I’m completely blown away by what’s been happening on Wall Street since Friday, but I don’t have anything particularly intelligent to add. There are good articles about it here and here, but the situation keeps changing.
Instead of rambling on about moral hazards, financial contagion, and the potential meltdown of the U.S. financial system, I’m going to post about food. I caught this meme about food from Freshhell at Life in Scribbletown. I’m not going to mention chocolate because I’m afraid of sounding like Cathy.
1. How do you like your eggs?
Depends. Most days I have an egg white omelet with one whole egg mixed in as part of my breakfast (along with the oatmeal I’ve mentioned previously). If I’m being a little decadent, I’ll have three eggs over easy on toast. If I’m being a lot decadent, I’ll have eggs benedict. I also like my eggs scrambled, soft boiled, hard boiled, or poached. I kind of like eggs.
2. How do you take your coffee/tea?
To paraphrase Montgomery Burns, I take it black, like my lawyer’s heart.
3. Favorite breakfast food:
Oatmeal. And Mrs. Unfocused’s cinnamon rolls, but I don’t eat those very often.
4. Peanut butter:
Not in our house — Junior is allergic to peanuts. We eat soynut butter. I like the crunchy, but am perfectly happy with the smooth.
5. What kind of dressing on your salad?
Vinagrette or honey mustard.
6. Coke or Pepsi?
I hardly ever drink pop, but will always choose a Diet Coke over a Diet Pepsi, and prefer Coke Zero to either.
7. You’re feeling lazy. What do you make?
Soynut butter and jam sandwich. Toasted bread. Blueberry, strawberry, or apricot jam.
8. You’re feeling really lazy. What kind of pizza do you order?
Half cheese (for the kids), half veggie (for the Mrs. and me). Thin crust.
9. You feel like cooking. What do you make?
One of my many failures as a human being is that I hardly ever cook at all (except for eggs and oatmeal). I’d probably make breakfast for dinner: scrambled eggs for the Mrs. and me (and Unfocused Girl if she’s in the mood), eggless pancakes for the whole family (Junior’s cursed allergies again), toast, and bacon, if we have any.
10. Do any foods bring back good memories?
Soon after the Mrs. and I got married, we came up with our own tradition for breakfast on Christmas morning, which we have continued since we had children. There is a very good bagel place in Skokie; it’s a little bit of a hassle to get to, but the bagels are worth it. On Christmas Eve, I go there and buy bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon, and that’s what we eat for breakfast on Christmas.
11. Do any foods bring back bad memories?
Yogurt. I always hated yogurt, and once, when I was a kid — around 6 or 7 — when I felt nauseous, my father badgered me into eating a bowl of yogurt in the belief that it would make me feel better. I’m not sure how many bites I took before I had to run to the bathroom to throw up, but every heave tasted like yogurt (sorry for the mental image there). I don’t eat yogurt, and I still can’t stand the smell more than 30 years later. Yes, I know it’s good for you. You can have mine.
12. Do any foods remind you of someone?
Fruity bagels (blueberry, apple, etc.) remind me of Satan, because fruity bagels are the official breakfast food of Hell.
13. Is there a food you refuse to eat?
Yogurt and fruity bagels.
14. What was your favorite food as a child?
For candy, it was Whoppers, until I was 10 or so. I somehow got my hands on a quart container of Whoppers, and ate all of them. I did not eat Whoppers again until college.
For real food, it was lobster. My father and I used to go camping in Maine with the Sierra Club, and at the end of the trip we’d have a steak and lobster cook-out (ah, roughing it!), and I always liked throwing the lobsters into the pots. I was, apparently, utterly without empathy for our crustacean brethren.
15. Is there a food that you hated as a child but now like?
Peanut butter and hot dogs. When I was a kid, I was so picky about what I would eat that my mother was reduced to feeding me Campbell’s tomato soup for breakfast and jelly sandwiches (grape jelly and white bread) for lunch.
16. Is there a food that you liked as a child but now hate?
Not that I can think of. I still have a little trouble with Whoppers.
17. Favorite fruits and vegetables:
Apples, grapes, bananas, blueberries, strawberries, tomatoes, spinach, leeks, carrots.
18. Favorite junk food:
Barbecue-flavored potato chips.
19. Favorite between meal snack:
Ideal: Fruit smoothie with whey protein.
Between meal snack I actually eat most days: bag of pretzels.
20. Do you have any weird food habits?
No. What? Why are you looking at me like that. I don’t, okay? That isn’t weird. Lots of people do it.
21. You’re on a diet. What food(s) do you fill up on?
The harshest diet I ever went on was the beginning of my senior year of college; I was very overweight, but I was in a play opening in two months in which I was playing a homeless man. I dropped 30-40 pounds (it didn’t last) by smoking two packs a day and eating pickles as my only snack between meals.
22. You’re off your diet. Now what would you like?
Barbecue-flavored potato chips, fried potato skins, and Giordano’s deep-dish pizza. And beer.
23. How spicy do you order Indian/Thai?
Medium spicy.
24. Can I get you a drink?
Yes, please. Dewar’s and soda, no twist.
25. Red or White Wine?
Red.
26. Favorite dessert?
A bowl of fresh berries, with just a sprinkle of brown sugar on top.
HAHAHAHAHAHA — No, I’m kidding. Let’s see, in no particular order:
— freshly baked chocolate chip cookies;
— the chocolate mousse at Brasserie Jo;
— chocolate cake made from the egg-free, nut-free mix we use for Junior, with Mrs. Unfocused’s frosting; and
— the blueberry pie we get from the farm store at the beach.
27. The perfect nightcap?
The drunken apricot: a piece of frozen apricot, a shot of Southern Comfort, in a glass of champagne.
Consider yourself tagged.
The Unfocused Life 
Red eats soybutter sandwiches at daycare because they have a no-peanut policy. Luckily, neither of my children has food allergies.
The drunken apricot sounds interesting. I don’t think I can drink Southern Comfort after college. I think you know what I mean.
I might do this one later.
Freshhell – on behalf of all parents of peanut allergic kids, let me say: sorry about that. I hope Red adjusted well. That said, it always warms my heart to hear about another school, preschool, or daycare banning peanuts, since it just takes the world one step closer to the day I can take Junior to a major league baseball game (last time I went to Wrigley, there were peanut shells on the ground up to my ankles). One of the nearby minor league teams has a peanut-free day every summer, so I’ll probably take him to a game next summer if they’re still doing it.
Mike – we tried it one year with frozen slices of pear and a shot of pear liqueur instead of the apricot and SoCo — it wasn’t bad, but not the same at all. I was lucky — somehow, I managed to avoid Southern Comfort until I was old and married and too mature to get into trouble with it. Or much trouble. Too much trouble, anyway.
Oh no – Red prefers soybutter over peanut butter. I actually started both girls on cashew butter and soy butter before introducing peanut butter later on. So, she’s good. My only annoyance is that every time there’s a new director at the daycare, I get the peanut butter question and have to re-explain that NO her sandwich does NOT have peanut butter in it. Pinky swear.
That sounds annoying. My daughter did the same thing for a couple of years — brought soynut butter sandwiches to their peanut-free school, but she had the same teacher, who was the only one who saw her lunch (and since we have one of the allergic kids, she was inclined to believe us).
One of the things that worries us about her new school is that it isn’t peanut-free, and if we want to send Junior there, we have to find a way to get comfortable with that.