Kitchen Eclectic

 

I made these baked egg meat cups for breaky last weekend, and was telling a co-worker about them. She seemed to think it was some kind of super fancy ordeal, but it’s really not. Simple as can be – only a few steps and little clean up, great for serving a lot of people. While they’re baking in the oven (bout 10 minutes or so), throw together a quick salad with a nice tart vinaigrette and a few slices of lightly buttered sourdough toast to serve with the egg cups. With salad and toast, one egg cup is usually enough per person. They can be pretty rich.

Ingredients:

You’ll need a non-stick muffin tin for this.

For each individual cup, you’ll also need:

• A few slices (about 3, depending on the size) of very thin sliced cured meat (proscuitto recommended)
• One egg 
• 2-3 white button mushrooms, chopped
• 1/2T butter
• One medium-thick round slice of tomato
• 1T grated parmesan cheese
• Salt & pepper
• 1 oven, preheated to 400

How-to:

1. Line the muffin cups with proscuitto. You can substitute the proscuitto for very thinly sliced bacon, or other cured meats. Just make sure whatever you use is as thin as can be!

2. Sautee your already chopped mushrooms in a small dollop of butter, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Then, drop a slice of raw tomato into each cup, and top it with a few mushrooms.

3. Crack one egg carefully atop the mushroom-tomato cup, careful not to break the yolk and trying to keep it as close to the center as possible. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt and pepper and a pinch of the parmesan cheese.

4. Bake in your preheated 400degree oven until the whites are juuuust set, the yolk still a tiny bit wobbly.  The yolk will continue to cook after you take it out of the oven, until you cut it open and let all the heat out. So poke the yolk ever-so-gently (without piercing it) to find the perfect time for your desired consistency. If serving with toast and salad, I recommend it nice and runny! MMmmmm….

5. After you pull it from the oven, and once it sets for a minute in the meaty-muffin cups, it will be easy to slide out using a couple of wooden or large spoons (be gentle!). Top it with the remaining parmesan cheese and serve with a simple salad of greens and vinaigrette to cut the richness of the meat and cheese and egg and toast to sop up the yolk.

 And don’t neglect all the options! This is just a base for beauty of a breakfast canvas…

• Replace the parmesan with goat cheese or cheddar cheese. Instead of on top, put the cheese right under the egg, on top of the mushroom and tomato. Top the egg only with salt and pepper.
• Replace the parmesan with a slice of fresh mozzarella, and replace the mushroom with 2 leaves of fresh basil for a caprese-ish meaty egg cup. Layer in this order: meat cup, tomato slice, basil leaves, mozzarella slice, salt and pepper, egg, salt and pepper.

• Try adding spinach to the layer of tomato and mushrooms.

 

Previously, I was under the notion that everyone knew that one of the best ways to cook 96% of all vegetables was to oven roast them at a really high heat with olive oil, salt and pepper – and sometimes, a few herbs and spices. I mean, seriously. You name it, roasting is the tastiest.

• Potatoes? Roasted, duh.  (rosemary and bacon)
• Green beans? Hells yeah! Roast the shit outta those. (chili flakes or sesame seeds/oil)
• Brussel sprouts? Of course! (lemon and chili flakes)
• Carrots? Well, we already know that…

Bring it on, I dare you….give me a vegetable that isn’t delicious when roasted. Especially in the fall. I don’t think there’s a single one….

 

And for sure….

 

Cauliflower and Beets! (ahem…purple cauliflower and yellow beets…)

It was cauliflower, actually, that helped bring to my attention the sad fact that not every cook feels, in their soul, the value of roasting. I was reading an article in an old issue of Gourmet (RIP) that preached to the reader the glory of roasting, specifically for cauliflower. I’ll tell you – roasting cauliflower is the only way I cook it. It’s amazing. High heat, til it browns and it’s out of this world. Well, second to the breaded and fried cauliflower from Bar Bambino.

And, being fall and all … all the veggies that you want to roast anyways – they’re extra pretty. Purple cauliflower and yellow beets…

 

chioga beets…

purple and yellow wax beans…

romanesco (aka geometric broccoli)…

and so many more!

So here’s how you do it for a head of cauliflower and about 3 medium sized beets….

 

Cauliflower:

• Trim it of leaves and the bottom stalk that hold most of the florets together, keep trimming down the stalks and the florets will naturally fall off into small pieces.
• For the large ones, cut them in half down the middle so they’re about this size: 

Give or take… having some a little bigger, some a little smaller is fine. In fact, the smaller ones are crazy good because they get real crispy!)

For the beets:

• Cut off the tops and greens (but save the greens, they’re delish!) and then slice them into rounds, about 1/2 inch thick, then cut those rounds like a waffle fry – crosswise, then the other way, so they end up being ’bout an inch square: 

• Beets, too, are just a little bit “more of less” in size. Because they’re round, and because you’re not a restaurant that is willing to waste a little bit of beet in order to get them all the same size, they’re gonna vary just a tad.
• Then, put both in a large bowl, toss with tasty olive oil, fresh ground black pepper and salt. I highly recommend using Alaea Hawaiian Red Salt – it’s great for roasting, because it naturally helps to retain moisture. Its iron content (what makes it red) and residual minerals also add great, but subtle, flavor.
• After tossing it, lay it all out flat onto a baking sheet and drop into an oven preheated for 425 for 25-3o minutes, until there is good visible browning on both the beets and cauliflower, but not so long they’re mushy. Taste-test along the way.

 

 

This is how we wake up.

