I usually throw all kinds of stuff into what for most folks would be a simple breakfast of bacon and eggs, but this one escaped from the kitchen [relatively] bare-bones.

• the ingredients on the plate photographed above included thick bacon from Millport Dairy Farm, Ameraucana chicken eggs from Millport Dairy Farm, Cultured Pastured Butter from Organic Valley, a little bit of sliced scallion from Phillips Farms, freshly-ground black pepper, sea salt, plus Maldon sea salt for finishing, part of a crushed dried golden/orange habanada pepper bought fresh from Norwich Meadows Farm last fall, Backyard Farms Maine ‘cocktail tomatoes’ (from Maine, near Skowhegan) via Whole Foods Market, chopped fresh thyme from Citarella, organic dried wild fennel pollen from Buon Italia, pea shoots from Windfall Farms, and toasts of 3 different breads: a ‘Mediterraneo’ (whole rye flour, stone-milled wheat flour, 5 seeds, plus millet and faro) and a ‘rustic classic’, both from Eataly, and a corn rye boule from Hot Bread Kitchen
• the music was Bach’s St. John Passion, John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir

Today’s Sunday breakfast was somewhat more basic than usual (no alliums, not a single tomato, and only one herb and one micro green).

Both the incredibly delicious eggs and the bacon came from an Amish family’s farm in Lancaster County. We will be enjoying their smoked pork chops and sauerkraut tonight.

• the breakfast’s elements included 6 free-range eggs and 4 thick slices of thick bacon, all from Millport Dairy Farm, the eggs dusted with a little dried dark habanada pepper, Maldon salt, freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper, micro cilantro and chopped lovage, the latter two both from Windfall Farms, and served with lightly-toasted
  Bien Cuit rye and sunflower bread from Foragers Market
• the Sunday music was the album, ‘W.F. Bach: Cantatas Vol 1’, the music performed by the Rheinische Kantorei and Das Kleine Konzert conducted by Hermann Max

It’s good to be Sunday.

And its good to be well-stocked.

• a very late breakfast (even late as a lunch), of gently-cooked (chewy, not crispy anywhere) thick bacon from Millport Dairy Farm; fried very fresh free-range chicken eggs, also from Millport, enhanced with Maldon salt, freshly-ground Tellicherry pepper, a bit of a mix of Nigerian cayenne pepper and Spanish paprika that remained from dinner the night before, sautéed chopped ramp stems from Violet Hill Farm, and chopped dill from Phillips Farm; pea shoots from Lani’s Farm, sprinkled with salt and pepper, served alongside 3 sliced Backyard Farms Maine ‘cocktail tomatoes’ from Whole Foods Market which had first been warmed in a little olive oil, seasoned, and mixed with a generous amount of chopped thyme from Eataly; slices of ‘8 grain 3 seed’ bread from Rock Hill Bakehouse in Gansevoort, NY (their Saturday stand in the Union Square Greenmarket, not toasted, and toast from slices of 2 other breads, ‘pane Mediterraneo’ from Eataly (whole wheat, rye flour; pumpkin, sesame, poppy, sunflower, flax seeds; millet, farro), and a Balthazar rye boule from Schaller & Weber; and finally, a very small amount of Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter from Whole Foods
• the music was Luigi Rossi’s 17th-century oratorio’, ‘Oratorio per la settimana santa‘,  William Christie directing  Les Arts Florissants (it’s the first Sunday of Easter, so we weren’t too far out of sync)

sometimes the classics are enough, but they can always take a bit of a tweak

It was the Feast of St. Stephen, a holiday in many Christian parts, suggesting the need for a special breakfast to begin the day.  We really wanted eggs, and we had all the fixings. Somehow we had already misplaced all of the morning hours by the time we discussed this, so, while it looks like breakfast, I’ll call the meal lunch, in fact it was a late lunch.

• the eggs were from Millport Dairy, as was the thick, ‘country-style’ bacon; the cress was from Max Creek Hatchery, and it was dressed with a good Umbrian olive oil (Luciana Cerbini Casa Gola), from Buon Italia and a small squeeze of a small lemon/line citrus fruit from Fantastic Gardens; the toast was Grand Daisy Pugliese Pane, from Whole Foods; the eggs were sprinkled with half of one not-so-very-hot Cayenne thin red pepper from Oak Grove Plantation; there was salt and pepper on both the greens and the eggs;
• there was Trickling Springs Creamery whole milk, and afterwards, espresso
• the music was still more of WQXR‘s annual 10-day, year-end Bach Festival, which will be streaming until midnight, New Years Eve

We rarely have anything but a pretty basic breakfast, even on weekends, probably because we already get up so late that we don’t want to put off the day any more than we would already have by then. But sometimes a breakfast can’t really be thought of as ‘putting off the day’.  This one, of bacon, eggs, toast, and a few trimmings, was very much part of our day this past Sunday, and it turned out to be a super one (breakfast and day).  Besides, we started our Sunday so late that we didn’t have to steal from it later in the afternoon with a proper lunch, even if we suspected we would not start to eat dinner until after ten o’clock.

I love eggs, at any time of the day, and in any form, but I usually just can’t leave them alone without some device – or devices.  In this case it meant herbs and spices, some only a little more exotic than others.

The herbs inside the yellow cup in the picture above were a mix of parsley from John D. Madura Farm, thyme from Phillips Farm, oregano from Rise & Root Farm, plus tarragon and winter savory, both from Stokes Farm.  The spice in the red one was some crushed very complex-flavored and highly-pungent ‘India Special Extra Bold’ Tellicherry peppercorns (“Special refers to longer maturation on the vine, the extra bold refers to larger size.”) by Penzeys Spices.  After the picture was taken I also included a container of whole peperoncini from Buon Italia, crushed.

The salt was Maldon.

Both the eggs and the bacon (thick, country-style) were from Millport Dairy, in the Union Square Greenmarket, and the European-style (more butter fat) butter was ‘Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter, Unsalted’, with 12g (18%) total fat, from Westside Market on Seventh Avenue.

The toast originated as part of a loaf of 7-grain bread from Eataly.

After preparing the condiments, the first thing I did was to heat the bacon very slowly in an enormous cast iron pan, which meant that less fat had accumulated after it had been cooked, and I fried the eggs in most of what had remained, reserving the rest for use in another meal. Barry, the toastmaster, began his duties just as I removed the bacon from the pan.

One tradition however that we observe every Sunday is starting off the day with music that is somehow ‘Sunday-ish’, at least in the Christian tradition. It’s a tradition from which each of us fully emerged, alive, thank goodness, long ago.  The choice of this music is made not out of nostalgia, but rather for the opportunity to listen to a part of the Western world’s great musical canon which is insufficiently represented in concert, and to listen to it in [at least a part of] the context for which it was originally written.

For me, the earliest form of this tradition began in Europe in 1961, when I first lived outside the U.S. and had ready access to live classical music performance, churches included.  In Munich, two years later, now a fully-confirmed atheist, I often went on Sundays with one or more friends to listen to music performed inside one of the shiny-new recently-restored great Munich churches, my aesthetic senses now proudly – and perhaps sadly – free of the veil of religious devotion (although understanding the powerful symbiosis of the two).  There we could listen to singers, a chorus, and a real orchestra performing some of the world’s most glorious (although even then becoming increasingly esoteric) music inside the kind of great spaces for which it was intended.  This sort of experience is not easily found in New York City today (and likely never was); when it is, there is usually an admission price involved.

Yesterday at home, with a bow to Beirut and to Paris, we played a recording of Gabriel Fauré’s ‘Requiem’.