Last week, nothing (healthy) sounded good to eat. Cheetos sounded damn fine; I’ll admit to having eaten a few peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, too. (These are a trending meal in meinem Haus.) Nothing wrong with PB&B — it features like, three food groups! — but it’s not the sort of thing I wanted to serve to Alex when he came to dinner. Necessarily, I put on my thinking cap and generated a slightly classier dinner idea. 
When I’m low on ideas, I mine my personal history. During Thursday’s introspection session, I remembered a dish my parents used to make: sautéed chicken served with scallions and bacon over egg noodles. As a kid, I wasn’t much of a meat-eater, but I fiercely craved this dish; I realize now that the flavor combination of bacon and scallions pleased me greatly. Egg noodles, of course, are good in whatever form they’re presented (unless that form = “overcooked”).
I consulted the Almighty Intertron and found a similar recipe — a disconcertingly basic recipe, I should add — one that had seven ingredients (chicken, bacon, scallions, pasta, salt, pepper, white wine). Kids aren’t known for their refined palates: truth. 
Using the googled recipe and my Very Vivid Memories as inspiration, I began. Here’s the recipe I came up with:
Garky’s Chicken with Bacon, Leeks, and Chives (serves 4)
Ingredients
- Eight ounces egg pasta — curlicues work best, if you’ve got ‘em, but you may also use those wide, flat, yellow strips
- Two large chicken breasts, totaling roughly one pound.
- Four strips of bacon
- A goodly amount of chives, minced
- One bunch of leeks, chopped, cleaned, and patted dry
- One bunch maitake mushrooms, cleaned and roughly cut
- Two or three cloves of garlic, minced
- Salt & pepper
- Red pepper flakes
- Extra-virgin olive oil
- About two tablespoons white wine (chicken stock may be subbed)
Method
- First things first: set a pot of (salted) water to boil. Clean your chicken breasts, trim them of fat, and cut them into equal-sized chunks. When the water boils, add the pasta and cook until just done (between three and five minutes). Drain pasta, toss with a bit of oil, and set aside.
- In a rather large skillet, cook your bacon. Set bacon aside to drain and remove most (but not all!) of the fat from the pan.
- In the bacon-fat pan, cook your chicken. Add salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, chives, and white wine to the chicken and cook until just browned. Remove from pan/store in separate, heatproof dish.
- In that selfsame pan, saute your leeks, mushrooms, and garlic. (Note: it helps to start the leeks first, then add the garlic and mushrooms after a bit.) Cook leeks until they’re soft and gently brown. Remove from pan.
- It’s combination time! To your pasta, add your chicken and vegetables. Crumble your bacon — which should be cooled by now — and toss that in, too. Mix thoroughly and serve right away.
Raaaaaaaaaaaah! This dish nailed it. I’m glad I didn’t follow the internetted recipe as it was — the leeks and mushrooms added a level of earthiness I might not have appreciated as a tot, but that I sure as hell appreciate now. Garlic, too, was a good call; I’m totally befuddled by recipes that don’t involve garlic. Verdict: I will be making this dish again in the near future. (Note: Alex was also a fan — he took leftovers to work for a quik-n-easy lunch.)
After dinner, we found ourselves with a mad jones for ice cream. No, I’m not using the royal we — Alex also craved sweets. So we hit up our new go-to, St. Francis Fountain, for A SUNDAE!
That there is the Buster Brown: one gooey brownie topped with Mitchell’s vanilla, raspberry sauce, cronchy slivered almonds, and enough whipped cream to topple Paula Deen herself. ALSO: our server, maybe noting our Lady-&-The Tramp-type behavior, added two maraschino cherries so neither of us would have to go without one. All together: awwwwww! Thanks, beanied hipster dude!
This week, my goals are as follows: 1) Find and prepare another leek-centric recipe, because leeks are the shit; 2) Hit up St. Francis again; 3) Eat fewer PB&B sandwiches, lest I burn out on that delicious combination. Good day.
Whoa, whoa, whoa: back up. You’re saying that because you can block out the shrieks of kids (or that you can pretend said shrieks aren’t annoying), those shrieks aren’t a problem? I love this logic! Let’s apply it to other so-called problems:
Targeting a misleadingly specific audience — one that seems to exist but, upon examination, is found to be a logical dead-end — yields problems in tone. Chubster is rife with such problems.
Not long ago, as Alex and I wandered the late-evening aisles at Safeway, I picked up a jar of poppy seeds. I had no real plan for the them, but poppy seeds don’t require a predetermined course of action; they’re a good thing to have around. Aside from Mohnschnecken* and lemon poppy-seed muffins, I couldn’t think of a recipe that called on poppy seeds as a main ingredient. (OK, that’s a lie: I recalled a citrus poppy-seed vinaigrette my mom made when I was a wee one, but said vinaigrette is a condiment rather than a main or dessert so it was excluded from my mental list.)
So I let my cravings dictate my direction. I’ve had pears on the brain for a stretch, and pear poppy-seed bread pervaded my thoughtstream. Google yielded some decent results for my search, and I found this recipe for 
Still, I’m not concerned. I’ve got my jar of iron pills — dingy capsules that taste like dirt — and the full assortment of greens remains available, always. I actually love personal food trends (food gravitations) and what they might signify. I don’t believe, as some people do, that they hint at deficiencies that our bodies seek to correct; rather, I suspect they’re rooted in something murkier — a convergence of physical and psychological preferences, seasonal cues, social prompts, what have you. I’m not fully tempted to suss out the causes, not only because the causes might be unidentifiable, but because I’m content with this small, benign mystery.
We’re still reaping the benefits of our V-day bounty: yesterday’s breakfast drew on a few leftover ingredients and a few freestanding ones. Clockwise from top: Josey’s wonder bread, buttered (and, post photo, slathered in Donna’s jam); bacon; and eggs with two cheeses and arugula.
We waged an epic battle at Bi-Rite, dodging rampaging hippies just there to get farro, goddamnit, and canoodly couples practically making out in front of the olive display. (GET A ROOM! Next time, that is.) Forty-five minutes later, we were prepping dinner. On the menu: assorted cheeses and charcuterie; dates, which Alex pitted and sliced into wedges; olives; radishes, cleaned, halved, and served in a teacup; arugula, tossed with toasted breadcrumbs and the tangiest vinaigrette, sharpened with shallots and capers and grainy mustard; bread: a sweet baguette and a soft, flat loaf crusted in sesame seeds; German sparkling wine; and Boston Creme Pie, with the lightest filling and the most decadent chocolate shell. Membrillo, too, which I cut into thin slices and smashed into the bread before laying down sheets of Manchego.
We ate near the heater, our plates and bowls balanced on small tables, our legs tucked beneath us. Watched the Maine episode of “No Reservations,” which I kept interrupting to ask, “Is that how it really is? Is this an accurate representation?” We let our stomachs settle before cutting one slice of the pie — a sharing slice — and finishing off the champagne and then, very late, rolling into bed.
