Waffling

Some time ago, I found myself reading something like this:

Waffles are, in essence, breakfast. Among the early scholars of the waffle industry are many who later played key roles in breakfast menu construction. The movers, shapers and architects of modern breakfast include clown hero Ronald M and various assorted expensive cafés where they charge five bucks for a shot of joe. They all have one thing in common, the capacity to spawn unlimited copies. That is why when you visit Atlantis, the natives look at you and say, "Let's go to a 'copy time' for breakfast."

To be a waffle has been a dream of many breakfasts. Those privileged enough to be one know that they carry with them a sense of butteriness, occasionally tinged with cinnamon or blueberry essence. To be a waffle means having the 'dare' to bread an unbeaten egg. To be a waffle is to be a carbohydrate source, a fat resource, a way of life.

In an advanced breakfast shop, we work hard at harnessing the best resources available to nurture breakfasts which have fresh eggs, butter and dough. We want our waffles to be strong in their basic stuff, so that when you apply condiments across them they will not crumble but remain relatively crisp. We want our waffles be pursued relentlessly and inspire in others the passion to create something new. We want them to be curious and peculiar, filled with hidden insights and ingredients. We want our waffles to show courage and fortitude in the face of challenging customers, to go down well with other foods, and invite empathy and a genuine respect (even from those whose views on breakfast, cultures and backgrounds differ).

In an advanced breakfast shop, we aim at making our breakfasts not just a good experience but a remarkable one. The stuff that we have extracted, the comprehensive combinations that we have designed, are meant to give breakfasts with diverse strengths, interests and aspirations pathways to digestion which they are best at. Breakfasts come with menus to help navigate the challenging and complex contexts of today. They are exposed to industry and leaders of industry to help them understand what it takes to be successful. They have many opportunities to learn to be served to the community and understand the qualities that make a waffle great.

This is our way of ensuring that waffles continue to embody the hope of a better age. Journey with us and feel your arteries respond to waffles.

No, I didn't quite believe it either.

Breakfast (Again)

The last time I wrote about breakfast, JS reminded me that there are indeed some far-flung corners of the world where minced-pork noodles and other wonderful morning meals are not readily available. You might have to cook them yourself, and you might not be able to find the right ingredients even then. This is a tragic truth.

I suppose the discontentment of globalisation is that it requires all to have equal access, forgetting that without barriers, what remains is mush. It is so in every organic structure. Can you imagine if your whole body decided to do away with its selectively-permeable membranes and mix everything up? You'd not be a viable organism anymore. It is just as true for the world; unless you can maintain some barriers, the virtue of separate qualities is lost.

Think for example of President Obama (well, in a couple of days, that's what he'll be). Much is made of the fact that he is half-Kenyan, half-white-American. Or that he spent his childhood in exotic locales like Kansas, Indonesia and Hawaii. But if everyone was of an indeterminate race or every place had the same quota of McDonald's or Starbucks or Lucky Coffee Shop Braised Pork Noodles, all this would have NO significance at all!

It is all very well to say that one shouldn't care about gender, race, or any of the other primitively simple differentiating elements in human society. But we still choose one breakfast over another. We don't choose to mush everything up in one flat grey or brown disc of homogenised nutrients. We actually spend time preparing food, and write essays that make sense. Homogeneity is rubbish, the lack of discrimination is an enemy.

What? So illiberal and uneducated a view from this blog?

Perhaps. But I'd like to point out that I much prefer the way humour integrates us all. There are Jewish jokes, there are Polish jokes, there are jokes about Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Scotsmen, Chinese, Japanese... they are all racist jokes. But the interesting thing is that they are all the same jokes. We just re-label them to make fun of someone else. There are very few jokes that can't be transferred to someone else (maybe some Sikh jokes or jokes about unpronounceable Polish or Celtic names); a lot of these are puns that rely on proficiency with a specific language.

The point is that we eventually learn to blend without making too much of similarity or difference, but rather complementarity and a harmony of differences. That's why we eat bacon and eggs, or salted eggs and congee, or bagels with lox. We know the digestive system (from the lips and teeth, down to the other end) will mix everything up and produce a final lump of homogenised crap, but at the input end, we still like to be able to distinguish individual and mixed flavours and aromas all at once.

Breakfast

There is nothing better in life than to saunter down to the local noodle shop for a bite and a dose of strong black coffee in a little chipped ceramic cup. It doesn't really matter where 'local' is, in these days of globalisation. Of course, the problem is sometimes that the quality hasn't globalised, so you find yourself in odd corners of the world where you cannot really get a good breakfast — or worse, where you cannot really get good coffee.

That said, these odd corners are now fewer and farther between. Which means that breakfast is more likely to be a treat!

Breaking News

It's all broken now. Heh.

Morning has broken, chains are broken, links are broken, and so are many other things.

Today was the breaking point.

Breakfast

One should always sit down for a proper breakfast before going on to more serious and taxing endeavours.

This morning's breakfast was exceptionally fine. There were

• slices of a French saucisse avec noisettes from a secret location in the underbelly of ancient Gaul
• a peppercorned Brie from New Zealand just turned darker yellow after cold aging
• grapes from the Asian Pacific, just on the brink of raisinhood
• kaya of the faintly ochre, not quite green, variety with a bit of pandan flavour but not too much
• toast done sunward but not suntanned
• apple juice, Fuji-sweet and Chardonnay-yellow
• South American druglord coffee
• Japanese dark chocolate with whole almonds

Yes, this is the life.

And in other news at the Rugby World Cup, Jonny Wilkinson kicked England to victory against a good but obnoxious Wallabies squad. I'm not sure how I feel about an English team acting like a bad 1980s Ireland set-up, or about a Southern hemisphere team acting like a Monty Python set-up. But at least one of them got eliminated and I can look forward to the romantic half of the draw now.