I feel like I cheated with this picture. Most of its interest is supplied by the purple micro basil. Although it definitely adds something to the flavor of a dish, it’s the delicate shape, and especially the color, that makes it sing, and demands that it be ‘heard’.

Otherwise this was a fairly routine Sunday breakfast-and-we’re-not-going-to-need-lunch meal.

• It included Milport Dairy Farm Americauna chicken eggs with blue shells and the same Lancaster County Amish farm’s thick bacon, Maldon Salt, some coarsely-ground black pepper, a bit of a bit of a homemade Basque  piment d’Espellate we purchased in a small town north of Baie-Comeau, Quebec from the French producer’s daughter, a pinch or two of fenugreek dried fenugreek from Bombay Emerald Chutney Company that I had purchased at the Saturday Chelsea Farmers Market, thinly-sliced pieces from the stem of a flowering spring shallot from Keith’s Farm that were heated in a little olive oil until they were softened, softly-toasted slices of 2 different ‘second-or-third-day’ breads, She Wolf Bakery’s Toasted Sesame Wheat, and a polenta boule from Bread Alone
• it was a beautiful morning early afternoon, the breakfast room windows were open, and the music was the album, ‘Afternoon Ragas Rotterdam 1970‘, with Nikhil Banerjee, sitar, and Kanai Dutta, tabla (it was so rich that it occasionally sounded like a larger ensemble)