Griddle Breakfast Chats (Sorry Audio Listeners)

Sorry to the audio listeners this week because this episode consists of me having a casual chat with you all while I improv breakfast on the griddle and make a travel espresso. Lots of randomness and some more tidbits on my origin story unlocked. Let me know if you want more like this!

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Time Codes: (None this week because there was no good way to break this up)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up everyone? Welcome to another episode of Down Once More. I'm your host Matt, and I'm going to do something completely different for the podcast this week. Uh, it is Sunday morning. I am outside. I decided I am going to try to make breakfast on my griddle today, and I'm just gonna freestyle it. So another outdoor episode, but we're freestyling. I am going to also make espresso out here. So if you've been tuning in weekly to Matt's Coffee Corner, this will be like a little bonus episode for that. And then I'll get into a couple random topics and I want to touch base on. So let's get into it. So now that I threw my onions on the griddle to get those started, I'm making a leftover burrito essentially. But now I'm gonna make my espresso because I need some caffeine because it is the morning and I haven't had a cup of coffee yet. So if you've been watching Matt's Coffee Corner, you're familiar with these. These are my portable grinder and espresso maker. Uh, usually I have it on my set inside. I am going to do it all completely outdoors today to show how nice it is. It's portable. The one thing I did do already is I already put my beans in here, measured those out, dump those in, give it a nice shake, throw a bean on the counter. Make sure I got my grind setting where I want it. And then I just double press. Usually I shut the top. It still grinds even if you don't. Check on our onions. Okay. Coffee's ground now. Always gotta tap it. Make sure everything comes out. That's my own rule. No one else said that, but nice ground coffee there. Now we're gonna open up. On a grill side table, you do have less space to work with. I'm gonna set that there and realize I forgot my water and go grab that. Add that to the appropriate filling. This is room temperature water. I'm gonna do everything out here. I'm gonna have it heated up to make it all that fun stuff. Let that go. It's gonna take a while to heat up the water, so in the meantime, I'm gonna come check in on my onions. Okay, those are looking yeah, a couple little darker than I wanted. But what I'm gonna do now is throw in leftover potatoes. But you didn't know you were tuning in for uh a cooking episode this week, did you? Keep it on your toes. You never know what you're gonna get here. And adding in a leftover bacon cheddar bra. The sun is bright enough. I have no idea how I am framed this shot because I cannot see Jack yet on the screen. Okay. Now I've added leftover bacon cheddar bra. I'm just gonna kind of chop that up. Mix it in with the potatoes and onions, and we're gonna add a couple of eggs in a minute. One thing that I have been doing lately, because we don't want to make this an entire cooking episode, it's that you didn't think you'd pick in a musical podcast and get cooking channel, is um I have been going through all my downloaded music because I have thousands and thousands of songs saved from over the years going back before high school. I used Apple Music, or probably high school, and so I've been going to my downloaded songs and just throwing them on shuffle and seeing what happens, going from there, and also I can't hear it because I have earbuds in, but my espresso is officially done, so I can reveal that now. Cheers. There is our espresso. We got our crema. Pretty, pretty solid. Now, as someone who's always hot, like I decided I'm gonna do it this morning. It's not even 70 out yet. Uh, wearing all black and doing this, it doesn't matter, that's only 70. I am baking right now. Okay, now while I let this cook up before I add the eggs. Um not a bad espresso. Not bad at all. I do think I need to get some different beans. I need to visit the roaster here soon because these are great beans for coffee, not as good for espresso. Um it's more of a lighter roast, and so the flavor is very full. But I like my espresso to be stronger and pack a good solid punch. If you watched this past week's episode of Matt's Coffee Corner, you saw me make a Deadeye, which is a coffee with three espresso shots in it. So just getting all of the caffeine out of the way then. Espresso down. When I went inside to grab my eggs, I discovered that I also have leftover Mexican beans and rice. So we're switching it up and we're gonna go kind of Mexican. This is just gonna be a mishmosh. And this is how most of my cooking uh comes into play. If I know you in real life and you're friends with me on Snapchat, uh then, I mean, hopefully for other things, like when you have a podcast, you're like, do I want my friends to know about this and support it and watch and listen to me and probably judge me? I don't know. It's always a toss-up. But you know me there. You know, I will often use a nice Snapchat will be uh I will send you pictures of my food and what I'm making because I do enjoy cooking and I always give good feedback. But one of the things I don't like doing is following recipes. Almost everything that I want is winging. I'm