch their kids for a couple weeks during their summer vacation on the beach. While the adults got drunk and played games, I hung out with the other babysitters and occasionally kept an eye on some children. Let the record show that I was a terrible babysitter with zero instincts for taking care of children, but I felt at ease playing card games with drunk adults. This is where I saw my first bloody mary.  Like all normal people, I thought it looked disgusting.   Like all millennials, I turned twenty-something and discovered that bloody marys are just foods that double as alcohol, topped with vinegar. They are brilliant. They are delicious. I love them dearly. I drank them at adulty-but-still-college-level-boozey brunches with my friends and colleagues. I hung out with adults who had real jobs. I started dating a man who was six years older than me, and I felt at ease. But deep down, bloody marys were alcohol, and I was still essentially a child. I had my whole entire life ahead of me. I was fine. A couple months ago, I turned twenty-five. I know I like to pretend I know everything, have all my life pieces together, and am totally chill when things go completely to shit. For the most part, I kind of am.  Because when I graduated from college and joined a non-profit organization with a two-year commitment to teach in an underserved school district in rural Mississippi, I was like, “Whatevs. Two years is nothin!” And when I decided midway through the program that I wanted to be a publisher, I found an elite publishing program and threw all my money and references into it, thinking, “Whatevs. If it doesn’t work out at least I tried right!” And when I left the non-profit after my two-year commitment ended to pursue a publishing career, applied to approximately several many thousand publishing positions, and could only find one through a contact back in my old college town that published Sunday school curriculum, I figured, “I’ll do this for a few years and then move on to something bigger and better! NBD!” But now, I’m twenty-five. I’m running out of years to find something bigger and better. I’m getting to the point where I should be at least somewhat settled. All of my friends are starting new jobs in new, exciting cities, and I’m still stuck in my small college town publishing material I don’t like with people who judge me for not going to church.  Yesterday, I had a bloody mary, and it gave me heartburn. 

Look. I know I’ve only written dumb stuff about food before. But this is very very important to me as a straight person who is heartbroken and doesn’t know how the fuck to mourn. I don’t have a target on my back—my gay friends and family do. I didn’t lose a piece of my own security—my gay friends and family did. I’m sitting through all these news reports and Facebook posts that are refusing to recognize an essential piece of the humanity of the Pulse victims and their friends and families. Refusing to support and help the queer community mourn in the way they need to mourn. Refusing to acknowledge a widespread culture that breeds these hate crimes, thereby preventing any efforts to stop this from happening again. Thereby ensuring the ever-present threat of murder and assault and harassment and discrimination towards the queer community. It scares me. And it enrages the fuck out of me. So. From an ally, here’s something to keep in mind after you’ve read the above list:  1. Not everyone begins or ends at the same stage of the “ally spectrum.” Maybe you’ve always been an in-your-face, writes-letters-to-senators kind of ally. Maybe the news of the Orlando shooting touched you in a way that made you decide to try being an ally for the first time, but you don’t know where to begin. Maybe your friend or family member just came out, and you want to be an ally just for them, but you’re scared to say or do the wrong thing. It’s okay to learn. It’s okay to make mistakes. 2. But it’s not okay to not try your best to seek out, listen, and learn from LGBTQ+ voices. Straight people like me have no authority here. I’m just here to tell you to listen to the queer community, just in case you’re at a stage where listening to a straight person talk about allyship will be more convincing and relatable to you.   3. And make sure those voices are diverse. Make your allyship intersectional. Always.  4. Here is a wonderful guide to being an ally from the Straight for Equality organization. This will guide you in your allyship every day of the year, not just during Pride Month, and not only in the aftermath of destruction. Read the whole. damn. thing. Love,  Michelle

How to Fuck Up Jambalaya (and avoid fucking up other things in the future)

Usually, my brain automatically starts dismissing information as soon as I look at a recipe. My vision tunnels and all I can see is a bunch of voices telling me, condescendingly, what to do and how to do it. And how dare they. 

I obviously have some control issues, but hey, there are worse things. Rather than listen to a recipe tell me what to do, I pull out only the information I find useful (that’s right, ME, I AM IN CONTROL NOW) and I merge it with information from other recipes. What I usually end up with is totally fine. 

On a great day, I end up with something brilliant. Sometimes, though, I end up with a monster. Wednesday’s jambalaya is that monster. 

