🥞 #003: Building Adult Friendships Over Coffee ☕️
Plus an ode to apple cider donut and a handful of hot links exploring the perfect croissant
Happy October folks! We’re back with another incredible digest. Today we’ve got a delicious breakfast for you. We’ll start off with a note from me about the excellence of the apple cider donut, followed by Georgette Eva guest-writing on adult friendships over coffee. We’ll finish up with a fresh set of hot links.
Let’s get started…
🍩 Top of the Morning: The Ballad of the Apple Cider Donut
It’s fall time which means it’s time for the best flavor - I’m not talking about pumpkin spice, which has permeated every food in absolutely bizarre ways. No, today I’m going to preach the excellence of my seasonal favorite: the apple cider donut.
Once a year, my wife and I make the pilgrimage to North Georgia to Hillcrest Orchards for a (shockingly) warm fall activity. Folks in Georgia have an aspirational vision of being Mr. Autumn Man, walking around a plentiful orchard of fresh apples off the tree, wearing a flannel layer and basking a cool fall breeze. The reality is more a hot, humid goose chase for what Apples are left on the tree at this point in the season and sweaty selfies. There is one true reward of this journal and that is a brown paper bag with warm, fresh donuts. Skipping the apple hunting and going straight to the food stand offers up apple ciders and snacks galore. You’ll open up the opportunity of a securing the bag for just six dollars. Biting into one of these cakey, dense and intensely flavored donuts fresh out of the fryer is the ultimate autumnal experience for breakfast lovers. Featuring flavors of apple and cinnamon, all rolled in cinnamon sugar, this is a top tier seasonal delight.
If you are not within driving distance of an apple orchard, check your local donut shop to see if they stock this fall sweet treat. Lastly, my hot take is that it’s always better as a fried donut over a baked one. Enjoy!
☕️ Building Adult Friendships Over Coffee
Here’s an open secret no one tells you about adulthood: Making friends is hard. It’s funny because we all know it, and yet no one has an easy answer or quick fix. You just have to put yourself out there and deal with the awkwardness and discomfort.
Here’s another not-so-secret secret: Atlanta has terrible traffic—so much so that it discourages people from leaving home. Oddly enough, the advice in this case is the same: You just have to get yourself out there.
I felt these twin difficulties after returning to my home city. I’d spent just under a decade away—long enough that, by the time I came back, navigating I-285 felt nerve-wracking. Appropriate, because trying to meet new friends did too.
But here’s a trade secret: mornings are the best to navigate both. Having lived in different cities in college and as a new adult, I tended to use the first light of day as an opportunity to get to know my new neighborhoods. I’d study Google Maps, Yelp, or check out that influencer’s latest post, before heading out.
It helps that I’m a morning person. A snap-her-eyes-open-at-6-a.m. riser. A first-one-downstairs-to-make-the-coffee house guest. Generally someone with too much energy for my sleepy husband.
While exploring, or in this case practicing latent driving skills, I found that businesses were at their best early. Not only do you get a seat without too much fanfare, but you get to enjoy a comfortable calm—not to mention the aromas of freshly baked goods and freshly ground espresso beans. It’s all buzzy anticipation like a party about to happen.
My neighbors at this hour were usually parents with kids. Joggers and bikers or even people post workout. You’d think I would have met fellow early birds during these adventures. But surprisingly, I met my early-rising friend in the evening, waiting to enter a movie.
Eatavision is an Atlanta movie experience led by Chef Quynh Trinh, which pairs film screenings with accompanying menus that you can enjoy while the movie plays. It is also where I met fellow morning person and foodie Jessica.
As an adult, it’s hard to find someone on your niche wavelength. School isn’t there to create routine, and many of us don’t even have offices to report to anymore. Instead, you have to create that moment. You join gyms, take pottery classes, and sign into BumbleBFF. Or, you somehow start talking to someone while waiting in line for a culinary movie experience.
I can’t remember how we started to chat. We were ecstatic about the movie, before conversation dissolved into treehouses, the same #vanlife influencers, and Chef Q.
Boldly, I asked Jessica if she’d like to get coffee sometime, and she agreed. “I get up early though,” she warned.
Perfect.
Jessica and I became fast friends over lattes and teas. We swapped restaurant recs. We complained about work struggles and colleagues. We spent a long morninga asking ourselves hard questions about potential parenthood, elder care, and house hunting.
If brunch is all about rush, hype, and stress, breakfast has a laziness and a welcome lack of cool. Breakfast means stretchy pants and haphazard hair with no makeup. It welcomes wandering thoughts and tangents.
As foodies, we had tons of spots to try, and new places for me to practice driving. We’d snag a coveted booth at a usually busy breakfast taco spot. I navigated the small parking lot of a top tier biscuit place, which was thankfully empty. We’d come and conquer, before always part ways as the brunch crowds entered.
I started to make a point to invite old and new friends to meet up early too. They’d tell me with wide eyes about how quickly they’d navigated Atlanta’s roads, free of traffic jams. They’d exalt over their great parking spots. They’d also insist it wasn’t a thing they’d do often. Like tourists, they loved to visit, but they didn’t necessarily want to live in the wee hours, full time.
Maybe that’s what made those meetings vulnerable and raw. In the same way that a vacation frees you up for relaxing or splurging a little, morning meet-ups open up discussions quickly. Prodded by caffeine and carbs, we’d dish on our goals, politics, and feelings. All before ten o’clock.
“You might be onto something with this morning thing,” a friend admitted, enjoying the birds overhead as we sat outside.
I took a piece of my pain au chocolat. I’d make sure to invite her next time.
🍳 Hot Links
🥐 What is the internet doing to croissants? (Expedite)
I missed this piece back from the Paris Olympics exploring our world post-croissanissance and if viral foods have peaked. It also references the wonderful NYT piece The Plain Croissant is still the Best Croissant.
“The plain croissant is not, at a glance, thrilling. It doesn’t have the whirling geometry of a Suprême croissant or the show-off shell of some just-gone-viral hybrid, which knows from which angle it wants to be photographed. It is not dramatically constricted, uniformly shaped, caramelized or colored. The plain croissant wasn’t made for the camera.”
Here at Team Morgenmete, we’re ride or die for the excellence and craft that goes into the plain croissant. There simply isn’t a better experience when you taste one in it’s best form.
🧇 We’ve Reached Peak Frozen Waffle. Here Are the Best. (Eater)
Inspired by having seen the Cinnamon Toast Crunch waffles in my local grocer, I found this piece exploring the best frozen waffles offered up (in the US) today. Call me intrigued by the suggestion for the CTC waffles would “.. be excellent dipped into an eggy custard base and turned into a frozen waffle version of french toast.” Challenge accepted.
🍜 Putting the Breakfast in Breakfast Ramen (New Yorker)
I really enjoyed this piece exploring the development of ramen that pays homage to New York breakfasts at Ramen by Ra:
“What makes it breakfast isn’t the clock but the flavors, which tell a story of morning in New York: there’s a bacon-egg-and-cheese ramen, a steak-and-eggs ramen, two bowls inspired by bagels, and another, brunchy version inspired by a B.L.T.”
It sounds like a true culinary treat, and just the mention of ““cream cheese foam” makes me want to instantly book a trip to try this.
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That’s all for this month. We’ll see you again in November. Any comments, suggestions for future issues or pitches, send me an email tim@morgenmete.com.
