breakfast on lunch break
my lunch break is the same time everyday. it lines up with when i start to get hungry: noon, give or take a few minutes before or after, i can guarantee that i start to feel gastric utterances by then.
my work day starts just after the sun comes up. i work from home, so the sunlight tends to be my first alarm, followed by a two-minutes-before-actual-shift phone alarm in case i pull the covers over head in a gesture of "just five more minutes, please."
i roll out of bed with a stretch that makes me taller for a few seconds. i take about five steps towards my desk and flip the company-issued laptop open, press the "power on" button. top right of keyboard, muscle memory. i turn the second monitor on while the laptop boots up, then open chrome and slack. slack usually opens up last. chrome loads the first window of the day with the pre-selected tabs to open up: outlook first, and various tabs of proprietary code the IT team alchemized into the company's work management playground.
i spend the first few hours of my shift remembering how to read. i'm still sleepy, and so is the rest of my team. it's early. i'm unsure of their morning routines, but for me, i don't eat breakfast first thing after waking. the first couple of hours are scrolling and corresponding to warm up the brain. i sip on water. i abstain from caffeine as a meal. i haven't done that since college. it'll just make my stomach hurt, anyways.
"breakfast" is a compound of the words "break" and "fast." your first meal of the day after waking up is literally "breaking" the "fast" from the day prior (assuming you had dinner before a night's rest). i consider my first meal to be breakfast, even if it's well past lunch time. my body doesn't really follow the whole "three meals a day" thing. i go by when it tells me it's time to eat.
come noon, i make my way to my pantry. i visually note what's available to me, walk to the fridge and do the same, and decide on the most nutritious option: peanut butter (crunchy) and jelly (more like a grape fruit spread) sandwich (honey wheat bread, round top), and a glass of milk with several heaping tablespoons of chocolate-flavored breakfast powder. i'll take what i can get in vitamins and minerals, doctor's orders.
i mirror two empty bread canvasses flatly onto a bright red ceramic plate, set on top of the dull granite countertop you see advertised in every "newly renovated!!!" apartment listing within the past couple of years. glob of peanut butter first, whisked onto my wielded butter knife, then wipe as much of it off so i can extract my desired amount of grape jelly with minimal transfer between containers. i'm not picky anymore about peanut butter being on the jelly side, or the other way around, or if there's a lingering essence of peanuts in the jelly jar. it's all going to get eaten regardless.
i introduce the peanut butter side and jelly sides and they embrace. i stir the vitamin enriched milk concoction until there's less chocolate clumps to my knowledge. i lick the spoon, drop in the sink. i lick the butter knife and hesitate halfway from dropping it off into its fated metal basin. i think, "what if i cut it into four triangles, like i used to?"
first diagonal slice needs to be delicate. it sets the tone. any hasty cutting, even with a serrated blade, can cause the slices to go askew. it's a delicate operation. it's not even a sawing motion; more applying pressure in sections first with your dominant hand--index finger and thumb arching over the knife with enough centimeters of distance, gently applying pressure to the bread to hold it in place--from the top slice to the base of the plate, much like perforating paper. then a slicing motion.
the first slice is done, now. lifting the blade leaves crude traces of pee bee and jay at the point of incision. quartering the two slices is easy. you got smaller surface area to slice. not as many perforations are needed. i used round top bread, so the slices aren't meant to be uniform. i have one part of sandwich with baroque curvatures, and the other part presenting as relatively isosceles. it's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be.
i take my first bite--sweet, crunch--and i'm taken back to pre-school, to a very specific lunch time. the food served has to be as universally appealing as possible to a group of soon-to-be kindergarten-aged children, a group that can be picky at the drop of a hat. newly onboarded cafeteria workers need to take heed. what's easy to make for children, while covering some nutritional ground? apple juice in a dixie cup, and a quartered peanut butter and apple jelly sandwich on white sandwich bread--specifically sandwich bread, because it's readily accessible and because it's square shape leaves no discrepancies in uniformity.
apple jelly is so interesting in it being mostly high fructose corn syrup, fruit pectin, then maybe apple juice or apple flavoring. the same could be said about apple juice--it's concentrate and added sugar, all watered down. if it's sweet enough, though, kids won't mind a bit. i sure didn't.
i peer at the almost-transom window that offers a view between cafeteria and kitchen, if you're tall enough to see everything, that is. i'm tall enough to recognize the face peering back at me with a smile: it's my welita, from my father's side. she's working at my school. her smile says she made my food specifically with the care one would for someone they love in mind. sure, my classmates all had the same entree as mine, but mine was specially made.
i started thinking, again, of these different versions of me in wela's kitchen, in my mother's kitchen, my sister's kitchen, and how they all made dinner with knowledge passed down. my wela taught my mother how to make mexican rice. my wela learned from her mother. my mother taught my sisters and me how to make this same rice. i learned from all three of these women. they all have made this rice at least once, and it's all unique to each of them. the same rice, with different personalities.
my peanut butter and jelly sandwich assembly of choice is a synthesis of all the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made for me. the way i like mexican rice comes from tasting three generations of rice. flour tortillas are as flat as the pressure from the rolling pin allows, the hydraulic press of an intentional precision unique to the chef's weight. i can tell when refried beans were fried with mazola brand corn oil from those that weren't. the crispy edges around a fried egg are as unique as fingerprints.
it's joked about a lot on the internet, how we are collectively "losing recipes" because newer generations don't want to cook, or lost access to family recipes for whatever reasons, so you end up with weird fusions of trendy food truck chimeras of childhood flavors out of grasp. it's lighthearted, but i can't help but think that there will be a time where i can't write some of these recipes down--they'll pass with the careful hands that cooked them many times over.
this isn't a call for melancholy. i encourage anyone who still can, within personal discretion, to document recipes they love. it can be as regular as pancakes, but someone teaching you is different from reading a stranger's interpretation off of the internet. family, friend, whomever--if it was made with you in mind and you have their blessing, write it down.