my bank account is the lowest it’s ever been (she says, remembering back to a week ago when she threw caution to the wind and money at the dinosaur designs), but today, tossing up between bagels at bagel house and a nice cafe sitdown, we chose about life. actually, the kid did. it’s my fault, i suppose, but she has really developed a taste for “scrambled eggs at a cafe”.

“you know, i can make you scrambled eggs at home,” i’ll say.

“but i want scrambled eggs at a cafe.”

sometimes i play along.

so we hop-skip-jumped over the potholes of the backstreets, and sat ourselves down at a big wooden table. these days the kids’ scrambled eggs at about life come with a fat slice of lean bacon.

on the grownup menu there is cinnamon chocolate french toast, but i’d been burned by their regular french toast before — sure, it looks impressive, cut some two inches thick, but the egg only penetrates not quite enough to render palatable a great wodge of bready bread. this problem might have been fixed by a copious dousing of maple syrup, but there was only a small puddle of the stuff. which only confirms my suspicions that about life is not the place to get a delicious sweet thing.

instead, today, i got the about life vegan breakfast — scrambled tofu with red onion, spinach and roasted pumpkin relish, served on soy and linseed toast. it sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? in my head i saw a great mound of sauteed spinach, maybe another pile of pumpkin, and good wedges of grilled onions. instead, i got this:

it was all kind of scrambled together, and placed rather politely on a solitary slice of plain — and unbuttered, damn vegan breakfast — sourdough. which, you know, is fine. fine. because why should i be disappointed when the thing on my plate doesn’t match the thing in my head?

because it was $15.50, is why.

still, it was almost tasty, even. a good sprinkle of black pepper, and salt (and i never add salt) fixed that. as did a scraping of butter from the kid’s order, and a blistered and fatty bit off her bacon that she refused to eat.

i further sullied the vegan experience with a pot of chocolate chai, a wonderful, creamy mix of chocolate and spices brewed in frothy milk. it was particularly gingery — tingly on the tongue — and it looked like there was even real chocolate in there, and when i got to the bottom of the pot i encountered a veritable swamp of tangle leaves. so ok, the about life drinks, at least, are delicious sweet things.

but the virtue — vegan or otherwise — is overrated, and anyway, possibly too expensive to indulge in with any regularity.

– – –

last week, i spent $15.50 eight blocks down darling street, at circle cafe. there, it buys you the salad of the day. but what a salad! poached egg and bacon salad!

a perfectly cooked egg — glorious and runny inside — perched atop an enormous tumble of well-dressed leaves, and many slices of crunchysaltymoist bacon, and shards of parmesan. the accompanying bread basket held half a baguette and two pats of butter.

you see where i am going with this? if you have $15.50 earmarked for lunch, you should go there too.