Give Me Some Comfort! (Food): Brinner

When it's late and I'm starving and lazy and don't want to prepare an actual meal, I start to take a good hard look at what's in my fridge. Tonight, I still had some leftover chicken, that I'm saving for Dave, my usual varieties of cheese, and some salad (which I wouldn't touch. When you're starving and bored of your usual food, salad is just about the worst idea ever). I made a handful of pasta, attempting to coax a faux-fettuccine Alfredo (a faux-fredo? a faux-cine? whatever) out of my melted whipped cream and tablespoon of Parmesan. It did not go well, especially considering that I had forgotten the cream was flavored with vanilla and sugar.

So a few disgusting forkfuls and then what? This is the worst possible situation to find myself in: tired, lazy, hungry, and annoyed because I just spent 20 minutes cooking something that ultimately turned out to be inedible. Luckily, I had an ace up my sleeve, in the form of bacon in my fridge: brinner to the rescue.


Brinner, for those of you not on the up and up, is a portmanteau of "breakfast" and "dinner" and is used to describe eating breakfast foods for dinner (I guess it could also refer to dinner foods at breakfast, but who really wants to eat spaghetti-os at 7 in the morning? Trick question!). It was the plot point of an episode of Scrubs, and for good reason: brinner is awesome. I don't usually fall back on the crutch of brinner, since you can get seduced by the idea of pancakes 24 hours a day until you become one of those people cooking rashers of bacon as a midnight snack, but on nights like tonight, when I have a fridge full of bacon and eggs that need to be eaten anyway, it's sort of a perfect storm of deliciousness.

For brinner, I usually go with bacon and eggs or green eggs and ham, since pancakes at that hour can fall a little too close to dessert. Also, I don't include cereal under the brinner category. Cereal is the absolute most pathetic meal ever, the honey nut standard for lazy college students and lazy college grads (I'm looking at you, love of my life). Generally, if it came from a pot or pan and is something they serve at Denny's, it will probably make a good brinner. And why not? A balanced breakfast contains at least many of the ingredients that come up in later meals. Plus, you get the added fun of eating breakfast for dinner! Pancakes at 8pm?! You crazy person! I want to be your friend!

As Turk says: "I just don't see what's wrong with having a nice glass of wine with some pancakes." Right on.