Irby - Meaty: essays

1 potato

1 red pepper, cored and seeded, sliced into thin strips

1 onion, sliced not diced, because it looks more elegant that way

68 eggs

sea salt and pepper

some bagged spinach or kale, unless youre the kind of asshole who has that shit growing outside your well-tended home

oil or butter, it doesnt matter

maybe some bacon if you want, or ham could be good too!

2 teaspoons rosemary, if you like that kind of thing

1 cup of whatever grated cheese you have left over from your last nacho day

I am not an egg person. Egg people enjoy thick, slimy yolks splooging over their tongues as they take a bite of their fried-egg sandwiches; they like rivulets of yellow slime cascading from under their hamburger buns; they squeal with delight as a puddle of neon goo oozes from their freshly poached eggs to settle wetly around the edge of their avocado toasts. But eggs are so cheap, and people always buy them, and making a frittata is way better than saying Sunny-side-up eggs make me want to die when they are your only option for food.

Crack the eggs into a bowl and beat them with a whisk. If owning a whisk is the kind of thing that is too fancy for you, throw this book in the trash.

Add to the eggs a couple of pinches of salt and a grind or two of pepper. I never measure, because am I really supposed to grind the peppermill over a teaspoon and see how much I can catch? Im not doing that! Just shake your sea salt container a few times and grind the pepper three or four times so that you can see black specks floating around after you stir it again to mix it all up.

Suddenly remember that you forgot the actual first steps, which are: wash and slice your potato into thin disks (use a mandoline and watch your fingers); wash, core, and seed your red pepper, slicing into skinny strips; cut your onion, but not into chunks, because chunks are weird feeling in eggs. Okay, heres how I do it: I cut off both the top and the bottom of the onion so that I have a flat surface to balance them on, then I take a sharp paring knife and cut from top to bottom while turning the onion an eighth of an inch at a time, until it all falls apart and looks like rainbows scattered across the cutting board.

Now is about the time I feel like Ive accomplished a lot. So I usually take a break, which often involves admiring my beautiful pile of uniformly cut vegetables while drinking coffee and wondering whether this will actually be worth it in the end.

I always forget until its too late that lettuce should probably be cleaned, so now is a good time to find whatever moldering kale or spinach is hanging out at the bottom of your crisper drawer and dump it into a bowl that is 1 cup distilled white vinegar to 3 cups cold water and soak it for 2 minutes, then rinse it in a colander and maybe shake it a little to get some of the water out. I know it feels like a lot of workand Im not going to lie, Ive probably eaten forty-seven E. coli salads since last Tuesdaybut now that Im thinking about it, if you gotta eat greens, at least maybe try not to die from them.

Set your responsibly washed old salad aside and heat up some oil or butter in a deep cast-iron pan and preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit (cue Juveniles 400 Degreez). Cook the potatoes first, for five minutes, over medium heat, moving them around a little bit so they dont stick or burn. Then add the onions and peppers and cook for another five minutes, moving everything around but not so rough that you turn it into gross mush. At this point you could add some crumbled cooked bacon, but that adds a series of extra steps that Im not gonna do while hungover on a Sunday. So its a no from me, dog. But I might chop some deli ham and toss it in there if I have it, but again, probably not. Anyway, if youre putting meat in this, chop it up and throw it in now. Also, at some point during this process, sprinkle salt and pepper on it.

Add the rosemary and the shredded cheese dregs to your beaten eggs (remember them?!) and stir. Then flatten out the vegetables in the hot pan as best you can and pour the egg mixture over it. Shake off your ripped-up chard or kale or spinach and kinda just gently press it into everything; dont add so much that it doesnt mix in, eyeball the right amount. Scroll through your Insta feed and look at pretty brunch spreads. No one wants a glorified egg pizza with a bunch of dried-up grass sitting on top of it.

Bake it for twenty minutes, give or take, until its set. Keep an eye on it starting around the fifteen-minute mark. I like mine a little brown on top, because jiggly eggs in my mouth make me want to cry, but you can eat yours however you want.

Im not an expert on how to pose food to ensure maximum jealousy from people you went to high school with twenty years ago, but here is what Id try:

Use a trivet so you can set the pan on your nicest table surface without fear of ruining it. Oh, you eat on TV trays but you have a rustic chest of drawers next to your bed? You better run that skillet upstairs, girl!

So people know that you actually made it with your own hands, scatter some eggshells and salmonella around the countertops so potential dates know that you dont go to the farmers market just to take pictures of purple carrots. (I go to the farmers market just to take pictures of purple carrots.)

Buy one nice plate. It doesnt even have to be a fancy plate; just get something that looks good through the lens of a dying iPhone. SpaghettiOs look like high art in a gleaming Crate and Barrel square cereal bowl.

Nice napkins can serve the dual purpose of making you feel like a capable adult and also making pictures of your revolting home food look more palatable. Plus theyre pretty cheap, and if you buy one of each color/style, no one has to know that you dont have the whole set unless they swing by demanding to look at your linen cabinet, but even then you can just brush them off like, Who cares about matching? and their eyes will widen in awe at how breezy and bohemian you are when really you just wanted a prop for some gluten-free brownies.

I have this dream of one day working up the courage to post pictures of the remnants of food that Ive already maxed: miserable-looking hot dog butts, dried soup ring crusts on a tower of stacked bowls, gnawed-on breadsticks, the last two pieces of cereal floating in some rancid milk skin. Until then, I guess Ill just be over here artfully setting my fork at a ninety-degree angle next to this perfect cassoulet I made for the express purpose of hopefully impressing that guy who once laughed at me for pronouncing the t.