- Hello my name is Andrew Rea of Binging with Babish
and this is everything I eat in a day.
(pages flipping)
First thing I do when I wake up
is go promptly back to sleep.
I dread getting up in the morning,
that sounds sad,
and then I make a beeline for the kitchen
so I can get some coffee in me.
I had Erika Vonie on my show, she's a coffee master
and she turned me into a pour-over freak,
so I'm all about the pour-over,
but sometimes when I need to be quick,
I got an espresso machine where I'll pull a shot
if I need the heavy stuff.
After coffee, if its a weekday
I'm gonna be a little bit more conservative.
I'm generally just doing a fried egg over medium
on some Ezekiel low sodium sprouted grain toast,
and I'll fry up a runny egg on that and hit it
with a dot of Sriracha
or some other, whatever hot sauce is kicking around
and that's fuel to begin the day
and it's relatively healthy-ish.
It's that or maybe I'll make a breakfast burrito,
or I'll skip breakfast all together,
sometimes I'm a breakfast skipper.
I don't recommend that kids,
it's the most important meal of the day.
So they say.
So they tell me
but always question what people tell you.
Just about a year ago, on my other show,
Being with Babish, I chronicled an exercise regimen
and weight loss thing that I tried to do
and I've stuck with it to the letter every day since,
that's not true at all, I took a few months off of that
(laughing)
and now I'm in a much more relaxed version
of what I was doing for that episode,
where I'll try to work out at minimum three times a week,
ideally four or five times a week.
I mostly work out at home, I like doing just body weight,
kind of burpee, kind of stuff, just calisthenic,
whatever you call that jazz
and I try to do that in the morning after breakfast,
so I can get it out of the way
'cause let's face it, exercise is horrible.
Lunch, being a New Yorker, I'm typically ordering
Seamless for lunch.
I cook a lot for my show, I cook a lot for my work,
so typically in my off hours I'm cooking dinner
but I'm generally not making lunch.
I'm doing research or I'm filming
or I'm editing and I just don't have the time
or the mental space to prepare a healthy balanced lunch
during the week, so typically I'm ordering in
from one of these bowl places:
Dig In, Westville, usually just something simple
like grilled chicken with a few vegetables
and some sweet potatoes or again,
this is the weekday we're talking about,
just wait 'til I get to the weekend,
you're gonna be disgusted.
If I'm very busy, I'm generally not snacking
'cause I'm not thinking about it.
I'll skip meals, I'll forget to eat meals
'cause I'm busy sometimes.
I try not to keep chips in the house,
I try not to keep breakfast cereal in the house
or anything that I might grab a handful
and regret later.
So dried fruit, nuts, cheese if I'm feeling really naughty,
I'll fry up another egg,
protein shakes, sometimes I'll make
a soy-based protein shake
and that's not 'cause I'm vegan, it's because whey
is bad for me as a man.
Weeknight dinners, generally also kind of a lame affair
but this one I'm typically cooking,
so I keep a lot of frozen meats in my freezer
right here.
Here, let me grab one.
What have we got today?
Oh here's a nice, this is a hanger steak.
Sent to me from Porter Road Beef out in Nashville,
great butcher, we've had a long standing partnership
so they send me meat every once in a while,
like so many of my closest friends.
I love a good hanger steak, I love a good skirt steak,
they're very quick and easy to pan fry.
You either make a pan sauce or make like, a...
What's it called?
A...
A chimichurri.
Chicken breasts, I like to do
skin on, bone-in chicken breasts,
so I can pan roast them and not destroy the meat
but usually it's something simple like that.
It's a piece of meat, a vegetable of some kind,
sauteed, whatever, roasted, whatever,
I like roasted Brussels sprouts most of all,
I'll toss them with a little bit of Sriracha and honey.
I think I'm getting hungry now, I haven't had lunch.
Sometimes a starch if I'm, again, feeling frisky
but usually just try to keep it to meat and vegetables
on the weeknights.
Trying to keep it tight.
As for what I'm imbibing liquid-wise,
I am a seltzer freak.
