How about the opposite: when good food happens to bad cooks.

Got a fool-proof recipe for those people who can’t boil water, or those who can but are still looking for something yummy and easy? I  nominate my BFF’s mom’s bacon-wrapped water chestnuts. She could butcher even the simplest recipes, which led to BFF eating over at my house at least a few times a week. However, the bacon wrapped water chestnuts were the bomb. I never saw the actual recipe, but it must’ve been something like – wrap water chestnuts in bacon, marinate in soy sauce, and bake. on nom nom!

Anything wrapped in bacon will be a success. My beloved BigStepdaddy used to make terrific bacon and other breakfast foods every weekend. He wasn’t so much a bad cook as a cook whose repetoire was limited to brunch (and, occasionally, barbecued chicken on the grill). Being an excellent husband, he made breakfast in bed for MamaSharper nearly every weekend, and he always served her first, leaving me and my sister prowling hungrily around the kitchen asking “Dad? Did you make ours yet?” I have never had French toast as good as BigStepdaddy’s French toast, made with Arnold’s thick-sliced white bread. His buckwheat pancakes were awesome. So were his scrambled eggs and crispy bacon. None of those dishes is difficult (or expensive) to make, and with repeated practice, you can impress everyone by serving up a great breakfast.

So have at it, commenters! Got a favorite good recipe for bad cooks? Or a story about a bad cook who surprised you? Tell us!

Breakfast Fuck Yeah!

Y’all, it’s time to talk about breakfast.

You see, while we were all holed up last week during Hurricane Irene, my friends and I embarked on a long chain e-mail about how if the end of the world were coming (Yes, we were being melodramatic. And we were bored. Bear with me.) we all really wished we’d had the foresight to make a huge breakfast before the storm descended. Because we all LOVE breakfast. Then, when it appeared the worst had passed us by, some of us got together and made a huge breakfast.

Because I have to get up earlier than I like and head to work, breakfast most days is a bowl of cereal and juice. But on weekends, I pull out all the stops. I have a boyfriend who I was convinced stayed over on Fridays not for the sex, but because I made omelettes and cheese grits on weekends.  I also make rockin’ French toast, as taught to me by BigStepdaddy, who—I’m happy for you and Imma let you finish—makes the best French toast of all time. Pancakes? Yeah, I make those bitches from scratch. And I am probably the only Jew in Brooklyn who has a genuine bacon press in her kitchen. I am also rather fond of the iconic full English breakfast, probably because when I was a student in England, it was the only decent meal the university cafeteria turned out, and I love spicy Mexican breakfasts with chilaquiles, frijoles and green chile sauce.

I realize not everyone is a breakfast lover. Late risers could care less and usually go directly to lunch. One of my college roommates had a cold can of Coke for breakfast every morning and considered it the perfect way to start the day. But there’s something about a big-ass breakfast that makes it the ideal meal. You can overindulge and it won’t keep you awake at night with indigestion like a huge dinner will. There’s evidence that people who eat breakfast regularly, especially children, have higher energy levels during the day and are generally healthier than those who skip it. And breakfast food is just so damn good.

What’s your favorite breakfast? Or are you happy with just coffee and a cigarette? Do you have recipes to share? Please share! (And enjoy my favorite breakfast recipe after the jump).

Nom Nom Cheese Grits

1 cup of grits (Do not use the instant kind—they taste like wallpaper paste. Get the regular Quaker brand, or a fancier organic brand like Bob’s Red Mill. If you are a serious OG Southerner, you might have the stone-ground kind, like Anson Mills Antebellum or Carolina Plantation, which are coarser and take longer to cook but are the tastiest of all.)

2 cups of water

1 cup of milk (Skim is fine, whole milk is better. If you were to use cream or half-and-half, the end result will be very rich but it will taste amazing. Don’t even think of using soy milk or rice milk. If you’re a vegan or can’t have dairy, just use water).

Bring water and milk to a boil (the milk will foam, so stir and watch out!). Add grits and a few dashes of salt. Turn heat way down until grits are just simmering. Stir for about 5 minutes.

When the grits have thickened, add a spoonful of butter or two—if you used skim milk, go for two—and a handful of shredded or grated cheese. I’m fond of plain old sharp orange cheddar, but if you wanted to be shmancy and Continental, you could use gorgonzola or parmesan (this is, after all, pretty much identical to making polenta). If you can’t have cheese, I’m terribly sorry. You can make this with vegan cheese, but it’s harder to get vegan cheese to melt easily, so your end result might be a little stringy or oily.

Just before serving, stir in as much cayenne pepper as you personally like. If you don’t like hot pepper, I do not judge you, but SRSLY, the heat makes cheese grits even better. Or you can just douse them in the hot sauce of your choice after the fact.

Serve with eggs, or just by itself. A thick version of cheese grits has also been served in my family for Thanksgiving dinner in a casserole dish with a little melted cheese on the top (cook on the stovetop, put in casserole, run under broiler for a few minutes).

Best Easter Candy EVA. Recognize.

This upcoming week those of us in the Western world get a special holiday twofer–Passover and Easter. Two great tastes that…well, don’t necessarily go together. Unless you’re me, and you grew up celebrating both holidays.

Fortunately my Jewish family doesn’t keep kosher. We’d have seders, but the ban on bread, pasta, breakfast cereal, rice, corn, etc. wasn’t enforced. But while we didn’t give things up, I always embraced matzo. These days, sarah.of.a.lesser.god and I are totally Team Matzo. It’s crunchy, it’s starchy, it goes well with peanut butter and jelly, cream cheese, humuus, runny brie—anything you can schmear. Plus it has a shelf life of, like, 200 years, so you can buy a couple boxes at Passover and enjoy it for months.

