Reentry and The First Lunch

Reentry from the wilds of the North takes place in stages and each one of them is shocking. This is why I scheduled my flight from HMC to land at midnight in San Francisco, getting me home in time to go to bed, wake up, and amble to work before I knew what hit me. By the time I got to work, I imagined, I’d still be in state of shock sufficient enough to cushion the blow so that work would just sort of happen as opposed to being some big whup.

The strategy succeeded, and thanks to a few chance occurrences, it was more effective than I expected. See, after being gone for a week, I was able to piss away the entire morning without even doing real work. This sort of morning after vacation work consisted of shuffling through piles on my desk, reading emails, and generally getting organized and positioning myself for real live industriousness. The shuffle carried me through until just before noon when my belly rumbled, lunch time hit, and true reentry commenced.

My first lunch back at Balbalonia took shape as the true end of vacation and beginning of fall. My internal clock had ticked, summer was over, and I had to order strategically, or at least examine my order for signs that normally slip under the radar. Lunch started promisingly as Brendan the bartender filled my normal water glass with citrus slices of all sorts: limes, lemons, and oranges. I never drink anything except water, caffeine, and alcohol except when at HMC and juice comes with every lunch, so this was a nice transition. On a bit of a side note, I had to cut juice out of my HMC lunches this year after a few days, as I was so jacked up on sugar that the juice was really dragging me down. This was a particularly hot summer in Michigan, and I was dehydrated pretty much the entire time, so juice was the last thing on my agenda. Ice cream, cookies and candy had to stay, so juice was out. Water, preferably spring water out of the Rush Lake or Pine River springs, was the only thing I could handle after a few days. I tried the normal cranberry juice with lunch, but no, my body said no. I didn’t ask Brendan for all that citrus, but that sort of intuition is what defines success in the hospitality biz, and he’s a damn good bartender, so it came as no surprise.

My order of actual food veered straight into the routine of routines: soup and pasta. Nine Balbalonia lunches out of ten, I order the pasta. And when hungry enough for two courses, the pasta gets introduced by the soup. Typically I’m not hungry enough – actually I am hungry enough just not skinny enough or motivated enough to withstand the post lunch lethargy from two courses – to order both, but when I do, this is it. The soup was the Roasted Garlic and Tomato. It’s got the classic bite of garlic and pepper and is irresistible. Jose makes it with the leftovers from the tomatoes that go into the Cobb salad. I can’t believe that his prep cooks go to all the trouble of peeling and pulling out the seeds and goop for the tomatoes in the Cobb, but they do. They throw all the goop into a pot, Jose throws that onto a sheet pan with some olive oil and garlic, he roasts it, purees it, strains out the remaining chunks (normally seeds and a few pesky pulls of skin) bingo there’s the soup. It’s quite tasty. Imagine tomato soup minus the creaminess plus some kick and there you go.

The soup was a nice little slurp before the pasta arrived. Ordering pasta at the Balb is no meaningless event. Along with the soup and omelet, the pasta changes daily. Ordering the pasta is a concession to curiosity but also reluctance to choose between the same menu items. When I actually do figure out what the pasta is before ordering it and it doesn’t sound good, the paralysis of indecision that ensues is painful. I can’t order the burger because that’s doom for the rest of the day. The chicken sandwich is bland and buttery. The pork sandwich is good, but who wants all that barbeque sauce all the time. The hangar steak blah no steak for lunch. Same with the fish. The Cobb salad is very very tasty but I need carbs. The chopped salad same thing. See what the problems are here? Pasta is really the only choice. Aside from being a mystery, it’s almost always good, and without it I’d go a little bit crazy eating at the same dang bar four days a week.

So, today, routine reclaimed its rightful spot, and I ordered the pasta, not really paying attention to the details, but hearing that it was risotto. It’s funny, going through my routines today was a bit odd as I couldn’t remember what some of them were. Do I do pushups before situps? I couldn’t remember, but situps came first today. Do I want to walk to work the exact same way as I always do? Well, as much as I’d like to switch it up, I love the way I walk to work. The views are the best, I weave by my favorite row of houses, and I get to say hi to the security guard in front of Sacred Heart. I did break my breakfast routine, but only because somebody told me that a banana every morning would help prevent calf cramps. So that was a new feature, if only by coincidence. And I’ll steer clear of the fact that I bought a banana every morning on the way to work for at least a year, as it’s not that important and I usually didn’t eat it until the afternoon.

