The minute after I got in the subway this morning at 6:15, I remembered that I forgot to buy bread for work. Before I get on the subway in Queens I can buy some of the best bread that NYC has to offer at a teeny tiny deli that sells Mozart chocolates by the cash register and blue dyed carnations out front. Once I get out at 50th and Park in Manhattan, it’s a bread desert.
I walked into the Eezy Squeezy.
“Do you have bread?”
“Bagels?”
“Not bagels. Bread. A loaf of bread.”
“You want a hero?” He holds up a squooshy mooshy torpedo.
“I don’t want that.”
“Toast?”
“I don’t want toast. I need toast but no toast.”
“Bread.”
“Yea, bread.”
He wraps up two slices of toast no toast, bread.
“I’ll take eight of those.”
He is so over me.
For eight slices of Better than Wonder I pay my four dollars and walk on out.

Upstairs I elevate Ferdinand’s birthday menu into business lunch. Marinate the chicken breasts with slices of red onion, bay leaves, slices of all the lemons and limes and olive oil. Make a chive butter for the flank steaks. Saute onion, bits of tomato, dried oregano, parsley, cayenne, fennel seed and garlic until it’s delicious. No fresh herbs because I have no fruit and veg delivery until 10. Add the black beans, and the dried rice. Add the water and let it wait until 11 to put it on to simmer so it’s hot for noon.
Puree tomatillos w/lime juice, salt and ripe avocados. Take the crusts off my “no toast ” and fry them in olive oil. Toast almonds. Roast a few roma tomatoes, soak some chili peppers, then saute them in olive oil. Pulse the almonds, add the bread, the chilis, the tomatoes, squeeze of lemon, spill of sherry vinegar, taste for salt, add the drained tomato juice that I saved from halving/seeding the tomatoes for roasting and now that the veg order is in, a chop of flat leaf parsley. Spicy enough, but not too spicy. Beautiful romaine the color of ginko leaves washed and dried and dressed w/olive oil and sherry vinegar. On the side, bowls of slivered radish, seeded and chopped cucumber and wedged tomatoes. Cook off the moros and cristianos, sear off the steaks, roast off the chicken, slice it all up, platter it all up and lunch is on.