Otherwise, for a carb-lover like me, Passover is not a great eating holiday. Fortunately, my mother’s family is Christian, which meant church with my grandparents and going face-down into an Easter basket full of candy, which my mom and grandma made for me every year. MamaSharper and I are devoted to marshmallow Peeps, although we disagree about the best way to eat them. My mother likes to rip open the wrapping so they can air out and get kind of dried and chewy. I like them super-squashy, right out out of the package (although I will not turn down the aged variety). But the best Easter candy ever made is Reese’s Eggs, which improve on the already fantastic Reese’s Cups by increasing the peanut butter-to-chocolate ratio so you get more sweet, salty, slightly grainy peanut-y goodness in every bite. For me, an Easter egg will always be a Reese’s Egg.

Do you have a favorite Easter/Passover nom? Plz to share…

HoagieMC sez: ALL UR BURGERZ IZ BELONG TO ME!

In addition to sea-haggery, beach-lounging, boogie-boarding, Trivial Pursuit-playing and an unholy amount of daytime napping, we Harpies have been spending a lot of our beach vacation nomming.

Last night we had a spectacular backyard barbecue. The sun was warm, the beer was cold, the grill was just right. The menu included:

–Veggie skewers of garden-fresh squash and sweet onions.

–Grilled portobellos and poblano peppers.

–The sweetest local sweet corn ever.

–Hot dogs–both veggie and Hebrew National–with all the fixin’s.

–Potato chips, including regular, salt ‘n’ vinegar and crab flavors.

–Hamburgers with all the fixin’s.

As it turned out, the hamburgers were the hit of the evening, and not only for us Harpies. You see, also vacationing with us is SarahMC’s beagle, Hoagie. We are all completely besotted with Hoagie and he’s been getting loved up like Robert Pattinson at a “Twilight” premiere. Hoagie, however, is besotted with food of all kinds. If there is food being consumed, he will be nearby in the hopes that you’ll share. Last night, as I was flipping burgers off the grill and onto plates, I put my own medium-rare burger onto a bun and set it on the low garden wall near me. I was passing the last burger to SarahMC when I realized I’d miscounted and had made more than we needed. Just as the words, “Oh, we have an extra burger,” came out of my mouth, there was a blur of movement in my peripheral vision and I turned just in time to see Hoagie dive for my burger, which I’d foolishly left within reach. He managed to gulp down about half of it before anyone could react, and then we were all laughing so hard he had time to get most of the other half down too. I settled for the extra burger and Hoagie looked exceedingly pleased with himself.

There have also been some excellent desserts featuring some combination of marshmallows and melted chocolate, including S’mores:

And chocolate fondue:

Also, there was the highly addictive, salty, cheesy, nuclear-meltdown-orange barrel of Cheesy Balls that PhDork’s Dude picked up at the grocery store. They lasted about 24 hours:

Feminists love balls...especially cheesy ones.

The balls, actually, may have been the most popular food item of the entire vacation, but then again, we have 36 hours left…

Devil's food with brown sugar buttercream. WIN! Via howtoeatacupcake.net @ Flickr.

I normally don’t read O Magazine, but a friend who knows my passion for food just forwarded me an essay entitled “Love, Loss and What I Ate“, the title obviously cribbed from Ilene Beckerman’s wonderful book Love, Loss and What I Wore (which was recently adapted into a play by Delia and Nora Ephron).

In the essay, author Lisa Kogen reminisces about the foods of her life and the emotions they trigger, like hope (pizza from Buddy’s in Detroit) and familial love (beef soup, the veggies hand-chopped). Books by women, from Kate Jacobs’s Comfort Food to Erica Bauermeister’s The School of Essential Ingredients to Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate have always played on the intimate connection between food and emotion. In Kogen’s essay, the kicker is her description of her go-to food in times of tragedy, the “dessert potato.”

Upon breaking up with my first true love, a delightful young gentleman whom I still affectionately refer to as “evil incarnate,” I invented the ultimate my-boyfriend-has-just-dumped-me food…Steve Jobs created the iPod, but let the record show that it was I who brought the world the dessert potato.

Yes, the dessert potato, because nothing says “I’m hurting” quite like a woman who hasn’t showered in nine days chowing down on a Yukon Gold that’s been slathered in sprinkles and marshmallow fluff while the greatest hits of Janis Ian play on in an endless loop of sheer misery.

Personally, I think the dessert potato sounds kind of icky. But hey, I’m not going to judge people for their comfort food–whatever works, eat it! The English make endless cups of tea in times of crisis, we Southerners have a casserole for every occasion–the active ingredient is usually at least one variety of Campbell’s condensed soup–and chicken soup “aka Jewish penicillin” will cure whatever ails you. Unfortunately, stress gives me a stomachache and kills my appetite dead, so in times of loss, I only want what I absolutely love: pudding, tortilla chips, slabs of cake. We know that eating sugar releases seretonin–the body’s natural feel-good chemical–in our brains and that people with low brain seratonin crave sugar. All those yummy sweets and starches, including the dessert potato, are cheap anti-depressants.

For me, family togetherness is my grandma’s Elston casserole, named for a long-ago Mrs. Elston who belonged to my family’s church and used to bring the casserole to church suppers. Strangely, it’s full of stuff I do not like and/or rarely eat–like ground beef, Campbell’s condensed tomato and mushroom soup and Velveeta cheese–but one bite makes me feel comfy and nostalgic and satisfied. Celebration means chocolate icebox cake, which I made for the Harpies at my birthday party this year; it’s possibly the most delicious food known to humankind. And, of course, bacon just means joy and indulgence no matter when or how it’s served.

Love, loss, a good meal…What’s your favorite comfort food? Serve it up in the comments!