I'm one of the pathetic members of this generation
that can't just drink water and just be happy about it,
it's gotta have flavor, it's gotta have bubbles
but it's got me drinking a lot more water.
Like, you're supposed to drink a lot of water
and I, again, decided to keep track, okay,
how much water am I drinking per day?
And it was dangerously low, like, how are you alive?
Kind of style.
I got the Soda Stream over there
and I'll mix in a little bit of mango flavor,
a little bit of lemon flavor
and it makes a nice mango seltzer
that I'm drinking right now
out of an eco-friendly vacuum-sealed beverage container.
Ah.
I'm generally eating dinner around like, 10.
I have a very, very unhealthy work schedule,
where I'll start working at like, 10
and finish working at 11 or something.
It's 'cause I love my job, I'm not pretending
that I'm some sort of champion of work,
I just love my job and I get lost in it.
So I'm generally eating pretty late,
so late night snacking
generally doesn't enter into it... unless.
(laughing)
I'm kidding, this is a family publication
and I'm referring to sipping on tea.
If I'm sipping on tea then yeah,
I might have a late night snack
and that's when I regret having
Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the house or whatever
and that's why I don't keep it in the house.
I try to, I got props, we're lucky we're in my kitchen,
I got props.
(beep)
I'm not on a super super strict diet during the week,
during the weekdays.
I allow myself, I allot myself
a couple of these little fellas, Dove dark chocolate squares
on a weeknight just to kill the sweet tooth
but generally I'm having decaf coffee or tea,
something like that to kill the sweet tooth
and not become a larger person than I am.
If I'm not having one of these chocolates
or something like that, I'm probably having
a glass of something brown, be it whiskey or cognac
or a glass of wine.
You know, keep it to one or none on the weeknights.
So let's get into the weekends, shall we?
This is when the rules stop.
I'll keep it tight during the day on Friday
and then Friday night, all bets are off.
I'm having you know, a couple of glasses of whiskey
because it's the end of the week, come on.
My biggest weakness in this world has gotta be chicken parm,
so I'm typically ordering from Parm, fittingly enough.
They make the perfect expression of chicken parm,
it's a seeded Italian hero, then it's got these
big fat pieces of white meat chicken, panko breaded,
beautifully crisp, even after being delivered,
just enough sauce, not too much sauce,
that's a big problem with chicken parm heroes is that,
and for everyone else in the world,
chicken parm sandwiches.
Chicken parm heroes, is that they get over sauced
or over cheesed even, I know that sounds crazy
but it's possible and this is a great balance
of chicken to breading to sauce to cheese,
also whole leaves of basil on there, so you just take a bite
and you just like
"oh, I have a mouth full of basil, life's okay."
I'll dig into one of those
with their Italian shoestring fries
and maybe a bowl of their spicy rotini.
Yeah and so that's Friday night.
Saturday morning, I maybe have a little bit of a headache,
maybe, I don't know.
I don't know why I have a headache
and why I'm hungry for breakfast sandwiches, you tell me.
And that's what I'll do, I'll get myself
a breakfast sandwich, I'm all about the BEC
or in my case HEC, 'cause I like ham, egg and cheese.
I'll even make it myself here if I got the stuff.
You know, I have to have...
Gotta have the good potato rolls, Martin's or Marty's,
which I didn't...
Hmm, is this knock-off Martin's?
Marty's?
Big soft potato roll,
lots and lots and lots of sesame seeds.
Lightly toast that in the pan, little bit of butter,
that way the roll stays soft.
Don't do it in the toaster, don't do it in the toaster oven
because then you're gonna get a hard roll,
you don't want a hard roll.
Fry up two eggs, medium, over medium.
I want a little bit of runny egg going on there.
Right before it's done cooking, flip,
squirt of water, cheese, cover.
That's gonna melt your cheese, it's gonna steam the eggs
and finish them cooking.
In another pan I'm generally frying up a slice of ham
or some bacon or something like that.
Ga, ga, ga, tale as old as time.
BEC, HEC, breakfast sandwich.
That, or you know, if I'm really out of commission
(laughing)
then I'm ordering in from some place like Black Seed
or Zucker's or any of these New York bagel spots
and then by the afternoon I'm ready to, okay,
maybe I'll start being a little bit healthier again.