like, what do I have in the cupboard or the fridge? Um, what can I randomly throw together and see what inspiration strikes me? I only have one flipper, so I can't like pull like stir-fry Mongolian chef it who hot it up with doing everything. But mixing everything together as I can, I'll show you all what it looks like here. Like it's a it's a lot of brown, it's not the most appetizing thing right now, but it's gonna taste delicious. So, as a reminder of what we have in there, we started with uh an onion, cooked that up, added some leftover air-fried seasoned potatoes, like little cubes, so basically like breakfast potatoes, that's what it's always called at restaurant. Then I threw in the bacon cheddar broth, smashed that up, and then added in Mexican rice re-fried beans that also had cheese in it. And now, more good old flips with that. Now I'm going to add in my eggs to cook those. Mix this up, let it cook. I do usually season my food more than this, but everything has so much flavor going on. I'm just gonna add some salt and pepper to it. Usually I'm more generous, but we're just gonna do a little bit right now. Let the wind take it. Mix it all together. Let's go cook really quick because the shritter was hot. This is a bad angle, it makes me look bad. So, one of the ways I got into cooking was growing up watching Food Network. So I would always I love watching Chopped and those kind of competition shows, Cutthroat Kitchen, and Chopped inspired me to kind of my cooking style, I would say, where it's just throw shit together, see what I can figure out. Um, one thing I'm not good at is estimating time frames. Uh, I go way long on everything. Um, we're not even when I'm making like the HelloFresh meals or things like that, they're like, ooh, this ready in five minutes, 15 minutes. It's like hell no. Uh, we're looking at half an hour. So I'm not the fastest cooker, so I would do awful with something like chopped, but I like putting different things together and finding things that that can work. I grew up and so watching chopped, and then so I was homeschooled through high school, and my mom would let me for like lunch and meals just make my own if I wanted to to try new things, and so I would always be trying different things. I started making like mac and cheese from scratch, which is pretty basic, like young. Uh, it wouldn't always be the most healthy things, and she when I did that, it there would get a kibosh put on it pretty quickly. Like, I remember one time I was like my go-to was making homemade croutons, which is just bread and a shitload of butter and seasonings, which are delicious because it's all good things, and so I would do that, but I would uh what this is uh this is why I look like how I do now because what I would do also is make uh mashed potatoes. I would just do the instant ones. Uh, my hot take instant mashed potatoes, perfectly fine. Like, yeah, it's not the most bougie, and homemade mashed potatoes are always going to be better, but man, there's just sometimes you want like those KFC, the instant mashed potatoes, and that's gonna do the trick. So I added some cheese to the top of my eggs. I'm gonna let that melt melt a little bit. I already threw uh tortilla on there briefly and let that cheese melt slightly, soften it up a bit. Okay, but anyways, back to what I was saying. I would do instant mashed potatoes, and then I would make them like garlic, cheddar, like put some Italian seasonings, stuff like that in there. All I always elevated things, added more seasonings, I like more flavorful things, and then I would put the homemade croutons on them. So it was nothing but carbs, and hence why my mom put a stop to that. She's like, you're not getting any nutritional value from this, you are having the opposite effect, um, which is fair, good looking out, mom. But that is why now, like, I don't know, I started young, like the cooking, making stuff, trying new things, and that's always been my thing. I think the other reason is because when it comes to like meal prepping and things like that, I am shit at planning and looking ahead at the week and what I want to do. And so I think that has also kind of upped the hey, what can you do on the fly? Because I'm not just cooking for me, I have to cook for my wife too. And uh, so I have to be somewhat thinking ahead. So I have to think of okay, what can be good, and also have to try to do okay, what can have leftovers so that I don't need to go out to lunch every day. Um, and where wife works from home so that she has leftovers in the fridge too, and so gotta plan bigger portions. A while back I had this buffalo chicken like brats that were delicious from one of the local grocery stores and they made them there in-house. And so I had cooked those up and then I sliced them. I made some pasta and then I threw Alfredo sauce, some more buffalo sauce. I had this uh buffalo sauce that was like dill pickle flavored too, so it had like a hint of the dill pickle. It wasn't overpowering, it was delicious. Um, and so I put the sauce in there, cooked already sliced sausage in there to almost like caramelize it and cook it in the sauce a little bit more. Then I added in uh some sauteed onions that I made out here on the griddle. I threw those in, and then I threw in some Alfredo sauce and the pasta and stirred it around and then added in some more Alfredo sauce and buffalo seasoning, cooked it, and it was delicious. One