The pasta wound up being one of the best in recent memory. A saffron risotto with tiger shrimp (what’s the difference between shrimp anyway? There’s small/bay, jumbo/prawns, the blue kind you see at Costco, and medium/Tiger? Is that all there is to it?), cherry tomatoes (west coasters – go eat a tomato now. Please. Every day in the grocery store you can walk by a bunch of tomatoes. Only now can you walk by and actually smell tomatoes. My first whiff this summer brought back a whoosh of memories and helped me realize how conditioned I was to shitty shitty nasty mealy tasteless tomatoes. Yuck. Easterners – move to California. Wow. Last meal before getting on the plan before HMC was a gigantic heirloom with some chevre. That’s it. And even then the cheese, as fancy and tasty as it was, acted as a condiment. Tomatoes. Who knew.) and asparagus. Back to the tomatoes. How many times have you eaten a cherry tomato? Five hundred thousand? I have no idea I haven’t been counting. But when you get one that tastes the way it was meant to taste it’s a deal breaker. There’s something wrong when you can eat a tomato that’s not a tomato enough so that you start thinking it’s a tomato. Where else is this happening?

I love risotto because it looks like a small portion but by the end you’re full. Ha, psych not today. That first sentence might be true but it’s not even really about fullness anymore. Nobody in this country stops eating when full. We stop eating when there’s no more food on the plate or we’re out of time. That’s how out of wack we are. So……I was full, but not prepared to go back to work. I wanted to keep sitting at the bar, read more of the NY Times than I normally do (just the opinions) and chat with Brendan (he had lots of insight into Snakes on a Plane). So what to do?

The thing not to do is discuss your indecision about dessert with a bartender who happens to be your friend. These guys make their living giving you stuff, even if you’re paying for it. So when I mentioned that I’d eat the bread pudding it I weren’t so full and had to concentrate that afternoon, the deal was done. He simply put in the order, brought me an espresso, and lunch was beyond my control.

As rarely as I order two things for lunch, I hardly ever order three. But remember, I’m transitioning from heavy duty eating at HMC here, so it’s not a huge deal. First of all, if this is going to be the meal that ends summer, I need to stretch it out and create a full blown buffer zone. Secondly, what was I sustaining here? The ability to do pushups and situps, walk to work over a hill, and stay focused enough to be at least 65% as efficient as possible (wow, even that’s a generous number)? And to what does this compare? Meals at HMC sustain a full day’s worth of hiking, swimming, fishing, exploring, gallivanting, careening, and a full night’s worth of heavy drinking, bonfire sitting, story telling, sing-a-long singing all the while catching up with life long friends, family immediate and distant, and maintaining the focus not to stare at a computer but to be patient enough for the wildlife to emerge, whether it’s animals, an early morning thunder storm, or late night northern lights (fuck’n a they did come out too, the last night there, the best I’d ever seen them, starting with a white arch over the lake until it pulsated, expanded, and turned green. Pure Magic). HMC meals always involve bacon and always end in sugar and as I said before water comes out of a spring and into your mouth. So ordering dessert at the Balb was par for some course, even if it isn’t the one I’m on anymore.

This year was not a particularly good berry year. It was too hot and dry. There were ups to this weather though, as the swimming was terrific, and I found myself looping my hikes past the springs way more often than normal. A generation before us they drank water out of the lakes. There’s only one reason that nobody does this anymore – beaver fever. It’s a brutal, ruthless illness and we’ve all been trained to forsake lake drinking for the tap, but the springs are fine. There is nothing like drinking water straight out of a spring. Every morning here at home, I do my exercises, go downstairs, realize there’s no water in the Pur water filter in the fridge, take a gulp of old pipe tasting water (San Francisco water is actually pretty good, but our pipes are ancient and metallic tasting), and use my thirst to motivate me to get to work where I can chug water from the water cooler. Actually I’m kind of thirsty now.