I decided to make jambalaya after watching an episode of Good Eats (praise be Alton Brown, praise be Netflix). He wasn’t even making jambalaya—he was making traditional red beans and rice. But I’m white and from suburban Georgia, so jambalaya is basically the same thing, right? Either way, I watched my man AB do it, and thought, that’s totally something I can do. Easily. Plus, I know what jambalaya tastes like. Growing up, I had

actual Cajun neighbors.

So it didn’t matter that my dad was from Indiana and my mom mostly fed us hotdogs and box macaroni and cheese. I knew what I was doing.

Jambalaya is a Louisiana Creole dish made with rice, stock, meat, and vegetables. Everything cooks into a stew together in one big pot (unlike gumbo, where the rice is cooked separately), and it’s delicious. The meat is usually sausage and shrimp, and the vegetables are the “holy trinity” in Creole and Cajun cooking: celery, onion, and green bell pepper. I also added garlic, which is definitely a thing you can do, which I know, because I Definitely Read It Somewhere Once (TM).

The whole thing is easy enough in theory. Add meat and vegetables to a pot, then add rice and stock. Ideally, it all cooks down and when the rice is finished cooking the dish is DoNe!

Rather than the classic andouille sausage, I found some extra spicy kielbasa sausage on sale (cha-ching). But because I wanted that delicious Cajun flavor, I added some Creole seasoning and plenty of salt to the sausage and holy trinity veggies, as per the instructions from one recipe that I found. I sautéed these ingredients only for a few minutes—long enough to sear the sausage so it would hold its flavor while cooking in the stew. 

When the sausage was seared, I added diced tomatoes and shrimp. After stirring the pot, I tasted the mixture just to make sure my flavors were on the right track. 

Alas, I was a little disappointed by how bland it tasted. I knew heat would bring out more of the veggie and meat flavors, but the tomatoes seemed to water things down a little. No big deal, I thought, because: When in doubt, add salt™.  

I also added a few dashes of Creole seasoning just for good measure. What’s the worst that could happen? My dish is

too spicy

? PUH-LEASE. 

I followed the measurements for stock and rice from another recipe I had found, one that used chicken stock instead of beef stock, because y’all. Get ready for this. I. MADE. MY. OWN. CHICKEN. STOCK. I know, I know. Not even I saw this coming. 

Full disclosure: chicken stock is stupid easy to make. Buy a rotisserie chicken (they’re like, $6 at Kroger), pull all the meat off of it (you can feed yourself for a week, not kidding), and boil the carcass and skins in water with celery and carrots and salt and pepper for a few hours. Do it on a weekend, or start the pot when you get home from work as long as you’re not trying to use it for your dinner that night. It’s worth it. It’s wonderful.

So anyways, I added my chicken stock and rice, and let the whole pot boil until the rice was cooked. It was amazing. The consistency was perfect, even though I’m very bad at cooking rice. It smelled incredible.

It seriously

 looked like actual jambalaya. 

But oh my god it tasted like a salt brick vomited in the ocean. 

If you make your own chicken stock, which, please do, make sure you dilute it before using it in soups or stews, especially if the other ingredients are already salty. And if you’re using more than one recipe to make a dish your own, which, please do, pay close attention to the types of flavors you see in the ingredients. 

Maybe don’t add salt when in doubt

™

every single time. Maybe check your recipes first. Maybe taste your chicken stock before using it. Maybe good, authentic, delicious jambalaya needs to be made from a recipe, even if it seems condescending. Especially if you’re a white girl from suburban Georgia.

Don’t worry. I still ate the whole thing. 

[seriously, do whatever the fuck you want]

This is the number one rule of cooking. Purists can shove the fuck off. 

Do you want to save money? Buy old shit that’s about to expire, and cook with that. 

Do you want to mix & match five recipes together because you’re too lazy to buy all the ingredients? Do not doubt yourself. Do the thing. 

Do you want to spend all day making a fucking tablescape straight out of goddamn Garden & Gun? Praise be to you. 

You want popcorn for dinner? Do it. Eat a gigantic bowl and finish a whole bottle of red wine by yourself while you binge-watch X-Files on Netflix. 

anything can be a salad

The older I get, the more I realize the world has lied to me. Or, rather, the world has kept secrets from me.