of the best things I have had in a long time. Okay, so we got a nice pile of food here cooked. So we have the filling for our burrito all cooked now. So now is the fun part assembling it, and where I wish I had worked at Chipotle in a past life. The tortilla has cooled down, so I'm so I'm throwing it back on the griddle to soften up. Do what you can, right? Also, House of the Dragon starts up this Sunday, and I don't know what I am going to do because I've been doing recaps of those uh last season. I can't remember if I did with season one or not, and but now it's like running at the same time of Love Island, where I'm doing nightly recaps for that, and that would mean that on Sunday nights I would be watching Love Island live because it starts earlier, and then House of the Dragon right after it, then filming a reaction to Love Island posting. Actually, what I do is probably batch it. So Love Island film, uh, sorry, watch, record, edit, post, then go watch House of the Dragon, record, edit, post, and then I'm looking at going to bed at like 1 a.m., which is a great way to start off your work week. But luckily I have, or not luckily, is sad, depending on how you all look at it. I thrive on not much sleep. I always like growing up being homeschooled, what I always wanted to do was get up early, get all my my schoolwork done, so then I could just chill after that. And I would say play with friends, but I was homeschooled, so had a few neighborhood friends, that was it, and that is why I'm the way I am. Just kidding. But okay. I put probably too much filling on here, but we're gonna give it a shot. See, cooking had the opposite effect, so now my tortilla is crusty, which makes it delicious but harder to roll. Succeeded. Burrito, not cracked. I'm gonna throw it right back on here though. Because we are going to make this more unhealthy. And I have more egg mixture, so I'm gonna throw it in the bowl to use at a later date, either just as like a scramble for breakfast tomorrow. Maybe I'll make another burrito. Who knows? Before you come at me, like, yo, you said you cook for your wife. You have to do her. Why aren't you making her a burrito? Um, fair, but she already ate breakfast and did not want a burrito, so I made her breakfast and took care of that first because I'm a gentleman. We're gonna see how this works. I haven't done it with my griddle yet. I'm just gonna put cheese directly on here because uh I do like doing cheese-sealed burritos, and so we're gonna give that a try. I could be fucking myself for cleaning afterwards, but hey, you live in or learn, right? I'm using pepperjack cheese. Yeah, you hear that sizzle, see that cheese mountain. I'll have some more cheese on the other side here. So we'll roll that here in a bit and show how that all looks. This is a very half-assed thing, and I know you're like, why the fuck are you doing it this week? This isn't anything like what you've done on the podcast before. Fair and valid. But with uh work's been crazy busy for me lately, and then with doing Love Island every night, and then trying to prep for House of the Dragon and some other stuff I've got going on, uh, my created juice creative juices are at an all-time low, and so planning for the actual podcast episodes is getting rough. Like I might switch to doing like short form nightly Love Island reactions, so like TikTok, reels, shorts, that sort of thing, and then uh grouping it all together at the end of the week, or I might just do a one-time weekly reaction. We will see. Uh, I'm not feeling this season so far, and so that plays a factor as well. If I don't like anyone or I'm not feeling it, then what am I gonna do? Why am I spending my time chatting about it? Uh, it's not like I get a ton of engagement. I do get lots of views and sometimes new subscribers, but overall it's not a reality show podcast, it is a mishmash podcast, a little bit of everything. So hopefully we get some reality. But Love Island has been the dominating driving force lately. So I get if that's not your thing, you may be frustrated. I always forget that cheese is like greasy enough, I don't need to worry about it sticking to shit. So let's see a preview of what the burrito looks like. Now, I know I didn't ever finish my train of thought about how I'm going through my downloaded songs and throwing everything on shuffle. The reason I'm doing that is I want to discover songs I haven't thought about in a long time, hidden gems. I'm a big sucker. If I like a single song, I download the entire album. I have Apple Music, it doesn't add any additional cost for me. So why wouldn't I? I have a terabyte phone, so I've got plenty of storage space. So I do that, but then I rarely listen to the whole thing just because, like TV and movies, there's so many options and so much choice out there for what you go to. So I've started when I'm doing things like grilling or cooking or doing dishes or housework, I do that, and then when I come across a song that grabs me or I'm like, man, I forgot how much I love this, I throw it on a playlist. It's my Shuffle Survivors playlist. So I'm going to give you a couple highlights that I hadn't listened to in a while. All that I've got by the use, just a great emo song that uh just brings me right back to high school. Am I Pretty by the Main? That's one that I completely forgot about. I saw the main probably eight to ten years ago in concert. It was a great