TGICFS.

CFS. OMG. HTS. STFU. SMDH.  © Ryan Schierling

Editor's note: As of February 2019, Hit The Spot Cafe has closed. One of the best, last, proper breakfast CFS and eggs plates is gone. 

"...so that's how I woke up with shin splints and found out I'd been banned from the community pool..."

"...I don't know what happened. I opened the front door and the light was blinding. It felt like I'd been in the house for two days instead of two hours and now the upper atmosphere was burning. It was incapacitating overexposure, hot white light that turned the insides of my cleaved eyelids bright blood red, even through the futile shade of my outstretched hand..."

"...I'd fight you right now, 'cept I don't wanna crush my cig'rettes..."

I'm not sure what to relay here. It's been a while. I really don't even want to tell you where this place is. Really. I guess if you run in the right, tight AUSTIN TEXAS CFS circles, you'll figure it out.

Your Haiku:

A breakfast stunner
Location curated, so
locals only please

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Shrimp, grits, gravy and greens.

Fried grit cakes with boudin gravy, dandelion greens and shrimp. © Ryan Schierling

Every Southern cook worth their heritage cast iron pot-and-pan collection has a shrimp and grits recipe that's the best. Of course, it's a recipe that was bestowed to them in hushed tones by their mama, from their mama's mama, and so on and so forth, down a long line of mamas. My mother doesn't have a shrimp and grits recipe and I'm not a southern cook. I rock the cast iron, but there is no lineage that would tie me to a historically time-honored shrimp and grits recipe.

I'm not looking to give you one more traditional (or non-traditional) reinterpretation of what started as a Low Country breakfast dish. It's been done.

While I have a deep and abiding respect for the classics, I wanted a fussy, sassy, gussied-up little Southern belle that was more a complete plate than just shrimp and grits. Call me a Yankee all you want – but when you taste these fried grit cakes and boudin cream gravy, the little pickled green tomatoes, the robust, biting dandelion greens and that rich New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp – you will slap your mama.

Tex-Mex Loco Moco.

Tex-Mex meets broke da mout'. © Ryan Schierling

It's been just long enough that I'm starting to yearn for a little island time again.

There were only a few places on our must-eat list when Julie and I first visited Oahu. We had to get malasadas at Leonard's on Kapahulu, try shaved ice at Matsumoto's Shave Ice in Hale'iwa. There would be poke at Tamashiro Market, shrimp trucks on the North Shore, and a stop for plate lunch at Rainbow Drive-In. A bit touristy, as all first visits are, but a good introduction to some solid Hawaiian culinary building blocks. 

At Rainbow Drive-In, the plate lunch of mahi mahi, steamed white rice and that wonderfully-simple, mayonaisse-drenched macaroni salad, was nicely satisfying, but I couldn't leave without trying the loco moco. The crazy wha….? Isn't "moco" Spanish for "snot?"

One scoop rice, one hamburger patty, one over-easy egg, smothered in brown gravy and served in a bowl for three bucks. It was brilliant. 

Now, like any other fabled regional dish with a long history steeped in island culture, stories vary about the origins of the loco moco. Some say it was a guy on the Lincoln Wreckers barefoot football team nicknamed "Crazy" that asked for the combination at Hilo's Lincoln Grill in 1949.  

Others say Lincoln Grill owners Nancy and Richard Inouye put the dish together for the hungry (and usually broke) Wreckers players and only charged them 25 cents.They say when Nancy wrote it up on the butcher paper menu, she asked husband Richard what it should be named.

"The kids are crazy. Call it a loco moco." 

There are variations – Spam, teriaki beef or chicken, mahi-mahi, wieners, chili, ham steak, bacon – but for me, none compares to the original with a hamburger patty.

A turkey Hajj (or "pilgrimage to Mecca").

Open-faced hot turkey sandwich. © Ryan Schierling

I'm totally with you, internets! We don't need 400 new recipes to create from Thanksgiving leftovers. We know that the best way to eat them is just to eat them. Sometimes, it's only a matter of reconfiguring them on the plate. This particular arrangement happens to be my favorite.

My story begins in a wonderfully gritty little dive bar/café – Mecca Cafe. It is this establishment that I have to thank for my sincere appreciation of turkey. Located in the heart of Seattle's Lower Queen Anne neighborhood, it is a stone's throw from the Space Needle and was walking distance from our old place. It is every bit as unpretentious and personable as its motto, which reads, "Alcoholics serving alcoholics since 1929." Split into two separate spaces, they serve stiff drinks on one side and offer rock-solid comfort food on the other, in true old-diner style.

And I know I am not the only one to have found delicious respite in their particular style of open-faced hot turkey sandwich.

