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For the record, I’m not a dirty hippy who believes organic food is healthier. There isn’t much healthier about smearing your food with poop and keeping insects away from it with nothing stronger than bad language. I’m also not some second generation yuppy who thinks paying more means it’s better. Paying more means it costs more, that’s it. But I am someone who likes a good tasting tomato, and the regular ones you’re going to find in the grocery store just ain’t.

photo credit: fuzzyslowmo

You see, tomatoes are naturally soft. Soft and velvety. This is awesome when you’re eating them, but terrible if you want to truck them somewhere. By the time you load them up, drive them 500 miles and drop them off all you have left is bruises, mush and stems. So transporters and grocery stores came up with a solution.

They pick a tomato while it’s still green and hard, then gas it with ethelene. Ethelene is a “ripening agent” doesn’t actually ripen the tomatoes. It just makes them turn red so they look ripe. So you essentially have a bright red softball that’s perfect for shipping and terrible for eating. You can actually set a dictionary on top of a store bought tomato and leave it for a day, come back and find the same tomato. If you do that with an organic tomato all you’ll have is a wet spot.

So knowing what grocery stores do to tomatoes, there are 3 ways you can still get a good one. Firstly, if you live in the right climate(and have a yard) you can grow your own. If you live in the wrong climate you can plant a little AeroGarden . Second you can go to farmers markets. This is my favorite actually, you can talk to the guy who grew the damn things. People won’t look you in the eyes and then sell you crap.

But this is a blog about eating better, easy. And if you were the kind of guy who went to farmers markets you’d already be buying your tomatoes there. So the third option is to buy organic tomatoes. They won’t be gassed like the regular ones, so if they’re red that means they’re actually ripe. Now you will pay more for these. They have to be bought locally(that means the store can’t buy them in bulk) and they will lose more during their short transport. But for convenience and flavor, they give regular store tomatoes a smackdown.

In fact, I’m issuing you a challenge. Go buy an organic tomato and a regular one and make a BLT with each. If you honestly can’t tell the difference I will personally come to your house and apologize.

photo credit: hiroohi

And I never apologize.

I know that your microwave is nasty. Melted cheese, burned grease and a small colony of single celled organisms that adapted to survive in harsh environments. And I know that as far as you’re concerned it can stay that way.

I don’t blame you, cleaning a microwave is a pain in the ass. Everything in there is crusted on like a rock formation and it’s an awkward hole with little corners and nooks you can never quite get to. It’s kind of like being Big Foot’s proctologist.

But that’s because you’re trying to clean it like a woman. Woman seem to have it in their heads that cleaning has to be a lot of work or it’s not really clean, and somehow they transfered this daft concept onto us. If I hear one more woman over 50 explain to me that all you need to clean your house is a wet sponge and some elbow grease I’m gonna start kidnapping entire audiences from Oprah tapings and stranding them on a deserted island.

I’m not saying you should “work smarter, not harder,” douches say that. I’m saying you should work smart or not at all. And judging by the dismal state of your microwave you agree with me.

So here’s what you do, get a glass bowl and throw in about a cup of water and a half cup of white vinegar. This stuffs like $2 a gallon and is useful as hell for cleaning. Throw the bowl in the microwave on high for 5 to 10 minutes. Enough to get the water boiling really good so the vinegar steam can loosen the barnicles. Then a damp paper towl will wipe all that junk off. It’s that easy.

Oh, and vinegar has another awesome property. It kills odors, so you no longer have to be reminded of the time you hit an extra zero when you were making popcorn every time you want a hot pocket. Why on earth your sad sack would want a hot pocket we’ll save for another time.

Safty Warning: There is a small chance, very small, that your water won’t boil. Sometimes with a smooth container there’s no place for bubbles to form, if that first bubble never starts then your water won’t actually boil. The problem is that your water still has all the energy in it from being in the microwave for 10 minutes! That means that as soon as you touch the bowl, it will form one giant steam bubble and explode in a geyser of scalding dragon piss. Not cool.

There are 2 ways to avoid this:

1. You can watch the water and make sure it’s forming those bubbles, releasing the energy(assuming your microwave hasn’t caked over the window with the dregs of nachos past) and if it isn’t just turn everything off, let it cool down and try again.
2. Or you can introduce some other object in there that isn’t smooth for bubbles to form on. Like a wooden skewer or even a toothpick should work.

   

Like I said, it’s a small chance but I usually check my handy work at about 8 minutes and if it ever wasn’t bubbling I would get a little worried.

The question “What is lemon zest?” confronts every man when he first sets out to cook and I’m convinced women named it that just to keep men out of their kitchen domain.

“Anything I can do to help dear?”

“Well, you could zest that lemon for me.”

“…I don’t think that’s legal in this state.”

“Never mind, I’ll just do it all myself.”

But it’s really not that complicated or gay. Let the fat man lay some knowledge on you:

The zest of a lemon(or any citrus fruit) is the quarter milimeter at the very top of the skin. That might not seem like much, but there’s a lot of flavor packed in there. In fact, about 80% of the lemon flavor is in the zest. Remember the time your girlfriend made lemon squares and they tasted like gelatinous yellow sugar? That’s because she skipped the step of getting the lemon zest.

If you don’t believe me, hold a lemon up close sometime. You can actually see all the oil in the skin, that’s where the flavor is. It’s the money shot of your citrus.

However, there’s kind of a dangerous zone right underneath the zest. It’s called the pith, and it tastes about as good as it sounds. You know how when you’re eating an orange you sometimes scrape up that bitter, white crap that makes you hauk luggies for 10 minutes and swear off fruit? That’s the pith.

