Deb Perelman, of Smitten Kitchen, makes a homemade version she calls “ castle breakfast,” modelled on the meals she ordered on a tour of castles turned hotels in Ireland: “The teapots and civility, the sunny rooms, the little jars of jam, the fresh fruit, so ideal for grazers like me.” During the height of the pandemic, staring at the walls of my one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, I began to obsessively daydream about going to hotels again. The coffee, in one of those swirled plastic thermoses, seems endless. Is there any other simple indulgence as satisfying as a room-service hotel breakfast? You eat it in a bed, atop fresh sheets. Also, solitude, quiet, and the ability to read a novel at a hotel bar and tell the bartender to charge a Martini directly to my room. I’d stay for one or two nights, ostensibly to hammer home a big deadline with zero distractions, but really what I was paying for was the sudden escape from my routine, which shocked my system like a cold shower. I checked into the Bryant Park Hotel, the Arthouse Hotel, and Hotel St. I would click open the HotelTonight app and check in anywhere that looked halfway decent and was half off the normal price. I simply waited until the urge to escape my apartment had grown from a low hum to something like a timpani drum charging through my brain, then decided it was time. Foolproof.Ī few years ago-in another life, before the pandemic-I began a seasonal ritual of checking myself into a local hotel to write. Mornings at home were for English muffins with a scoop of marmalade, or muesli with a splash of almond milk. I technically could cook an egg for myself, and it would be totally fine, but after enough rubbery centers I didn’t see the point. The delicate act of poaching-and the confusing debate swirling around whether one should glug white vinegar into the roiling water-was more or less out of the question. My yolks were overcooked, my whites slimy. I tried occasionally to re-create the egg breakfasts that I’d considered so exciting in my youth, and for the most part I failed. It was not until I moved to New York, in my twenties, and started living off of greasy bodega bacon and egg sandwiches, that I understood that eggs could be a non-event, or even a total disappointment. As such, I came to associate them with special occasions: the eggs Benedict I would order when we would have my grandfather’s annual birthday lunch at the golf course the salty, cheesy omelettes a friend’s mother would make when I spent the night a steaming Sterno dish of poofy scrambled eggs in a bottomless-brunch buffet at a middling hotel. Eggs were not a common indulgence in my house, let alone a daily breakfast staple. Maybe there would be a plastic mini-cup of yogurt, or a piece of toast smeared with the lightest wisp of Country Crock. My mother tended to skip breakfast and mainline black coffee instead. When I was growing up, my dad’s breakfast was a rotating selection of PowerBars, which he would buy in bulk from Costco and eat in the car on the way to work. I don’t come from a family of egg people. You don’t need an egg machine to indulge in this practice, but it helps, especially if, like me, you never really learned how to properly soft-boil an egg. I have become something of an evangelist, a convert to the practice of Effortful Breakfast. And yet, here I am, every morning, making myself a fussy little breakfast with my fussy little egg machine. It defies all of my steadfast kitchen rules: no single-use doodads, nothing that came via Internet-influencer girlbossery, nothing that clogs precious countertop space in a New York apartment. It looks simultaneously vintage and made right now-right this minute-to really “pop” on Instagram, where très mignons appliances in Easter-egg hues rule supreme. My egg machine is a squat ovoid in a gleamy mint-green, like something the Jetsons would display proudly in their glassy space house, or like a giggly Pixar character that would be voiced by Jenny Slate.
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