Breakfast meat in Dublin
Not a euphemism! (I'm sorry)
I have been in Dublin for a week and a half, leaving on the 29th. I’ve been here long enough to wake up in the mornings at a normal time, and go to my favorite bakery three times to pick up sausage rolls. I was actually called out as a regular at the bakery yesterday morning, because it’s in the burbs and no Americans besides me go there. I got a drink with my one (1) friend that I’ve made here, who is potentially moving to New York soon, but also maybe not. Since I live in New York I guess I can be happy about either outcome, but I would really like to keep having a Dublin friend, so there’s that.
I am working to build some sort of sustainable working schedule here in a way that I wasn’t so concerned about previously. On my last visit, I would start working at 9am, when Peter did, but then I’d often have meetings till 8pm due to the time difference. So I’d just work straight through for like 11 hours and it was wild. There were a few days where I never left the house, and I had an emotional breakdown one day, which I realize in hindsight is because I was eating too many sausages and only averaging like 2,000 steps a day. I am not handling myself like that this time! So far, any day that I have late meetings, I’ve forced myself to stop working for a few hours mid-day and take a run. I’ve actually been monitoring my steps (a surprisingly large mental health factor, I’m realizing), and I’ve been trying to remember to eat vegetables. I think it’s all helping, even despite all of the Black Friday stuff I’m trying to execute for my clients from the wrong time zone. It’s crazy how you as you get older you have to start spending concerted amounts of time deciding how best to care for your brain and body. I am still wrapping my mind around that most days.
I try not to eat a lot of meat and dairy in my everyday life, but in Ireland it’s almost a crime not to. Everything just tastes really good. My (admittedly limited) understanding of the food supply chain here is that a lot more products are produced on small farms, and you get access to all the good cheeses and things because of the EU free trade thing. I’m especially obsessed with the sausages here, which are a meat product I’ve never historically cared that much about. Here there’s a really soft, almost pillowy quality to them, and they have this lovely mild peppery flavor. There is also black sausage, which is crumbly and contains oats and spices and some unknown-to-me proportion of blood, and it’s sort of an acquired taste but I think I like it at this point.
So one thing you can do with all those sausages is stick them in sausage rolls. Sausage rolls are a Big Deal here. Some have flakier pastry, almost like a croissant, and the sausage situation varies from a whole encased link, to more of a freeform ground meat situation. Corner Bakery, the place where I am (ahem) now known as a regular, makes my favorite variation. It’s an almost unholy-sounding double sausage roll, containing two full links of meat surrounded by a highly tender but not-too-flaky pastry shell. They sell out of these things every morning, and for good reason. Typing this now I’m considering going to buy another one. This is an obvious hindrance to the eat more vegetables resolution.
An even unholier thing you can get here, I’ve learned, is a breakfast roll. That’s when you take the aforementioned sausages, plus rashers (Americans would call this Canadian bacon), crumbled chunks of black pudding, and runny fried eggs, and throw them all together into what I would describe as a footlong Subway sandwich roll. It is a breakfast sandwich on steroids. The runny yolks act like a sauce component, soaking into the bread and binding everything together. I am a huge proponent of literally any breakfast sandwich so obviously, I love these and have eaten several. And by eaten I mean I’ve split them with my boyfriend, who is more than capable of eating a whole one by himself, but who shares because he is Benevolent. It is important to get your breakfast roll from a greasy spoon-type place if you want to have the real experience. In this way, I find them very similar to another classic, the NYC bodega bacon egg and cheese. It just hits different when you know they aren’t following any sort of cleanliness guidelines at the grill.
We’ve also been cooking a lot at home. It is suddenly frigid outside and turning on the oven or stove is a decent way to heat up the house (I am learning ALL sorts of things about American vs. European heating standards these days). My friend Ellen keeps gifting me bags of Rancho Gordo beans, which I haven’t interrogated too closely but I believe is because she is a member of their bean of the month club. Well, some of those fancy beans made it to Dublin. I cooked us up a giant pot of Domingo Rojos, which we had for dinner topped with a fried egg, slices of corn bread, and (in my case) chili crisp. Peter described this meal as “a bunch of ingredients that I didn’t think you could put together.” I was like “no dude you’re eating like a cowboy now” which he seemed to like. Thanks for the beans Ellen!
