- I am Andrew Zimmern and this is Everything I Eat in a Day. First thing that I do when I
wake up is I slide out of bed and I get on my knees and I
go through a spiritual routine that I've been doing
for the last 29 years. Head to the bathroom, drink something. I have drinks everywhere,
on the bedside table, in the bathroom and it's
usually bottles of water or sparkling water because
I'm always very thirsty. Then it's brush teeth and downstairs for the first cup of coffee. I'm a coffee drinker in the morning. I love tea, I probably have
about 75 different types of tea in the house and about 30
different types of coffee. I'm kind of obsessive when
it comes to food and drink. First cup of coffee is always black. Second cup of coffee
sometimes I take with milk. I found out over the last
couple of years, you know, I'm 59 not 29, that too much black coffee tends to be a lot of acidity and I've been trying to
cut down on my coffee so a little bit of milk
in there is oftentimes what I need for the second cup and then it's onto something to eat 'cause I'm usually pretty hungry. I can't eat unless I've
been up for about an hour. I really need to get my
engine sort of going. Primarily it's dinner for breakfast. I rummage through the leftovers. This morning for breakfast
I had two slices of brisket with a little bit of gravy on
a piece of sourdough toast. But I spent so much time
traveling through Asia where they eat soup and sauteed greens and small amounts of protein, usually fish and all variety of foods. I don't like dessert for breakfast so I'm not really into
French toast and pancakes and all that kind of thing. I go lean much more towards
the Asian models for breakfast which is savory foods
that are a lot better for you in the morning. Sometimes I will get to the office and especially this last year with COVID, wandering into the office
at 9:30, 10 o'clock has been pretty normal for me. By 10:30 if there's
good snacky stuff here, I've usually had my snacky snack here. Sometimes that's just scrambled egg. I just love eggs so much. And then I try to keep my head in my meetings and my computer
until 12:30 or one O'clock when I typically turn to lunch. I'm kind of a sandwich junkie. So I'll take a sandwich from anywhere. That includes both hotdogs and hamburgers, they are both sandwiches. The Italian grinder from the local deli, the fried chicken sandwich from the Fried Chicken
Palace down the street. And that's about half the time. The rest of the time we'll bring in lunch from outside of here and so whether that's the local Mexican
or Vietnamese restaurant, we try to support a lot
of our local restaurants and have food brought in. And we're also a hospitality company and so frequently there's
something for lunch that involves recipe testing or stuff that our Culinary
Director JP Samuelson is testing. And today for lunch, he had some gravlax. He makes the best cured
fish in the whole world. And so I took a Hawaiian. This is so embarrassing. I took a a King's Hawaiian oversized bun and four, five slices
of his homemade gravlax. And then I remember that, you know, it's the holiday season
so we have a big container of caviar in the back 'cause we're doing some caviar stuff for
New Year's Eve videos and I put a nice big tablespoon of caviar in the middle of the whole
thing and smeared it around and that's what I had for lunch today. The day beforehand, I
had two all beef hotdogs in bonds with mustard, I mean high, low. So I'm not a fancy food guy by any stretch of the imagination. It just that occasionally,
if I wanna go that way we have the ingredients
here that I can lean into and I'm very lucky. Snack time is a big deal for me. Some people have said, it sounds like I eat six
or seven meals a day. I just kind of think of myself
more like a barnyard animal that has access to food all the time. I'm just always eating something. love corn chips, I love certain brands. I love Utz potato chips. I love a lot of the Asian potato chips, shrimp flavored potato chips, pork and scallion flavored potato chips. I'm lucky enough to gather a
lot of those sorts of things. I like savory. I'm not really a big sweets guy despite the fact that I have a ice cream and Popsicle freezer in my office. Well, we haven't really
gotten to dinner yet because when you get home,
there's the requisite drop the briefcase at the door, change into something a
little more comfortable, check in with the family
and have a snack, snack or as I like to look at it hors d'oeuvres, because that way it
sounds a little better. I'm a big cheese guy. That usually involves cheese and crackers or some other little
taurine or meaty thing that I have lying around. We keep palms and salamis
and things like that at home. I think we have two hams
hanging in the garage which we keep it very relatively dry. That's super embarrassing. I mean, is there anything
worse than confessing that the reason you have your garage with a humidity and
temperature control setting is so that the hams that you
buy can be stored out there? Super food nerd right here. Dinner is easily the
healthiest meal of my day. I love the way the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean eat, where there's a roasted or grilled or a braised piece of meat that sits in the middle of the table. And then there's dozens
of little plates of things all around it. The other night I grilled like a three, three and a half pound fish and in one bowl I had roasted red peppers that I charred in the fireplace with real salted whole anchovies. We had a bulgur wheat
salad with lots of parsley and tomatoes and olive oil
and cucumber and onion. We had eggplant al ha'esh. It's now winter in Minnesota so the fireplace is always going so it's easy to char eggplant and just peel the skin off of those and drizzle a little tahina inside, maybe a little salt, maybe a little lemon or red wine vinegar, very, very simple. I did mustard greens sauteed
with garlic and chilies and lemon zest. And so we pulled that out and you have all these little bowls and you can have a couple
of spoons of each one with a few ounces of fish and it's like super, super healthy. My favorite food city in the world is a everywhere Opolis Berg. My favorite food city is
wherever I've just visited. I'm obsessed with bright shiny objects. And as a cultural explorer who puts everything
through the prism of food and who has made it a living for 20 years to define other cultures
by the foods that they eat you're sort of asking definitively the wrong person that question. Oh, wait, there's more,
I don't sleep very much. I go to bed around 11:30, 12 o'clock and I get up around 6:30 or seven. Three or four nights a week I wake up at three in the morning and I just, I'm just hungry. I wander downstairs and
I open up the fridge and with the light from the refrigerator illuminating my shame, I sit there and eat cold leftover Thai,
Vietnamese or Chinese food out of the carton with my
chopsticks three or four bites and I just think to myself, God, this is so much better cold
in the middle of the night. And then I box it up and I put it away and then I trundle back
upstairs and I go back to sleep which is probably why I only want coffee the first couple hours
I'm up in the morning. I'm Andrew Zimmern and that was Everything
That I eat in a Day. And two things that I would
want you to leave with. Number one, if you're interested in any in all things that I'm doing in TV and otherwise, please check
out andrewzimmern.com. And most importantly,
don't eat till you're full eat till you're tired. (upbeat music)