It has shown me boxes of things, organized neatly and clearly and specifically, and boldly proclaimed, “THIS IS HOW THINGS WORK, DON’T ASK QUESTIONS, NO NO, I SIMPLY CAN’T BE BOTHERED” as it shrugs and saunters away. This is true of religion (I was raised in a strict, conservative Christian community in the South), morality, ethics, gender, sexuality, and just about every other thing that rises and converges to form my identity. But it’s also very true of food. Namely, of simple dishes that should literally

never

have a recipe attached to them, but because of the oppressive asshole world, they do anyway.

I’m talking, of course, about salad. 

Have you seen all the impractical, ornate, bossy salads in magazines? Vegetables and breads are cooked with all kinds of pricey appliances. There’s a garnish. There’s a fucking color scheme. All the ingredients are perfectly proportioned and always involve at least one ingredient that I have to Google, plus also jars? Why.

The world tells us, especially if we happen to be women, that we need to eat salads. And if you’re me, you are so excited that the world is finally telling you to do something that you love doing anyway. You belong here! You make sense! You fit neatly into the order of things! Rejoice!

But not so fast. The world then goes on to proclaim (again, boldly, as it shrugs, because it knows it makes no goddamn sense) what your salad should look like. And how big it should or shouldn’t be. And how much of an avocado it should probably have in it.

 And don’t get me wrong! There’s nothing wrong with a little guidance. Recipes are important and helpful (probably), and honestly, I’m grateful for all the wonderful and creative salad recipes in the latest volume of Southern Living. But I also simply cannot live up to those standards, and neither should you. 

Salad is a fancy word for “vegetables and other things in one happy place, together.” 

Salad is synonymous with ease and harmony. We don’t need to let the world tell us our salads have to contain some rare, difficult fruit and stressfully expensive cheese. We don’t need to let the world insist we go out of our way to buy a $20 ingredient from Whole Foods, only to leave the majority of said ingredient to spoil in the refrigerator door after a week. You know what salads really are? They are whatever makes us happy. Even if our happiness comes from saving money for beer and eating hot Cheetos. 

A salad can be anything, and anything can be a salad. It doesn’t even need to have lettuce. Half of it can be leftover pasta and chicken nuggets. As long as you’re happy. You actually cannot fuck this up.

Below, you’ll find an incredibly vague guide for the categories of ingredients that I think make a good, filling, something-to-look-forward-to salad. Don’t let anyone tell you your salads aren’t enough. They are enough. You are enough. Slay the day with your magical saladry. Let the world stand in awe of your knowledge and power as you reclaim your space and defy its silly rules.

Bear in mind that if you’re trying to eat for nutrients, this might not be for you. If you’re trying to eat for joy, this is for you. (But if your joy comes from tackling the rude and oppressive salad recipes from Pinterest, you’re a masochistic slave to the man, and this is not for you.)

CATEGORIES

lettuce

protein

crunch

complement

EXAMPLES

LETTUCE:

Lettuce just happens to be the cheapest and easiest vessel ingredient, usually. It can be whatever you want to carry all your yummy ingredients, if you don’t like lettuce. Replace it with literally any other vegetable, or like, tortilla chips. Play around with whatever you have. 

PROTEIN:

 This is the meaty part of your salad. Can be actual meat or fish, but can also be nuts or eggs. Some of my favorite proteins are: hummus, chickpeas, canned tuna, and baked salmon. Almonds are also really good, and add crunch.

CRUNCH:

 I eat croutons right out of the bag as a snack, so that’s always my favorite crunch. But get creative. I’ve used Cheetos (yeah, you thought I was joking earlier), Cheezits, crackers, toast, and canned water chesnuts, just off the top of my head.

COMPLEMENT:

Honestly, the above three categories already make a salad. But no one wants a salad with only three ingredients. Food is joy, people, and it should be a fucking

event

. Do yourself a favor, and look at the ingredients you’ve used so far. Is your salad mostly crunchy and savory? Throw in something creamy

 and sweet, like berries and cheese. Mostly dry? Throw in something that can act as a binder, or that adds some juiciness, like a juicy tomato and fatty avocado. Need to get rid of the leftover mac and cheese you drunkenly made last weekend at 3 a.m.? That’s a victorious ingredient, my friend. Use. That. Shit.

q & a : b a k e d b r i e

The other day, I decided to make a baked brie for my friends. Usually, when I make something for other people, my brain decides that all my friendships will be over if anything goes wrong. So you understand the pressure. 

The instructions looked simple enough. You wrap a thing of brie in puff pastry, brush with egg, oven, done. So I went to the store to buy the two ingredients, and here is where I spiraled. 

