With or without a specialty grocer, the breakfast sandwich will cure you.
It’s been a rough week. A family health scare has kept me glued to my telephone (everyone will be fine!), and when I haven’t been patching through calls from sisters to uncles or mothers to aunts, I’ve been doing the number one thing they tell you not to do: doom-scrolling medical studies I could have no way of actually parsing. (Despite a pretty shocking amount of hubris from watching Grey’s Anatomy.) So, where does that leave this column? Much like Kate Middleton, I haven’t set foot in public for a suspiciously long span of days. But I have the kind of appetite that only swells in times of distress, so you can imagine my delight when I discovered that Kalustyan’s—one of my favorite specialty grocers for spices and pickles and prepared baba ghanoush—delivers. I placed a large order for various eggplant spreads, hummus, dolmas, and the like, but the biggest hero turned out to be a package of frozen parathas, which puff up into nearly translucent, crackly, buttery rounds of crispy-soft dough on a hot skillet. I’ve been eating them plain (the ones I ordered are unstuffed) or dipped into cold labne, or as the base for an egg sandwich I make as a super lazy homage to the one at Thai Diner. My home-version just has soft-scrambled eggs, sausage, hot sauce, aleppo pepper, American cheese, and any tender herbs or alliums I’ve got laying around. I wrap it up tightly like I’m swaddling an infant, then slice it with confidence down the center. Or, if I’m not up for all that, I use the paratha like an oversized tortilla. Either way, it satisfies and soothes.