BREAKING NEWS: Breakfast Sandwich

Post-gym, pre-work, I habitually go to Caribou Coffee, where I buy a $4 version of the exact same banana and walnut oatmeal I make at home (except mine's better) and a coffee. Well, this morning, the line at Caribou was absurd (I HATE waiting in lines. Any other shape is fine; lines frustrate me.) -- so I crossed the street and hit up Potbelly, which was emptier than my tummy on Yom Kippur. I'd seen that they make breakfast sandwiches, but since I consider Potbelly a treat, I'd yet to try one.

MMMMMM. See? It's got some ham, and a little omelet, mushrooms, swiss, some lettuce, a tomato, and on that decent Potbelly bread (which doesn't, after all, have the same pungent aroma as the Subway bread). AND only $3. Downside? According to Potbelly.com, it pretty much negated my workout, calorically. Good thing I'm in it for the protein. =)

I'm gonna remember this.

Blessed be Brunch

I will be brief. The exceptionally talented blogger Suburban Sweetheart, my coworker and friend, loves breakfast potatoes. She adores them. They are her everything, in a Barry White sort of way. She ALWAYS gets them with any meal at which they are available, and has only the highest and most discriminating breakfast potato tastes and standards. And her Ideal Potato, in a Platonic sense, is the brunch buffet breakfast potato at the Marriott Crystal Something Hotel.

When she speaks of these potatoes, her head cocks slightly up and to the left. Her whole body tenses slightly, as though she is straining toward the image in her mind's eye. Her brow lifts and her eyes widen and become unfocused, as though directed inward with a Buddha-like concentration. I think she even tears up. She really, really likes these potatoes.

Being Hungry Sam, I've understood her passion in a general sense. But this last weekend, brunching after a hard morning of tikkun olam-ing, I had the glorious opportunity to taste the object of SS's long-unrequited desires. I had the Potatoes.

Please, please, allow me to be more precise. I had the Brunch. I OWNED the Brunch. WE owned the brunch. In the 17 minutes my friends and I had before the buffet closed, we ate nearly every bit of food at the buffet. I personally ate NINE POUNDS of food. See?

That plate is my first of 3. Plus there are more out of frame. And I think I ate a little off my friends' plates, hence my ridiculous expression, which is meant to communicate victual-related victory. Altogether, we enjoyed plate-cracking loads of:

• scrambled eggs
• The POTATOES (2 varieties, both cheesy and non)
• strawberries
• melons
• blackberries
• omelets
• chicken sausages
• pineapple
• waffles
• blintzes
• probably other things, but I forget.

The meal is like a dream; I almost don't believe it happened. So much food, so fast, and just so damn good (which is obviously important; everything was impeccably prepared). The potatoes were everything I'd hoped, everything I'd dreamed, and almost as satisfying as eating them was seeing Suburban Sweetheart doing so herself. This brunch, these potatoes are enough to make me willing to return to the high-rise hell that is Crystal City. And that's saying something.

PS: I'm pretty sure I can make said ridiculously stupendously mouth-wateringly superb potatoes with some minor variations on my recipe.

Well-Balanced Breakfast

Remember how kid's cereal commercials (not the Mom-approved ones; more like Froot Loops et al.) used to end with the assertion that the hydrogenated fat-sugar in focus was somehow part of a well-balanced breakfast? And didn't those well-balanced breakfasts look so freaking good?

Yes, yes they did. It was great! There'd be toast, an egg, orange juice, milk, maybe a sausage, framing the sugar cereal of choice. It wasn't even the food itself that looked good; it was the beauty of their visual and nutritious balance. The effect of surrounding the food being pushed with other delicious but generic foods was immediate and irresistible (like Rudolfo Otto's mysterium tremendum): I would always immediately begin my mother's application process for new sugar cereal (to be completed in triplicate and submitted under a blue moon).

Now, it would be too contrived to imitate such a breakfast (although I do frequently make for myself multi-Act breakfasts balancing protein, fiber, vitamins, etc). BUT every now and again, when Mars aligns with Saturn, Demos, and my toaster oven, a well-balanced breakfast just coalesces before me. Bowl of cereal? Check! Coffee? Yes please! Bananas? SIX FOOT SEVEN FOOT!

This happened last weekend, as my colleagues and I breakfasted at a hotel, gearing up for a long day of social justicing. It looked a little like this:

Well, actually, it looked exactly like this. I got very excited and snapped this shot even though balanced as it might have been, it was not the smorgasbord of fat and sugar from Frosted Flakes commercial's glory. This excitement has translated into a post here at Hungry Sam, and now I'm going to ask for some responses from you, my avid and loyal readers (BANTER!)

What is your well-balanced breakfast? What constituent elements, in joining together, have the Captain Planet-like effect of combining powers into something wholly other and stupendous? You can respond by commenting below (for the superstars among you) or by voting at the right.

Happy breakfast!