Pain PerGOOP

It was my senior year in college that I became aware of the magical healing properties of French Toast.

Don't look so aghast -- I'd known that French Toast was delicious much earlier than that, of course. You can't have a bite of French Toast without figuring that out, especially if it's being made for you by my mother, who does all manner of odd things like adding orange juice and various types of booze to the egg mixture, all of which come out deliciously.

But one Sunday morning during the early Fall of my senior year in college, a horrific wailing coming from my insane Chicana roommate's bedroom alerted me to the fact that she'd returned from a camping trip with her whey faced shit-kicker boyfriend somewhat precipitously.

As I tiptoed gingerly past her door on my way to the bathroom, I could hear her yelling into the phone to her sister in a frenzied mix of English and Spanish. From what I understood based on two years of Señor Thompson's excellent tutelage, I was able to deduce that things had gone awry -- so awry that if a particular Ag student wasn't walking around with one of his ridiculous boots shoved up his scrawny ass, it was only because he could run really, really fast.

I was unequipped to deal with this situation in any way but one. So I tapped gently on her door, and reeled back slightly as it was opened by a red faced, streaming eyed, wild haired creature who -- the phone still pressed to her ear -- shrieked "WHAT?????" at me in a voice that rattled our windows.

"Would you like some French Toast?" I asked timidly.

She sniffed, and said "yes, thank you," and finished up her conversation with her sister at a slightly more subdued level of wail while I puttered around our kitchen trying to scrape together some semblance of the necessary ingredients. Seriously, as French Toast interpretations go, it must've been a travesty -- I think I used Orowheat bread as the base -- but we sat down together to eat it, and it had some sort of mysterious, soothing, sanity-returning effect on her. In the course of that breakfast, she went from relating the horrifying tale (which ended with a howled "and that is NOT what you say to someone right after you've made love to them in the back of a truck") to the two of us giggling madly about how paralyzed with fear I'd looked when she opened the door, and the knowledge that tomorrow was, as someone once said, another day.

This weekend I made French Toast inspired by the Challah Bread French Toast recipe in My Father's Daughter, not because anyone was wailing offstage right in my apartment, but because it was Sunday, and to have French toast on Sunday is good.

I say inspired by because I used what I had on hand -- blackberries rather than bananas and a wheat baguette in the early stages of stale-ification rather than Challah. So mine is more in line with the origins of pain perdu than it would be if I'd gone out and bought Challah just for the purpose.

The recipe is not exactly rocket surgery -- for every 2 servings, you need one egg, a half cup of milk or whatever milk-alike you use, a half teaspoon of vanilla and the appropriate amount of bread to be dunked and fried as usual -- but it is good, honest, ordinary French Toast. Perfect for enjoying on a Sunday morning, or talking a half crazed, heart broken 22 year old back from the edge.

(And yes, I know that looks rather a large portion for one person, but you have to consider that each baguette chunk is really only about two bites, so that's really about 16 bites of French Toast. You also have to consider that it's within my rights to say "suck it, food police, I eat what I want." And I do say that. I absolutely do)