My boyfriend’s dad is an attorney, and do you know what that means? Harry & David gift baskets at Christmas! During the Years of Temping I spent some time as an executive assistant to lawyers, advertising guys, and other hommes d’affaires and often part of my job would be overseeing the ordering of holiday gifts from the Harry & David or Tiffany Business Catalog. One advertising agency head I worked for kept a database of clients and vendors that kept track of what gift he’d got them last year so he would accidentally repeat something or get a smaller gift and give inadvertent offense. Like you can’t follow up a $125 paneled bowl with the $39.95 All’s Well Banquet. This list went back decades, and for me it turned into this neat anthropology project thinking about how gifts work in human cultures – when are they obligations, when are they displays of status, when are they gestures of heartfelt kindness and generosity, and also what happens to all the cut glass crystal that some of these people had accumulated over 30 years of working with this guy.
The other upside is that when you work for one of these dudes they GET gift baskets and then your office is full of beautiful pears and gourmet popcorn for the entire month of December. Adjunct faculty at an art school don’t get Harry & David gift baskets.
So I was lucky enough to inherit some beautiful pears (all eaten), some fancy jams (Some will be eaten, some will be recycled as hostess gifts. Maybe at your house.), and smoked salmon. Really good smoked salmon. And it prompted me to make a brilliant breakfast sandwich. What you’ll need:
- 1 bagel, toasted
- 1/2 avocado
- A bit of smoked salmon
- Whatever else you’d eat with that – I like thin-sliced red onion, tomato, and lots of freshly ground black pepper. If you have capers, fresh dill, etc. go ahead and throw it on.
Mash the avocado on half the bagel. Build the sandwich. Eat it. No cream cheese required.
Long live the Harry & David gift basket! Long live the breakfast sandwich!
Not photogenic, but tasty.
Okay, I am now officially jealous of people who get corporate gifts.
Also, I want your bagel.
There is a brilliant morning lox sandwich at a local cafe with spinach, red onion, tomato, capers, etc. and I was always asking them to use 1/4 of the cream cheese that they normally do when they make it. This solves the whole problem!
One thing I noticed while reading this blog. A lot of the food is very rich. I love food like that too, but I don’t often eat any of it for reasons of health and diet and weight.
Not sure if this blog is about losing weight or just healthy eating and finding a healthy “size” that suits the way you want to eat.
If this blog is about weight loss you need to radicalize yourself even more. Cut out ALL dairy, ALL sugar, ALL wheat, Coffee, and Alcohol. Drink tons of water and eat only fresh vegetables and some protein (in the form of meat and nuts). Use dried fruit (a piece or two) as a desert.
Follow the above and you will improve your diet and health even more than just buying “great food”. . .and you will peel off the pounds too.
Cheers
I really debated letting your comment through, but it gives me some food for thought. Probably not the kind you wanted, but those are the risks you take when you give presumptuous and condescending advice to complete strangers.
“If this blog is about weight loss you need to radicalize yourself even more.”
But Tom, this blog isn’t about weight loss at all. It’s about cooking. If you’re looking for a weight loss blog or one on making diet foods, you can go find one. That isn’t the focus of this one.
Pingback: Creative pursuits, Captain Awkward, and the overratedness of being “helpful.” | The Girl Who Ate Everything
Use dried fruit…as a desert.
And broccoli as a forest! And mashed potatoes as mountains! And some healthy blueberries can be the sea!
Why do I never get comments on my blog like Tom’s? What am I doing wrong?