Below you’ll find all the questions that plagued me from the time I entered the dairy aisle to the time I put the brie in the oven. Further, you will find some answers, which may help you if you, too, are making life-or-death baked brie. You may or may not be able to find answers to the rest of these questions on the Internet, but, trust me, you definitely can’t find them on the first page of a Google search. 

Concerning how to serve the brie. 

What kind of crackers? 

Or is toasted bread better? 

What if the fruit makes the pastry too soggy? 

What if the nuts make it too hard to scoop? 

But wait. If it's wrapped in pastry, how do you even use crackers? Do you just eat it with a fork? Because I mean, how in the actual fuck am I supposed to expect people to eat a forkful of cheese? Is a spoon better maybe? 

Concerning the ingredients.

Can I see a direct comparison chart between mini Brie pastries and full sized pastries? Because they both seem great but obviously should be eaten in very different environments. What is the etiquette here? 

What the hell is puff pastry? Nothing in this section is called puff pastry. Not a damn thing.

Why are nuts so expensive? Where do these nuts come from, actually? They must come from a very specific climate, probably? Otherwise we could all grow them and then they would be cheaper. But Georgia has a fuckton of pecans, and they’re still pricey, so, why.

Oh god. Which fruit. Which fruit is best? 

Do I have to cut off the papery outside of the brie first?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I left the store with a tube of croissant dough and a tube-shaped thing of brie to be cut into mini brie pastries. I was happy I did not actually have to decide between full-size or mini brie: the mini brie tube was on sale. (If you’re also a good chef, you’ll understand that sales and manager specials determine about 80% of meal choices.) I did not buy nuts. I did not buy a fruit spread or any fruit. I left my fate to the gods.

Luckily, I didn’t have to pick a fruit for the brie, because my friend is a gentleman wizard and brought me a jar of homemade pepper jelly from middle-of-nowhere south Georgia. It’s the best damn pepper jelly I’ve had in a long time.

Here, I could say a lot about pepper jelly, but I won’t. But I’ll tell you to put it on cream cheese and eat it with crackers and your quality of life will improve. That’s not even a recipe you should try -- it’s just a good habit to get into.

When I recovered from my grocery-store induced paranoia, I rolled out the croissant dough and pinched the perforations together. I did not do a good job, and figured it would be fine. I cut a square out of the dough and spread enough jelly to make myself feel real good before wrapping it around the brie.

Mistake the first: cutting the dough before cutting the brie. The first piece of dough was entirely too large for the mini brie round, and it looked silly, like clown shoes, so I cut the rest of the brie before repeating the pinch-jelly-wrap step. None of my baby bries were the same size, which brings me to mistake the second:

I have since learned that a good thickness for mini brie is about two finger widths (like an inch-ish). If it’s thinner, the pastry totally takes over the cheese, and you mostly eat bread. Which, normally, is fine. Bread is dope. But if you cut a nice thick piece of brie, you get the buttery croissant and the melty sweet cheese in every bite. Make this your priority. Visualize your goal. This is what we trained for.

Here, I also learned that you do not have to cut the papery covering from the cheese. You can, but what a profound waste of time. Furtherly luckily, my other friend had made baked brie before, and instructed me to brush the pastries with egg white instead of a whole whisked egg before putting them in the oven. This has worked very well for me both times, so I stand by it. The whole egg might also be fine. Up to you.

Because I used mini brie rounds, the pastries come out almost perfectly bite sized, or at least, very easy to hold in your hand. This means that I still have no answer for any of my serving concerns. After eating the mini pastries, however, I can’t imagine eating a wheel of pastry-wrapped brie with a cracker. The croissant dough really puffs up (hence the cryptic “puff pastry” jargon) and scooping with a cracker would just be redundant. I will assume that, when using a full-sized brie round, you leave a knife and allow people to cut pieces for themselves, like any cheese board appetizer. But you might want to make sure you do a good job pinching the perforations together before baking, otherwise you will end up with my mistake the third:

Apparently, if the perforations aren’t pinched closed all the way, melted brie will melt out of the holes. And it will spread over your cookie sheet. And you will be forced to scrape burned, melted, delicious, buttery cheese from the pan like an animal. 

I actually enjoyed that part. 

So, in summary: 

Cut mini brie rounds a little over an inch thick.

