Meat as a Treat

Yesterday I pulled out all the stops for brunch, and I have a bunch of meatless recipes to recommend to you.

Cinnamon Rolls (Tasting Table): They take a certain amount of work, but the beauty of it is you do most of the work THE DAY BEFORE! Then you just stick them in the fridge, and remove them from the fridge an hour before baking them. While they bake, you make the sauce, which is a quick task. And the rolls are GOOOOOOOOOOOD. Oh my, they are good.

Whole-Wheat English Muffins (NYT Cooking): There are quite a few steps to this recipe, so you need to have some time, but the results were very impressive. I am sure I will make them again.

Eleven Madison Park Granola (NYT Cooking): This is super-easy, and delicious. And like the cinnamon rolls, it's a great make-ahead recipe. Serve it with yogurt or milk. I recommend a teaspoon of regular salt rather than the quantity recommended in the recipe - the first time I made this, it was far too salty.

Pommes Anna with Chives (A Garden for the House/Delicious Living): If you have a food processor that will slice your potatoes, this is a breeze. If not, it would probably take a thousand years and I wouldn't bother. The pictures illustrate the fun athletic move you'll need to make at the end, at which point we all ooohed and aaahed when we saw that it turned out perfectly. It tasted good, too.

Pat made us breakfast cocktails, and we were good to go!

Scroll back up to the top of this page and take a closer look, because in addition to cinnamon rolls, granola, English muffins, Pommes Anna, and cocktails, we also have.....

.... Bacon. Ah, bacon. This blog, as you know, is all about reducing our meat consumption for the benefit of the planet. So why is bacon still on my menu?

A friend sent me a New York Times article about "The Vegetarians Who Turned Into Butchers." It is possible to farm animals in a way that is less harmful to the environment, but it costs more. And I got to thinking: that's perfect, actually. If it's more expensive, then I buy less of it, and that, too, is good for the environment.

The concept, in a nutshell, is "Meat as a Treat." If we can approach meat like it's something special rather than something we get every day, then it makes more sense to pay more for it, the way we splurge on other things we see as treats. If we aren't ready to quit meat entirely, it's still helpful to cut back to any degree, and try to get it from an environmentally-conscious source.

And thus, bacon when guests are invited for brunch.