Breakfasts of Champions

“Pizza and pie for breakfast? You betcha’!” ~eamII

Finally some breakfast recipes in this Cook the 40 Challenge.

Although I suppose any recipe can be a breakfast recipe if you make it to eat in the morning, right?

Right.

The Most Important Meal of the Day?

I haven’t always been a big breakfast person. Even now, if I’m not intentionally making a recipe or wanting to pig out on tacos, I more than likely will just have some whole milk in the morning.

One reason is that, if it were up to me, I would always sleep in, so eating in the morning usually ends up being late morning or more like early afternoon, hence my first meal is usually lunch. Another reason is that I don’t get super hungry in the early morning. But if I do eat a big breakfast—and I’m not on some kind of food quest—it will hold me through dinner.

All that being typed, a fancy pizza and pie for breakfast? I’m game.

Photo of the magazine cover. — Best-ever recipes? Let’s see how the next two breakfast recipes measure up.

Cook the 40

Why take on Food & Wine’s best-ever recipes from their forty years in publication? Because I do like to eat, I like to cook and well, I also like a challenge.

Plus, it’s something to write about.

40 Years of Food & Wine

According to the September 2018 anniversary issue of Food & Wine, and editor Hunter Lewis, https://twitter.com/notesfromacook?lang=en, what makes a good recipe is it being delicious, of course, and (I think even more important sometimes) the best recipes “tell a story worth repeating.” Well said, Hunter.

Let’s see what breakfast stories these next two recipes will have to tell me. And will they be stories I’ll be willing to retell…

Recipe Thirty: Wolfgang Puck’s Pizza with Smoked Salmon, Sour Cream (I had to improvise), and Caviar

So, if you click on the recipe link and see the ingredients list, you will see from my ingredients below that I had to improvise a bit. I made this pizza while staying in a cabin in Estes Park, Colorado; and while they do have a proper grocery store in town, they didn’t have all of the exact ingredients so I made do.

I will say, it all worked.

Game on indeed for pizza with smoked salmon and caviar!

Easy pizza dough since I couldn’t find the exact flour called for in Wolfgang Puck’s recipe.

I added olive oil to the finished pizza crust. Yum!

It really ended up being a great recipe. So good!

What Was I Doing in 1999? What Did I Eat? Where Did I Go?

In 1999, I was living in Evanston, Illinois. Peter and I had been together for two years, and other than a trip home to Texas for a best friend’s wedding, and several trips to St. Louis to visit my parents and my new niece and Goddaughter, I don’t think we traveled much.

I started a new job in January of that year, and then again in September of that year, and even that job wasn’t going to last long. Those were the last two jobs I had working in finance and accounting departments, though. Still trying to write consistently in 1999 and my feeling was that those kinds of dull office jobs weren’t contributing to my creativity. Although not wrong, per se, mostly what contributed to my lack of writing was laziness. I probably knew that, but hadn’t admitted it to myself yet.

Also, in 1999, Peter and I got our first pet together: Sammi Jo. She was Peter’s cat from the start, sweet and quiet, even though I joked that she was an evil black cat.

We ended up having Sammi for 14 years. She really was a sweetheart.

Recipe Thirty-One: André Soltner’s Potato and Egg Pie with Bacon and Sour Cream (Again, I had to improvise…)

Who doesn’t love a good pie! Especially a pie with both a bottom and a top—get out of here! (LOL – see other blog posts and social media rants if you don’t know what I’m talking about…)

Let’s see what I can do with the ingredients I found here in Estes Park.

This recipe was the first—from 1979—in the *Food & Wine Magazine*‘s issue of their 40 best-ever recipes.

Really, really good! We have another winning recipe, folks!

I will definitely make this pie again; it was really good!

What About 1979?

What was I eating and where did I go to eat well in 1979?

I turned nine years old in July of 1979. My family started the year in Slidell, Louisiana, moved to Lubbock, Texas after my dad got transferred to the airport there—he was an air traffic controller; my mom, siblings and I then went to live with my grandparents in St. Louis for a few months (because Lubbock, let’s just say, was not for us), then back to Texas to a small town outside of Lubbock called Idalou.

I went to four schools in 4th grade.

What did I eat? Whatever my parents or grandparents made us to eat. That’s pretty much how it was in the 70’s. And besides an episode or two (subjects for other blog posts), I usually ate everything on my plate.

Not too much has changed in 40 years.