Some time before moving to Madison, my friend Lewis mentioned that he could eat an almost innumerable amount of potato chips. He also called my attention to a rather amazing Robert Creely poem. Putting two and two together, I put together this poem.

When time from time shall set you free, one thing you can do is read this 72-page essay analyzing candy bar wrappers from the last 100 years. 

When you kill a magazine, it looks like this. 

Incidentally, I have some magazine ideas for Condé Nast. Total money makers:

• Elegant Caca Magazine
• Golf Terror Magazine
• Silver Adultry Magazine
• Cigar Hoarder Magazine
• Donkey Cutlery Magazine
• Scandinavian Home Prison Magazine
• Dapper Entrails Magazine

Wait, I had another one. No, I guess I forgot it.

BREAKING NEWS: The Elephant and Butter is making itself giddily apoplectic by reading this over and over and over again. Strange fruits and hammers and shrimps and mop-tops.

One can scroll through some impressive mushroom illustrations here.

A learn-ed comparison....

{Elizabethan Seaman's Daily Ration* vs. 

What I Ate on this Workday**}

1/4 lb. butter | bagel with jalapeño cream cheese

bottle of beer | 2 cups coffee & Cold-EEZE®

1 lb. ship's biscuit | burrito & banana & challah & water

1/2 lb. cheese | slice of pepperoni pizza & water

Adjusting for the fact that Elizabethan sailors precede me by about 450 years of culinary advancement, I think it's pretty clear that they win this match-up. Selah.

*Source: "Much Depends on Dinner," by Margaret Visser, Collier Books, 1986, p. 98.

**Source: my recollections.

Dan bing! It just might be the answer to the insane demands of breakfast, that incessant meal of few decent daily choices. For a short while, I ate dan bing regularly. I miss it now. Let me recollect.

It was in Taipei. I would ride my motorcycle through a tight group of streets and alleys and come upon an eatery that was, according to my imperfect memory, both indoors and outdoors. I recall a crêpe griddle being under an awning out front, but perhaps my memory is confusing the internal and the external because spaces seemed to overlap in the small neighborhood. On the crêpe griddle, a cook would create a thin pool of liquid made from cornstarch, flour and water, and after it began to sizzle and lift up from the hot surface, she would crack an egg atop it and add scallions. When the egg set, the cook would fold the crêpe, leaving me to apply a soy sauce-based condiment. The result was dan bing. Dan is pronounced sharply, definitively [4th tone]. Bing descends and then rises, as though a parachutist landing and then being lifted up slightly by a breeze [3rd tone]. Witness dan bing, as photographed in a plastic to-go bag:

A decent partner to dan bing was a stick of friend dough (that's a typo there in 'fried', but I will leave it because dough that is gently immersed in an effervescent jacuzzi of warm oil is, indeed, one's friend) -- called you tiao -- and a bowl of warm, salty soy milk in which to dip it.

Gentle reader, I enjoin you to imagine the complementary prowess of dan bing and you tiao: Savory and sweet. Protein and sugar. Pliable and crisp. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Folds and protrusions. Rangy Marr and Statue Morrissey. Together, dan bing and you tiao prepare an eater for the variety of possibilities in any day. Eat them, and your day's elevators will open ever so decadently.

The aforementioned Chip Brantley has published a superb Robert Bresson/cooking article on Gourmet's website. You should probably check it out before the magazine shuts down entirely in some weeks, forcing food bloggers all over the nation to re-make Gourmet's old recipes over and over again in one giant, gauzily-photographed feedback loop. For perspective on Gourmet's demise, see here.

Lately, I have been eating a shit ton of pumpkin seeds. In my food/health cosmology, pumpkin seeds are going to expel all bad things residing in my quintessence, and will lead to a golden age of physical prowess. It's going to be pretty awesome. I'm mainly focused on pepitas, the hulled version of the seed -- the green mantle of power. Imagine my delight, then, upon finding a recipe for roasted pumpkin seeds in a Portuguese cookbook. The coincidence was amazing: my great-grandmother was full-bore Portuguese. Not to mention: I possess the remarkable talent of being able to locate Portugal on a world map, globe, or world map placemat.

Here's my version of the recipe:

1. Whisk one egg-white, some pimentón dulce (sweet paprika), some curry powder, some olive oil. Add pepitas. Bake at 425F until toasty. The pepitas will become distended and will pop. Remove from oven and salt them vigorously, insanely, like Jerry Lee Lewis.

Look at that: only ONE step.

The Elephant and Butter has the answer to your question, so long as your question is: how can I cook numerous eggs simultaneously yet individually, and on toast? It's easy. 

1. Get a muffin pan. Butter it.
2. Use a glass or cup to cut circles out of a dozen pieces of sliced bread.
3. Cram the circles into the reservoirs of the pan.
4. Grate a little cheese into the bread holes.
5. Crack an egg into each hole, disposing some of the egg white if you have too much matter for the space alloted. I don't have to tell you what constitutes too much, because too much is manifestly too much. You are no rube.
6. Add chopped prosciutto if inclined to do so. 
7. Bake eggs for about 10 minutes, or to suit your taste. (I like my yolks firm -- that's simply my nature and no one should try to change me.)
8. Pop resulting breakfast units out of pan.
9. Plate the egg units and top with diced chives, or anything.

And there you go. Now you have wrest control of the produktionsmittel.