Scotch, The Thin Man, and Wet Fries

When I lived in Vermont, people from 2 blocks north in Canada always seemed to talk about wet fries: french fries with some sort of gravy on them. That's great, but as a disclaimer, that's not what I'm talking about here; what I made last night just sort of asked to be called wet fries. So, apologies to all wet fries traditionalists.

Have you ever seen the Thin Man movies? I can't ever really say what happens in them, because I'm always captivated by the relationship between the main characters, Nick and Nora, which I think is kind of the point of these movies. They have this wonderfully ideal marriage, and in an unorthodox way, especially for the 30's-40's era in which the movies were made. As my friend put it, "So there's this lovable lush named Nick and he married the greatest woman in the world named Nora". And that sums it up. They've got this great, playful, snappy, booze soaked relationship, and they just make you want to be around them. And the movies always have some great over-acted death scenes, depression-era street-tough talk, and a mystery in there somewhere, too.

So my friend brought half of a bottle of 12 year Glenlivet over, and some Thin Man movies. The idea being that we'd watch the movies and be inspired to drink scotch. Instead, we drank scotch, and basically talked about the movies we'd already seen--that's the great thing about these films, as with all great films--the real meat is in the discussion afterwards.

So my point here is that we were drinking scotch and chatterboxing it all night. Then, around 2:00am, we got hungry. I had potatoes, aged cheddar, an onion, and Sriracha. And an egg. I sliced the potatoes into fries and roasted them 'till soft as I caramelized the onion. I grated and threw the cheese on top of the potatoes with the onions, and cracked the egg in the middle and threw it under the broiler. Out it came, all nice and browned; the egg slightly underdone as the heat from dragging the hot potatoes through it would finish the cooking process (it reminded me of my favorite meal, Sukiyaki, in which hot meat, vegetables, and noodles are drawn from a hot communal pot into a dish of raw egg, simultaneously cooling the hot stuff and lightly cooking the egg around it). I doused the whole thing with Sriracha, and despite the picture I got of it being less than perfect, it was an amazing 2:00am meal to be had, on the pizza pan I cooked it on, set on top of a stool in front of the couch, with two forks (which would soon be discarded for the more appropriate greasy fingers) and the glasses of scotch waiting patiently at our sides. There's nothing much better than feeding the inebriated stomach the late night salt and fat bomb after feeding the brain with conversation all night.

Tweet