Family Dinner with JP

I did not grow up eating grits. The only time I tried them in my "youth" was during college, headed to the Warped Tour at Hampton Colosseum with my friends Jed and Ty and Graham and Dan, Jed insisting we head to Waffle House for breakfast before the show. When in Virginia ...? I remember the menu included variations of grits to include, but certainly not limited to, Covered, Smothered, Buttered, Sputtered, Stuttered, possibly Mothered. I may be making some of those up. Point is, I was incredibly underwhelmed and a little bit grossed out. It wasn't until years later, watching Michael Chiarello's "You'll Never Live in Napa and Never Be Unawaredly Rich Like Me" cooking show, when I first heard of polenta. He made it look good, elevated, exquisitely delicate and complex. And then he said the words: polenta is basically just Italian grits. So, I decided to give polenta a try, and I liked it. And then I discovered actually complex, not-covered-in-chee...

The first time I ever had hash, I was in high school. I'd spent the night at my friend Rob Dentry's house, and in the morning his father made us corned beef hash. We smothered it in hot sauce, and I ate until my stomach hurt. It was one of the most delicious things I'd ever had, and I think some part of me wondered why, in a childhood where I grew up eating scrapple and Taylor Pork Roll and S.O.S. (chipped beef gravy), my family had deprived me of this delicious, salty, starchy vehicle for Crystal Hot Sauce. To be fair, everything can be turned into a viable vehicle for Crystal Hot Sauce. At any rate, years later, after the baptism of my godson, the lot of us went out to breakfast. This is where I first experienced corned beef hash in a non-cat food state. Giant chunks of tender but crisped corned beef (rustic), with a perfectly poached egg on top. This was the elevation of something I never knew could be elevated. It was only in the last year that I first came up...