"On a bad day, one of their good greasy breakfasts or the hot open-faced turkey sandwich might just save your life." - The Stranger, Dec 13, 2007

Most Thanksgivings I have had the opportunity to eat turkey, but most of those years I took a pass on the bird. My general opinion was that eating turkey just wasted stomach space for the really yummy things on the holiday menu, like mashed potatoes with dressing and gravy. And pie.

But one fateful day nine years ago, months away from any gratitude-based festivities, I made the acquaintance of the open-faced hot turkey sandwich at Mecca. I was smitten. Thick slices of egg bread, 1/8" cuts of turkey breast that pulled apart easily with a fork, and a fluffy heap of mashed potatoes all generously drenched in warm delicious gravy… sigh… a revelation.

I don't recall if someone recommended it to me that day, or if I ordered it on a whim. I'm not even sure if I was alone or with a friend. All I remember is that it was a turning-point. I was eating the most amazing turkey plate I had ever eaten in my life and realizing that this was what a holiday meal involving turkey aspired to be. Oh, the gratitude!

There's nothing fancy at all about a hot turkey sandwich. It's a straightforward layering of sliced turkey over bread, snugged up to a pile of mashed potatoes, then all topped with turkey gravy and served with a big spoonful of cranberry sauce. But each element is important; flimsy honey-wheat bread, dried out Butterball®, rehydrated Idaho® Spuds™ and generic gravy from a jar are NOT going to give you the same sandwich. Also, the cranberry sauce had better be fresh because the gelatinous kind from a can will never deliver that wonderful sweet-tart sensation of a whole cranberry bursting between your teeth.

This year we planned for having adequate leftovers. All the extra home-cooked goodies for this meal were waiting in the refrigerator: roasted turkey, mashed potatoes with butter and cream, and cranberry sauce made with fruity cabernet. Bread was the only additional item we had to buy to make this – which actually worked out perfectly for us since we'd already gobbled down the sourdough dressing. Now that we're living in Texas, we decided to try it with a loaf of Texas Toast instead of egg bread. Because of its similarly-thick slices and light texture, it was a satisfying facsimile of the real deal. 

There are a thousand ways to dress up, dress down, and devour those Thanksgiving leftovers, but few more simple than this – unless you're eating things cold right out of the fridge. It is also the most turkey this quasi-vegetarian will probably ever eat off of one plate at a meal. Spicy pumpkin and smoked turkey risotto be damned. This weekend I'm going to have to insist on a hot turkey sandwich.

Braised beef and boiled bread.

Sauerbraten, with semmelknodel and rotkohl. © Ryan Schierling

Friday night cooking show / with a horse meat dish / I had to stay in the freezer / all Thursday eve talking to that horse – The Dead Milkmen, "Dean's Dream"

I've never been known to skimp when it comes to the authenticity of a dish, but I swear there was no horse involved in this meal. Historically though, horse meat (or venison) was used when preparing sauerbraten. Maybe horse is how they did things in Germany when it's longingly, nostalgically referred to as the "old country," but I'm betting they go for das Rindfleisch nowadays.

This is a traditional meal that your Oma might cook from her grandmother's recipe cards, that you – being four generations removed from the Fatherland – give a wrinkled nose and a sideways glance before pushing it around on your plate for half an hour because German food is just so… bland.

Really? What do you need? An Oktoberfest oom-pah band, a 72 oz. Spaten and a busty beer wench that looks like the St. Pauli girl slugging you in the belly with a bratwurst brickbat?

Don't be such a tourist. Mass-market ethnic cuisine is so diluted in the United States that we're already beginning to associate the lowest common denominator with authenticity. On The Border = Mexican. Olive Garden = Italian. P.F. Chang's = Chinese. Where do you go for American food? Old Country Buffet?

German food is not easy. Most times, it is not pretty. 

It is, for the most part, a heavy, filling cuisine that American restaurants do poorly. It's difficult to find homemade pungent, puckering sauerkraut, fresh caraway-flecked sausages, sinus-imploding mustards... and when's the last time you saw choucroute garnie on a menu? We tried... but disappointed by German fare in Fredericksburg, Texas (a bastion of German-Texan heritage) on more than one occasion, I decided we were going to do this on our own – starting with sauerbraten. I consulted dozens of recipes and tried to distill the essence of what really made sauerbraten so special. What were the historic similarities? What were the regional differences? Why were there differences?

When the roast went into the Dutch oven to brown, the olfactory nostalgia began. Adding the marinade the beef had rested in for the last three days filled the kitchen with a memory for me. I don't know if I really recall eating sauerbraten as a child, but if I did, it was probably at a Schierling family gathering and the preparation smelled exactly like this – rich, savory, sweet and full of red wine and vinegar.

All afternoon the house felt like Fall married with the scent of comfort food, and I couldn't wait to tuck into a plate of beef and gravy.

MSOMS (Modified Shit On Modified Shingle).

