From Omeletta:
The only thing I wanted to do today? Brag about my super awesome amazing lunch. Brag, yes. Write, no.
I am extraordinarily lazy as a rule. I spend most days fighting to overcome this laziness. I also drink a lot of coffee. That makes me restless. My mother swears I have Adult ADD. My mind is usually thinking about fifteen things at once, and I make a lot of lists, and I forget stuff all.the.time. I’m the girl with lots of little slips of paper shoved in the bottom of her purse that say cryptic things like, “coordinate all links” and “AT&T” and “brine”. The items are crossed off only half the time. This week, while following my latest lists like the responsible adult I try to be, I have cooked, I have photographed, I have even edited, but I have not actually sat down like a big girl and started writing because I’m scared it will take forever and still not sound the way I want it to. Which, naturally, gets me nowhere… Except back in the kitchen, where I cook to make myself feel productive. It’s a vicious circle, and sometimes the only one reaping the rewards is the Big Man, who comes home to find them laid out on the counter in tupperware at the end of the night.
So, anyway, I made BLT’s for lunch today. And I might make them again for dinner, and breakfast tomorrow morning, and serve them to my brother when he arrives in town tomorrow evening. I’ll have to buy more bacon, but I won’t stop eating BLT’s. There’s just something about good-quality bread, bacon, lettuce and tomato in the afternoon. Even though I’m not writing (again), eating this makes me feel a little less guilty.
I did nothing over the top with these BLT’s, nothing innovative or different. I didn’t make a pesto-mayonnaise tempered with adobe chiles. I didn’t use sustainably organic Black Garlic-Cheddar Sourdough hand-kneaded by 50 virgins, I didn’t flash fry green tomatoes before layering them just so on top of wild dandelion greens. In short, I simply made a fricking awesome BLT, with a good crusty bread I bought in Little Italy, vine-ripened tomatoes from a street vendor, Hellman’s mayo, and some escarole I picked up in Manhattan Fruit Exchange the other day while I was waiting for my knives to finish getting sharpened. It’s not your typical diner-style BLT, I know, but it’s not “food bloggy” either, and maybe that’s why it tasted so good? Because I wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel in order to have something different to write about. Because I stopped trying to think of something new or technically difficult, and just made something that was easy and comfortable and oh-my-Jesus delicious. Sometimes all you really need to get going again is a good sandwich, tomato juices running down your fingers and nothing left at the end but a filthy napkin and a smeared plate.
And suddenly, I had something to write about.