I think there's a time in everyone's cooking career where you reach a plateau, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to inspiration and all you really do is cook the same few things everyday and I really hate to admit it but I think this is the point I'm at and have been for a while.

I'm thinking of buying a cookbook to help me learn to vary my meals and open up my mind and creativity in the art of cuisine.

For breakfast I had two pork sausage links, two scrambled eggs and two slices of buttered toast. The meal was pretty scrumptious as usual. To make the pork sausage links I had a quarter cup of water added to the pan and the pan set to medium high and then once all the water evaporated I set the heat back down to medium and I just let the sausages brown a lot. The sausages are much juicier this way, their texture waaay better, and this is of course the way to go. The scrambled eggs were okay but my scraper broke a few weeks ago so it's actually been kinda difficult to make the eggs as smooth as I could before which is why I went on this totally crazy sunny side up egg binge for a while.

Toast is whatever. I like toast and I haven't had it in a while.

I need to go grocery shopping and then we can talk about making cool foods. :9

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—Sofi

I don't like pancakes, so I'll only make pancakes if someone who likes pancakes is over. Thanks for the suggestion though!

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Breakfast today meant two slices of toast, hash browns, two scrambled eggs and two sausages, as usual. I got a new scraper and this time it's purple instead of blue. I totally forgot how well they let me mix the eggs in the pan. I really missed having eggs with this sort of nice consistency. The scrambled eggs had chives instead of parsley.

Let me tell you about chives.

Chives just have so many possibilities and they are an amazing little spice that will add a little extra zest to many dishes, including fish, potatoes, soup and scrambled eggs. Chives are the smallest species of edible onions and they're grown for their leaves which are very much like green onions. The flavor is almost exactly the same but since they're smaller and have a somewhat milder flavor they're much easier to work with.

I was at the supermarket yesterday and while I was looking for sea salt (they're discounted right now! 2 for $4) I decided to pick up a shaker thing of dried chives, too. Gordan Ramsay recommends that you add chives to your scrambled eggs and that's just what I did. Ramsay isn't lying when he says the spice lifts the eggs from really nice to simply sublime. It's possible this constitutes my best scrambled eggs yet, if not best breakfast yet.

Plus, now that I have tarragon, parsley and chives, I have pretty much most of what's called the fines herbs, the mainstay herbs of Mediterranean cuisine. I can start cooking French now, pretty much! It'll be awesome. With enough practice, maybe some day I can open up a Mediterranean-American fusion retro-breakfast-diner. Vintage Wurlitzer jukebox with 70s music included. A pomo romp in haute cuisine.

The soundtrack to this post is Elvis Costello's first studio album My Aim Is True. I love you Elvis Costello. I wear non-prescription thick-rimmed glasses in your honor.

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—Sofi

I had a can of Progresso creamy mushroom soup a few hours ago and it just occurred to me that basically all Progresso-brand soups have this uniform phony taste to them. I mean, duh, it's canned soup, but all the thin soups taste just like fake chicken noodle soup no matter what and all the thick ones taste like fake clam chowder no matter what. It's really confusing and it makes me start to wonder if any of the soups are actually all that different to begin with.

Of the creamy ones, I think the creamy mushroom one is my favorite so far because it doesn't have the really weird textured potatoes they put in and they have really cool-textured mushrooms but otherwise they're all pretty much the same.

So what's the deal?

I had chives sprinkled over my sunny side up eggs this morning by the way and it was simply divine.

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—Sofi