Shit on a...toad in a hole. © Ryan Schierling 

The dish has throngs of fans and legions of detractors. It has an oft-edited expletive in its name. The acronym SOS has some pretty legendary U.S. military history and gravitas, and I'm not talking about the Morse code distress signal.

I struggled with this one for a while, because I love a good doody reference (see Caddyshack) but I'm extremely wary of over-processed, pressed, salted, sugared and sorbitol'd beef simulacrum. I also have a Navy boot-camp association with this bastardized biscuits & gravy that is less than favorable.

The edited, safe-for-children name is Stuff On a Shingle, Same Old Stuff or the puritanically-unimaginative "Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast." Toast is toast. The gravy base is a classic French mother sauce, a delicate béchamel beaten over the head with bits of bad beef.

It has been on all branches of the military's menu, in various incarnations, since the early 1900s. The chipped beef version officially entered the Army’s recipe database with the 1910 publication of the Manual for Army Cooks, calling for dried chipped beef, beef stock and evaporated milk, a flour and butter roux, chopped parsley and ground black pepper.

The current creamed chipped beef recipe, straight from the Armed Forces Recipe Service Index (# L 052 00) calls for chipped beef, a margarine and flour roux, nonfat dry milk (reconstituted) and ground black pepper. Having – like every other shell-shocked new recruit – fervently and indiscriminately shoveled SOS down in Navy boot camp, I can tell you that this was not the version served. Instead, we apparently got AFRS #  L 030 00, which has no roux but is 90% lean ground beef, onions, flour, salt and pepper, warm water, Worcestershire sauce and nonfat dry milk. Sounds yummers, right? I ate it a few times, and the disgust with the glutinous, chalky mess (imagine choking down beef-flavored Elmer's Glue on thick cardboard) compounded until I decided to skip subsequent breakfast servings and just go hungry until lunch.

So why bring this egesta back to the fore? Why pick at the edge of a malicious, malignant food memory? Because I believe in second chances, and I also believe that just because something is entrenched in culinary history (even bad military culinary history) doesn't mean it can't still evolve into something delicious.

Be still my heart, literally.

Sweet potato fries w/ gravy and over-easy egg. © Julie Munroe

It is a breakfast order in the finest Ghetto Melrose tradition.

A supremely-overslept Sunday morning, a toss through the freezer and refrigerator, a perversely-inspired ensemble of baked sweet potato fries, leftover chicken gravy, an over-easy yard egg on top and a hot sauce drift...

It's like Texas poutine with black coffee. 

Beware the kalends of April.

Biscuits and sausage gravy. © Ryan Schierling 

We're a pretty open-minded pair when it comes to what we eat. I haven't really encountered anything that I wouldn't put into my mouth – kind of like a two-year-old in the backyard – sampling rocks, dirt, snails and whatever else crosses my path. Okay, I don't eat rocks and dirt, but thanks to my mom's policy of "taking a no-thank-you helping" when I was growing up, I'll eat and enjoy pretty much whatever you put in front of me. 

I've gotten Julie to at least taste a great number of the meatses I've prepared, but she draws the line at pork. 

So when I make sausage gravy, which is a traditional biscuit blanket here in the South, I compromise. We use a pork proxy – Gimme Lean sausage. 

The very first time I used Gimme Lean, I also made a batch of my normal pork sausage gravy. Two skillets with identical ingredients (fat, white flour, whole milk, salt, white and black pepper), save the faux-sausage. My longtime-friend and fellow Kansan (read as: born-and-bred carnivore) Dan was our unwitting test subject. I didn't ask him "which one do you think has real sausage in it?" I simply asked "which one do you like better?" 

Now, I have to qualify Dan with a quick story here: 

A number of years ago we were at Trader Joe's in Seattle. In the vast and wonderful cheese section, there were sample trays with little cubes of different cheeses to try. Dan was tasting each and every fromage they offered up – aged English cheddar, Havarti with dill, Parmigiano Reggiano – but wasn't paying much attention to the labels on each tray. He got to the final sample station, popped a cube of cheese into his mouth, chewed twice and suddenly stopped. His jaw clenched, his eyes were wide and frightened, and he began frantically looking around for... something. Dan, as discreetly as possible, leaned over and ejected the cheese from his mouth to his hand, making a "Bwuuuu-uuuulll-uuch" sound. He was looking for a trash can, and I was no help, standing a few feet behind him nearly choking from trying to hold in my laughter. He looked back at the tag on the tray, which read "soy cheese." 

Let's just say Dan prefers the real things in life. 

So when I put two plates of biscuits and gravy in front of him – not disclosing anything about the dishes – and asked him to tell me which one he preferred, I figured he'd instinctively choose the biscuits with real sausage gravy. 

I was wrong, and he was rather surprised to learn that the one he liked better was actually pretend pork. 

My sausage gravy has been prepared this way ever since, even on April Fool's Day.