time. They were with Mayday Parade on tour, which Mayday Parade is one of my favorites, my staples from high school. Another song Outnumbered by Dermot Kennedy. That's one of my favorite ones right now, too. It's picked up, it's been on heavy rotation on the playlist. I'll usually, when I go to my playlist and hit shuffle, I'll start with that one. Uh Jesse's Girl 2, featuring Rick Springfield by Coheat and Cambria. Just Jesse's Girl, just a classic iconic throwback song. And then bringing Rick Springfield back and making like a sequel to it with Koheat and Cambria. So much fun. The music video is a ton of fun. Highly check it out. Uh Staple Gunned by the Spill Canvas. I saw them with secondhand serenade probably 10-12 years ago, and it was a good time. And now they're doing emo orchestra tour and playing with the full string orchestra, some emo music, and that is awesome. And I might be traveling out to Chicago to see that sometime. It is on my list. Save Tonight by Eagle Eyed Cherry, another classic, some good old third eye blind, semi-charmed life. I know that is not like a hidden gem, but it's one that I hadn't listened to in a long time and just sucked me right back in. And then uh In My Head by May Day Parade. So the Jason Darulo song, it was on the pop punk goes pop album. I appreciate some new like artists bringing back that in their own way, but I loved those uh punk goes pop albums back in the day. It was very rarely actual punk bands, it was very rarely pop songs, but it was just I love a good cover and a good like kind of remix. So those were some of the ones that popped up and are on my place. I got 63 songs now. Uh, we're going right back. I downloaded, I think I have like 10,000 songs, something like that. Okay, I'm gonna flip. This burrito again. The leftovers while I'm waiting, just a little snack. That's gonna be delicious. The one thing I'm now realizing that I forgot to do was add any sort of sauce in here. So it's probably gonna be kind of dry. So what I do in that case usually, you do like some dipping sauce on the side. So I've been really enjoying like a garlic aioli, and so I know it's not like a controversial or hot take, but garlic aioli fucking slaps. And so I'll just throw that out on the plate, dip the burrito in it, and it's gonna be a good time. I want to know what are you all's like either struggle meals or go-to meals that you'll make when you just need some like comfort food. I just want something quick, easy. I bring this up, but I don't know that I really have one myself. That if I'm making like from scratch, homemade, the easiest thing I love pizza. I'll just throw a fucking frozen pizza in the oven, go with that. If I'm making something, I love making a good grilled cheese with just an insane amount of different cheeses. So I just get the different sliced cheeses, some shredded cheese. I rarely make a grilled cheese with less than three different kinds of cheese. And then you gotta use mayo. It gives it a nice, like, kind of caramelization on the bread. Cook it low and slow so that cheese is nice and melty. So good. So good, so easy. Stuff you almost have on hand all the time. And then what are you guys' like best creations? If you've cooked, what's the best thing that you think you have come up with that you are proud of? And you're like, then I would make this for anyone. I'm turning up my heat because I'm impatient because I'm wearing all black and it's starting to get hot, and I want to just go inside and eat this burrito. I was very tempted to go grab a beer because when you're grilling, I feel like you need a beer in your hand. But well, it's now like 10:30, so that would be somewhat acceptable on the weekend. Battle of beer and burrito. No, beer and burrito would go really good. But now it's too late. I delayed too long. I just had my espresso to let this burrito cook. I'm gonna take my teas and my leftovers inside. So I have less to clean up in a minute. Alright, let's see this sucker. Okay, I'm gonna take the sucker off the griddle now, throw it on my plate, and take it inside, and then I will show you all a nice cross section before I dive in. It may not be the most appetizing or exciting looking cross section, but that melty cheese just looks so good and it's gonna taste delicious. So I'm going to actually eat my breakfast now though. So that's gonna do it for this week's episode. Uh, tune in to the Love Island instant reaction videos. Tune in. Let me know in the comments if House of the Dragon recaps are something you want. Uh, if there's any other topics you want me to discuss on the podcast. This was a weird one, it was a more visual one. I felt like I could do a primarily visual one now that the video is available on Apple and Spotify. So if you're just an audio listener, sorry, maybe this wasn't the episode for you. But make sure to tune in next week. We're gonna have something fun in store. Not sure what, but it will be something fun. And then as always, like, comment, share, subscribe, tell your friends, tell your family, tell whoever you think would enjoy random bullshit on this podcast. So drop something in the comments what you like to make, what your favorite songs are, what a hidden gem song is that you think I should check out. If there's any that I said that you're like that's an awesome song, let me know. Love hearing from you all. See you next time, and don't forget to go down with some more. Later, but