Have a healthy lunch, one of these bowls,
then by the evening I'm ready to party again.
If I'm not doing Italian then I'm generally gonna go
either Japanese
or Vietnamese
or some kind of noodley, soupy, sushi kind of thing.
Sushi snobs will make fun of me for this
but I love Sugarfish, it's really good,
the fish always tastes really sweet and clean.
That'll be Saturday and then Sunday
is kind of the tempering, get back into
the normal flow of things day
and just tempering myself for oh God, Monday's coming,
here we go.
If I'm making my cheat meals at home,
it's typically gonna be pasta, a carbonara in particular.
With the carbonara I will either make fresh pasta
or I will use something, some big, really thick spaghetti
or bucatini, something with a lot of chew to it
and something that I'll cook really al dente
and I can twist it up into a nice nest
and if I made it out to my favorite butcher Pino's,
Pino's Prime Meats over in the East Village,
generally while I'm there if they have guanciale,
I'm gonna buy a slab of it and be like,
I'm saving you for the weekend and I'll make the carbonara
with some really nice orangey yolked eggs
and some guanciale and a whole bunch
of freshly grated Romano cheese.
Oh my God, I'm so hungry right now.
Another one of my favorites is Pasta alla Norcina.
It's an herbed pork sausage that you kind of have to make,
you can't really buy it in the States
and so the best approximation of it
is to take some ground pork,
mix it with a ton of fresh rosemary, garlic
and freshly-grated nutmeg and then you cook that sausage
and then make a cream sauce out of heavy cream,
a little bit more rosemary, a little bit more garlic
and a whole lot of Pecorino Romano cheese
and it makes this very creamy, very sharp,
very herby pasta that, I've never tasted anything
quite like it before.
That, or one of my favorite things to make over the weekends
is fajitas with marinaded thinly pounded chicken breast,
some sauteed onions and peppers
and this great condiment almost, I guess
you'd call it a condiment, called rajas con crema,
which is Poblano peppers that you place
right on the grate of your stove and fire roast them
and just blacken them entirely, peel off
all the burnt carbonized exterior,
chop up the nice soft pepper underneath
and then cook those in crema, which is basically
a Honduran sour cream, so basically to make
an approximation of that you mix sour cream and lime juice
with a little bit of Mexican oregano
and a little bit of cumin and it makes this flavor
that again, you think you've tried all Mexican food flavors
and then you try something from some locale
that you've never heard of before
and you're like "wow!"
There's this whole other world that I'd never tried
and this is one my favorite expressions of that
and that, with some homemade tortillas,
'cause tortillas are surprisingly easy to make
and they're so much better than the stuff you get
out of the bag.
(exhaling breath)
My weekends are a lot more interesting than my weekdays.
The main food that I actively avoid
'cause I hate it very publicly is cilantro.
I actually have a tattoo of cilantro right here
and if you follow it all the way down in there,
I won't reveal everything, but it just grows
straight out of my armpit.
That's my little middle finger to cilantro.
People who hate cilantro, it's literally a genetic marker
that makes it taste like soap or whatever,
in my case it tastes like burning tires.
Despite being a proud New Yorker, my favorite food city
has gotta be New Orleans, Louisiana,
because a lot of the cuisine there was born of need
and of scarcity and most of the food in that genre
is cooked slow and low, that's my favorite,
sort of category of cooking, is slow and low
and making something beautiful out of something
that most people might not be interested in or throw away.
So I've never met a dish, I don't think, in New Orleans
that I didn't love and I don't think I've gone
to a restaurant in New Orleans that I didn't love
and I went to a lot.
Last year I went and did
Homer Simpson's food tour of New Orleans,
which was 52 different restaurants
in a two minute and 30 second long video.
Of those 52 restaurants, I don't think I met a flavor
or a thing that I didn't like
and there were some very interesting,
very exotic things going on there.
So that's pretty much everything I eat in a day.
My name's Andrew Rea,
I have a YouTube channel called Binging with Babish,
where I recreate foods from movies and television.
Go check it out, thank you for watching.