Don't Wake Me, I Plan On Sleeping In

It’s around this time of year that I start thinking about the early Roman calendar.

I know what you’re thinking—sure, men are always supposed to be thinking about the Roman Empire. That’s not usually the case for me, and I’ve covered that before—I have my own personal obsessions, such as the Johnstown Flood and Forrest Fenn’s treasure.

It's not *just* the Roman Empire.

“When was the last time you thought about the Roman Empire?”, my wife says, looking up from her phone.

The Action Cookbook NewsletterScott Hines

No, the Roman Empire typically only crosses my mind in these late lingering days of February, when I remember that there was a time when this part of the year simply didn’t count. In the original Roman calendar—the one credited to the first emperor, Romulus—the year was divided into ten months, starting with March and ending with December. The agriculturally-insignificant winter period that we now know as January and February was simply not counted.

Now, at the beginning of this year, I openly expressed my fondness for the slate-clearing reset that January brings, but I’ll admit: after the last two months of horrific news and nasty weather, the notion that we could wave our hands and say “hey, uhh, none of that actually counted, the new year starts tomorrow” is quite appealing. We could treat everything that’s happened so far this year like spring training baseball results: potentially-instructive, but ultimately irrelevant to our win-loss record, which still stands at 0-0.

With that mindset adopted, I’m going back to bed.

Okay, not really—but today’s newsletter is all about cozy weekend-morning vibes. I’ve got a hearty, delicious breakfast for our egg-scarce times, a crisp brunch cocktail, a wonderfully soothing novel, some chill music and more.

Hit the snooze. A new year starts tomorrow, and you’ll want to be well-rested.

I put all my eggs in one basket, and now I can’t find it.

I haven’t eaten breakfast much lately.

As part of an ongoing effort to slim down by summer, I’ve been doing “intermittent fasting”—wherein I only eat during a set window of the day, one that typically does not include the breakfasting hours. I’m not sure that I buy any of the supposed science behind the practice; my embrace of it is a strictly practical play. If I only eat between the hours of say, 11am and 7pm, that eliminates my prime snacking-and-drinking hours. My Achilles’ heel in recent years has been getting the kids into bed and then immediately searching for something sweet, and a timer telling me that I can’t do that helps.

I bring this up because I don’t do this on weekends, and the lack of breakfast during the week compels me to make the ones on Saturday and Sunday count. The thing is, I love breakfast. There’s no better way to kick off a weekend morning than with a big plate of eggs, and I—[touches earpiece]

I’m being told that there are no eggs anymore. Huh.

Well, I’m sure we’ve got capable people looking into this problem at the highest levels of g—[touches earpiece]

Ahh. I see.

Well, nevertheless. I am committed to making a delicious breakfast, eggs or not1, and I’ll be damned if I resort to making something healthy like overnight oats2 or avocado toast3.

No—I’m making a Breakfast Burger.