Pinch dough perforations closed, cut into squares.

Spread your choice of jelly/fruit on the dough -- or don’t!

Wrap the rounds, brush with egg white.

Follow oven instructions on croissant dough (not puff pastry, dammit) package to bake.

Good luck keeping all your friendships and maybe even making new ones. 

The secret to cooking is to whisper fuck under your breath the whole time

I am a fake writer & other facts about my life

Well, here we are. The end of another year. Isn’t it great that we compartmentalize our time so we can feel less overwhelmed by a relative, nonlinear dimension that we have no control over? Anyways, besides becoming nihilistic, I changed and learned a lot during a major transition in my life this year. One of the things I learned is that I need to write to keep myself sane. This is not a thing I ever thought would happen to me, because I’m an editor, not a writer.  In reality, I’m probably just a sort of bad writer. 

I wanted to share a single post I made for my website that I completely forgot about until I tried to get to my personal email today and just typed my email address into my browser. My website popped up in Google. I felt like an idiot, was confused, and then was delighted to find my old website that I haven’t used almost ever! The single post on my site is about my transition from being a first year teacher to a second year teacher and the books I read that helped me do it. In this post, I say things like:

“My whole life was work, so I didn’t do anything that wasn’t work without feeling guilty for not working. I felt depleted and inhuman.”

And then I say things like: 

“I read some amazing books mostly by women (I cheated a little) and learned a lot. I felt less like an empty robot and more like a growing, learning human being.”

So I mean, if you like things that aren’t as nihilistic as I usually am, read this post! It has a happy ending and a book list and everything. And now, I feel inspired to make something for 2016 and maybe even become a real writer. Enjoy.

how to probably make eggs benedict

A few days ago, my sister asked me if I could pass along our Granny’s recipe for hollandaise sauce. 

I lost her recipe a long time ago and it’s like who even uses paper recipes when there’s The Internet? So, I sent her links to the recipes I use for the main elements of eggs benedict: the hollandaise sauce and the poached eggs. These foods are dazzling and tumultuous adventures. My emotions are present at all times throughout, so please be sensitive. I am glass. 

First, the hollandaise. I use Tyler Florence’s recipe for hollandaise sauce, but there are others that use fancier gadgets to make everything easier. Like blenders. Whatever.

The recipe is simple, so I’ll paraphrase. Whisk 4 egg yokes and a tablespoon of lemon juice in a stainless steal bowl for a very long time until your wrist hurts and you see lots and lots of bubbles. When you think you can’t whisk anymore, you can probably stop, but give it one more whisk for good measure. Then, melt a stick of unsalted butter in the microwave. Then, put an inch or two of water in the bottom of a double boiler and get it simmering before turning the heat down a little lower so it’s not really totally simmering anymore. Pour the egg/lemon juice mixture into the top of the double boiler, and whisk for your life while you very slowly pour the melted butter in. Keep whisking until it looks like hollandaise sauce. 

Congratulations! You are an equipped, capable, professional person, because everything went as planned when you followed all the directions and your life is perfect.

Quick Tips

Make the sauce first and then do the eggs. The sauce will keep in a bowl for a while, but poached eggs will get cold and gross. People say you can reheat them but I don’t recommend it unless you have Half-Blood Prince-level potions skills. Florence’s recipe suggests adding some hot water to the sauce if it gets too thick or cold while it's sitting, which works great and is pretty hard to fuck up. Plus if the eggs are hot, it’s fine if the sauce is a little chilly. Plus everyone is just impressed that you’re making hollandaise sauce anyway so if you point out that the sauce is a little cold they’ll immediately tell you how incredible you are and how delicious everything is. 

Try adding a little white pepper if you have it. It’s yummy for real.

Also, it says to use a stainless steel bowl over a pot of simmering water if you don’t have a double boiler, but I've used a regular microwavable ceramic bowl before. It doesn't get too hot, so I don't think the bowl will explode or anything if it's not stainless steel. Sorry if you try this and you explode a bowl. But seriously I think it will probably be fine? Obviously, a double boiler is better, but who even has one of those? The Half-Blood Prince maybe does.

Ways I have fucked this up

One time I used salted butter instead of unsalted butter. Do not recommend. Also, one time I accidentally used fake butter (vegetable oil sticks or something?) and everything was ruined. It was miserable. So, so bad. I felt like such a failure. I deserved no one’s love after that incident. Just thinking about it is making me ashamed of myself all over again and I’m sorry to everyone I have ever disappointed, really I’m going to try and make you all proud starting today I promise.