So the key to zesting is getting the skin with it’s oils and flavors and not getting the pith with it’s aweful and raunch. Toward this end a lot of people buy this useless hunk:

Yeah, a waste of money, time and sanity. But here’s a couple tricks for getting lemon(or lime) zest quick and easy without that null-tool:

• If you have a box grater, you might be able to get away with using the side with the smallest holes. You have to go light to make sure you don’t dig into the pith, but this works pretty well with a little practice.
• You can actually drag a knife blade perpendicular to the skin. this doesn’t get much of the skin off, but it will scrape up a decent amount of the oils. If you’re getting the lemon juice as well, just scrape the skin, squeeze the lemon and then wipe the knife with an empty lemon quarter to get all the good stuff.
• My prefered method is to use a file. A straight up metal file. I’ve always got my Leatherman with me and it does a great job of zesting the lemon. You’ll still have to wipe the oils off though, the same as the knife.
• Failing all that, if you absolutely must buy a lemon zester(or you need the zest but not the juice) then you need something like this:
  

  
  

  Anything that’s stainless steel and uses a microplane. That means really small holes for scraping.

So that answers the questions “What is lemon zest?” and why you should never skip it and gives some easy ways to do it. It doesn’t quite calm the masculinity questions zesting brings up, but you’ll get over it.

So I got into work Friday and the old man across from me slumps into his cube and takes out some generic, crappy, frosted protein bar. He noticed my look of disgust and apologized “Hey, it’s better than McDonalds, right?”

After I beat him to death I gave his corpse the same lecture I’m gonna give you.

Breakfast is not a meal, it’s a birthright. It was earned by our fathers and our fathers’ fathers and it is one of the greatest gifts they leave us second only to our last names and the ability to pee standing upright.

And yet so many weak, small minded guys have this impression that if a woman doesn’t make it for you then you can’t have a decent breakfast. That it’s a magical reward they conjure whole hock from an ether of love and estrogen. These guys are all single, because married men know that women don’t make breakfast anymore. But they’ve given up on life too fully to make it for themselves. So men resign themselves to a piddling of cold milk on some sugary fiber.

Well I say bullshit. Cereal is not breakfast. McDonalds is not breakfast. Any combination of the word ‘protein’ with something else is not breakfast. Breakfast, true breakfast, requires copious amounts of heat, butter and the flesh of a deceased swine.

I know you have a hundred excuses, but they all boil down to “I don’t have time” and that’s a God Damned lie. That day, I explained to the remains of my former co-worker, I had 2 eggs, 2 pieces of toast and 2 to 8 pieces of bacon(when I start eating bacon I kind of get into a zone, so it’s hard to count). It took 10 minutes of attention and 15 minutes total, you’ll spend more time in the drive through at Carl’s Jr.

The real problem is thought. Thought is the enemy of action. When you think “Should I make breakfast?” your head is already so full of unclear scenarios you don’t know where to start and eventually you talk yourself out of it. Well I know how to deal with people who think.

Here’s the agreement you and I will make. I’m going to lay out each step and how long it will take you, and you’re going to make yourself breakfast for a week. One week, following this exact formula. Once you’ve done it for a week, there’s no more need for thought. You won’t find yourself looking around the kitchen wondering where to begin, you’ll just do.

Step 1: Bacon, the cornerstone of both breakfast and happiness. Go ahead and throw some bacon in an oven as described here. I keep the cookie sheet covered with foil at all times just to make this go faster. At this point I also get out 2 eggs and the butter and set them on the counter.

Time 1 minute

Step 2: Go upstairs to shit, shower and shave. This can be a bit tricky, I know my oven gets up to temperature in 7 minutes and if I don’t mess around I get finished up in exactly that amount of time, but you may have to push some activities until after breakfast. I suggest you don’t skip the shit part, you need to make room for a hearty breakfast.

Step 3: Back downstairs, check the bacon then throw a pan over a medium flame. Spray it with Pam and crack your now room temp eggs into it. Hit them with a pinch of salt(Kosher, as always) and a few grinds of black pepper. Please don’t skip that part, unseasoned eggs taste exactly like the gelatinous sacks of fat and protein that they are. They <i>need</i> salt and pepper, and some red pepper flake if you got it.

Time 30 seconds

Step 4: Slice some bread up and pop in your toaster. And for the love of all that is holy use some real bread here. Every grocery store in the country now has their own bakery that’s producing stuff a damn sight better than Wonder bread. That stuff doesn’t so much toast as accept the cleansing flame of judgment.

Time 30 seconds

Step 5: About now you should pull the bacon out of the oven probably. If you used a cooling rack it’s good to go but if you had to let it sit in it’s own juices just lay it on some brown paper bags or newspaper. That’ll pull the grease right off.

Time 30 seconds

Step 6: Now flip the eggs(or don’t, I like mine over easy) and turn off the flame. If you had your heat right almost immediately after the flip your eggs are ready to go onto the plate. Remember, eggs keep cooking after you take them off the heat, so if you leave them in the pan they will dry out.

Time 15 seconds

Step 7: Now when your toast pops just spread on the butter(real butter, in addition to being worse for you margarine tastes like plastic and cheese had a baby) and put it and the bacon on the plate.

Time 30 seconds

Step 8: Eat.

Time 45 seconds.

I know that seems fast, but I grew up with brothers. If you didn’t eat fast you ate less, and the Fat Bastard is not going to eat less.

Step 9: Clean up. All you have to do is throw out the foil, re-cover the cookie sheet, wash 1 plate, 1 pan, 1 spatula, 1 fork and 1 knife. You can actually leave the dishes in the sink but always make sure to wash your cooking utensils and pans as you use them so you can depend on them to be ready next time. Unless you have a stack of 30 pans, then just throw this one out and grab the next.

Time 2 minutes.

There you go. 6 minutes and zero thought gets you a full gut for the morning. Because starting your day with a belly full of frosted protein is for Tijuana hookers.