The North End

A few weeks ago, my dad came to visit me for the second time since I’ve been at BC. A true Texan, born and raised, he openly abhors Northeastern weather and refuses to step a foot into Logan airport unless it is absolutely certain that the temperature will be above 60 degrees. Needless to say, there have been very few chances for him to come during the school year, so it was great that he made it up here while we’ve been having some of the best weather I’ve seen in Boston since my arrival. I swear, you never know when it’s going to be nice here. One moment, it is cold and rainy and the wind feels like ice. The next, the sun is shining brightly and there’s purple flowers everywhere and you can’t fathom where the hell they came from, you’re just glad that they’re there and you hope that they don’t retreat back into that frost that’s soaked into the sidewalk. Brrrr. We’ve had some cold winters here, but it sure does seem like Spring is on its way.

And that’s what my Dad said when he first got in. “Wow, I didn’t expect it to be this sunny.” I smiled and gave him a hug. It’s always nice to hear a parent talk about the weather. Older people seem to have an uncanny understanding of the seasons, probably because they’ve been here for so long- by now, I suppose that they’ve gotten used to it. The first thing that we did was go for a drive along the river, the Charles River, where already, Harvard and BU kids were rowing their boats along the canal, making trails that rippled behind them like the Slinkys that my Dad has always hated so much. “They’re too cheap,” he complained. “And they never work how they are supposed to.” I sighed. “They go to Harvard, Dad. I’m sure that they work as hard as they can.”

The sun eventually set and my Dad had long since stopped talking about the dangers of eugenics, so we decided that the only thing left to do was get some dinner and call it a night. I did a quick Google search in my phone and came up with a place called “Trattoria II Panino,” located in the North End. There was limited parking on the sidewalks so we navigated through the narrow alleyways in order to find a mythical parking lot that Apple claimed was real, but you can never be sure. Upon arriving at the restaurant, we were promptly seated at a table for two, with a cramped kitchen behind me and an outdoor patio to my right, enclosed due to burgeoning rain. Beside the patio there was a narrow staircase that descended steeply into what I imagined to be the bowels of Paul Revere. I laughed about this, weirdly, and we ordered some pasta. They used the pans that the food was cooked in as plates, and Dad and I both agreed that Boston’s Italian food would be hard to beat, anywhere.

In all, it was a really good visit.

James Masterson

BREAKFAST BURRITO

First of all, I want to preface this post by saying that cooking is not my forte. Like, I’m not terrible at it- I have reasonable command over the toaster, and the microwave is even easier, but the oven has given me some serious problems in the past, problems that include, but aren’t limited to, innumerable fire alarms, charred skin, and broiled cookies. So, needless to say, I don’t use the oven anymore, which makes cooking kind of hard, especially given my already limited culinary capabilities. The stove, on the other hand, I can control pretty easily, almost easier than the microwave. I mean, all you have to do is flip on the switch and BAM- fire! But it’s not the type of fire that sets off the fire alarm. It’s a more somber type of fire; a fire that burns sweet and low and perfect like a campfire at dusk in the middle of summer and the sun is setting so the horizon is orange but gets light blue towards the top and there’s that smell in the air that smells like a campfire but might actually just be the oxidized air particles disintegrating into the atmosphere like those sparks that are imploding in miniscule bursts of heat that instantly cool and contribute to the darkening cool that spreads with the night as it finally falls over the world like a blanket on a bed that’s a little too close to the open window but it’s okay since cold sheets feel great at first, especially in the summer. Stove fires are kind of like that, but even better since the knobs can make the fire expand like blooming flowers, and what’s fire if not a really, really pretty flower?…

I can make breakfast burritos on the stove, but that’s about it. And of course, I can make the stuff that goes into the burrito, like the eggs and bacon and sausage. I can cook the eggs, easy, even though it is pretty hard sometimes to resist breaking the yolk and making the eggs scrambled. I usually don’t do that since I like breaking the yolk from the egg once it is already formed, because who doesn’t like egg yolk? It’s so silky and bright- it’s the best part. Besides, scrambled eggs are so boring. They look like the intestines of a radioactive rodent who survived primarily on cheese, which wouldn’t be that unusual, I just really don’t like the thought of eating rodents! But then I think- isn’t foie gras duck liver? As far as gross body parts go, it doesn’t get much worse than duck liver, especially since most ducks don’t seem to adhere to the strict, purely organic diet that I expect my meat-based foods to maintain. God, ducks are stubborn creatures. Narrow-minded, too. Just like cows. And that’s why I never feed them, even when the sign tells me not to.

So, I melt the butter on the pan instead of using PAM because PAM is so industrial it adds a strange metallic taste to the food that causes me to not totally trust it. Butter is fine, though, and after that’s melted I add the egg and the bacon all at once because it’s more efficient that way, and while that stuff is cooking, I take out the tortillas and avocado and tomatoes and I cut up the avocado and tomatoes and place them off to the side and by the time that that is finished, the eggs and bacon are usually more or less cooked, so I take them off the pan and place them on the plate and then I place the tortilla on the pan and let it cook until both sides are crispy with butter and bacon juice, which sounds gross but actually isn’t so long as there isn’t THAT much bacon juice left on the pan beforehand, and once that is done, I add all the ingredients to the tortilla and roll it up and BAM-

Breakfast burrito

James Masterson