One time I also made the mistake of not getting the mixture hot enough. If it's too hot, the egg yolks will scramble, but if it's not hot enough, it doesn't completely emulsify, and the texture stays watery and it all tastes bland. Try to keep it as hot as you can without scrambling the eggs. If the eggs look like they're starting to scramble, remove the bowl from the water and whisk the shit out of 'em. Like your life depends on it. And if they actually scramble, the sauce will still taste fine! Just not as pretty. Do not tell a real chef that I said this. Do not read any of this if you are a real chef please.

And now, here's an easy guide for how to make poached eggs, from my lord and savior, Alton Brown.

This one is a little more complex, because poaching an egg actually does require Half-Blood prince-level potions skills. Basically, you crack eggs into a pan of hot water with a little vinegar for a few minutes to cook them and then you spatula them out and the end. 

If, like me, your rebellion against people telling you what to do makes you somewhat bad at following directions, take a breather with this one. Watch lovely Alton’s egg poaching video a few times. Read a blog post about poaching eggs. Just really take your time with these ideas until you Inception yourself into thinking you’re following your own directions. This is probably the best cooking advice I’ve ever given myself in general.

Quick Tips

Try to get the water temperature as close to 190 degrees as possible. Seriously, that sounds like a fake perfectionist thing, but it's not. Cooking thermometers are super cheap at like Kroger or anywhere with a kitchen section. Best investment ever, if you don't already have one. 

If you absolutely don't/won't have a thermometer, here is a trick that works in a completely unreliable way: bring the water to a simmer, and then turn the heat down until the water isn’t simmering. Let it continue to get cooler until it is just cool enough to where you can put your hand in it without getting burned. Like it should be hot enough to make you be like, oh dang that’s some hot water. But not hot enough to make you recoil in pain and obviously not hot enough to actually burn you. Please don’t burn yourself if you do this. Also, just please don’t use this method. Buy a thermometer.

If you don't have white vinegar, you can also use lemon juice. Both of these ingredients are there for their acidic properties, because it helps keep the egg white intact after you drop it in the water. (Is what I read somewhere I think.) And lemony egg is great for this dish because it blends in with the sauce anyway, so you don't have to worry about accidentally putting too much when your egg just won’t stick together and you pour in half the bottle out of desperation. The texture will be a little *squeaky*, but it’s all good. 

Ways I have fucked this up

Where to even begin. I have fucked this up so many times. 

Seriously do not stir the water, or even have it moving a little bit. One time I read a recipe that suggested stirring the water before dropping in the egg, and while this is a technique some people use, the water wasn't hot enough to hold the egg together and the egg completely fell apart in the pan. This has also happened when I dropped the egg in the water too fast and it was all wobbly everywhere and then suddenly it was all over the pan. So embarrassing. Like how am I supposed to get my life together if I can't even keep an egg intact?!    

Actually, every single step in this recipe is vital to success. The temperature, the level of water in the pan, everything. I have fucked up poached eggs so many times because it's all just very precise. People all over the Internet lie about how easy poaching eggs can be and I hope you never have to hear from those people. It’s not easy. It’s work, dammit. It is work.

Also, it's really hard to reheat poached eggs. Alton makes it seem easy, but he's a demigod. Or I'm just a failure at poaching. Either way, I like doing the eggs last, especially since you can cook 4+ at a time with this recipe. And if you fuck it up you can just start over and the hollandaise sauce will be fine for like, hours. Whereas if you do the eggs first, you might get a perfect one and fuck up the rest and then the perfect one gets cold while you poach more eggs. Don’t even start going down that path. It is depressing and full of anxiety.

So once you do those things, you can fry some ham and toast some english muffins or pop some biscuits in the oven. I usually don’t do this part myself because I make this dish for brunch with friends or my family on special occasions. I put my siblings to work or give my friends the boring oven tasks. They are all nice people who want to support my art, even if that means listening to me say fuck fuck fuck wait what the fuck was I doing?! over and over again to myself. We all have mimosas so it’s fine.

Have fun making this and impressing your friends. It’s okay to do it wrong and it’s okay to feel disappointed in yourself but don’t you dare let anyone tell you that poaching an egg or making hollandaise sauce is easy. You are not your mistakes. You are a veritable, well-rounded potionsmaster.