This is how we have lunch.

 

And here’s how you can have a bangin’ lunch too:

• Dinner Rolls
• Mayo
• Spicy Mustard
• Fresh Taragon leaves (not optional, it makes the sandwich incomprable!)
• Mixed Greens
• Very Thinly Sliced Onions
• Avocado
• Salami

 

1. Put it all together into a sandwich, making sure to put the mayo into hearts.

 

This is how we follow up, with dinner on the fire:

Marinate your steak in a ziploc bag, grill it up on a fire that looks like this:

Get those grill marks, and serve it with some fennel potato salad:

You’ll be a happy camper, too.

Thanks to Amy Tso for photos

I’m no master baker by any means; without a sweet tooth to call my own I generally stay on the savory end of the kitchen. Baking also requires a certain kind of attention to detail and scientific organization that after the daily patience my day job requires, I just can’t hang with. But I’ll tell you – you could be missing an arm and think a whisk is is some kind of sex toy and still be able to make this bread awesome! You can even get creative with it and use your savory skills to combine flavors without opening your oven door to yet another baking catasrophe.

Apart from being a quick simple recipe, the delicious secret to it is FRESH spices. If you’re using cinnamon and nutmeg, don’t use the janky stale powdered stuff that’s been sitting in your cabinet since three Thanksgiving’s ago when you made pumpkin pie. Get a zester or fine grater, some cinnamon sticks, and a hard nutmeg nut and make yourself sneeze with the freshness.
If you’re using cardamom, toast the fresh seeds quickly on the stovetop (not pods, but for extra freshness, you can get pods and crush them to extract the seeds) and grind them in a spice grinder (which you have already, right? It’s just a little coffee grinder that you use for spices instead of coffee….)

Get this together:

1 cup smashed banana, ¾ cup toasted chopped walnuts (or)
1 cup grated carrots (or)
1 cup semi-smashed blackberries , 3/4 cup oats

(or….):

1 cup any fruit, veggie, etc (wet ingredient that you choose and up to 3/4 cup any nuts, oats, small chopped dried fruit, coconut, choco/butterscotch/peanut butter chip or combination thereof that your heart desires

And here’s how to do it:

1. Preheat oven to 350 and lightly grease 9×5 pan or (2) 6×3 pans

2. Mix 1 ¾ flour ¾ c sugar 1t each baking powder and salt and ½ t baking soda cinnamon nutmeg in large bowl (except blackberry bread, replace with a couple pinches cardamom), add dry ingredients (nuts, oats, dried fruit, coconut etc)

3. In separate bowl whisk 2 eggs, 1/2 c cooled melted butter or vegetable oil, ½ c. yogurt or sour cream, 1t vanilla, stir in wet stuff and fold into dry mixture until nicely combined.

4. Spread batter in pans and bake until tooth pick comes out clean. Cool in pans on rack bout 30 min, then pop out to cool the rest of the way, on a rack.

5. Eat it!

I, for one, thought it was illegal to sell abalone. Did you? Well apparently, we were both wrong. A little while ago, my mom and I found some sushi grade abalone at the Japanese market. It’s pretty expensive, real small and a pain and a half to clean – but what a novel treat! And mighty delicious, I might add…

But, back to the point. It seems that the focus of the regulations is to specify what kind you can catch and when, how many and how and that each and every one caught is reported and tagged. Take a peek here, if you care to learn the simple rules of abalone hunting. Apparently lots of them are just north of San Francisco. That’s just north of me! Perhaps I’ll drag the other half out for some abalone fishing sometime soon in order to recreate this most delicious abalone recipe.

Before you can cook it, though, you gotta clean it. And it goes a little something like this:

Cut it out of the shell. An oyster shucker works well, otherwise a small paring knife is a-ok.

Use a small paring knife to gently cut away all the dirty and the black membranes from the beefy meaty abalone. It seems more daunting than it is; once you start cutting, you’ll be able to feel where to cut. This is a decent video on how to do it. There are a couple on youtube that will help out.

In the end, it will look like this. Wrap it in plastic on either side and pound it just a bit to tenderize it, then (for this recipe) cut it into thick strips. (Other ways to cook it besides this recipe – slice in half long-ways pan fry it in a cast iron skillet with lots of butter, salt, pepper and some cayenne and lemon juice – like calamari. Or, breaded and deep fried, also like calamari.)

The cream sauce for this is similar to something for linguini and clams, but it’s pretty versatile – use it on pasta, as a base for chowder etc. And super delish. Apologies for not offering the exact measurements for the ingredients, but mess around with it, and you’ll figure it out ok.

Ingredients

Few Tablespoons Butter
1-2 Shallots, finely minced
2-3 cloves Garlic, finely minced
large palmful of Fennel fronds, finely minced
1/3C. or so White Wine – Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio will be just fine
1C. or so Heavy cream
1teaspoon, give or take Hot Sauce – preferably Tabasco
juice from quarter to half a Lemon
Black pepper to taste

How to do it:

1. Heat a large, deep frying pan and melt the butter.

2. Once melted, add shallots, garlic and pinch of salt and let it just start to brown and get aromatic.

3. Add white wine and fennel fronds, moving often to keep the garlic and shallots from burning. Let it just start to simmer up in order to reduce the wine.

4. Add cream, and stir often and reduce. Salt to taste.

5. As it reduces reduces, add hot sauce, lemon and fresh ground black pepper and keep stirring.

6. In the simmering sauce, add the strips of abalone and cook carefully and briefly on both sides until heated through, about 7 minutes total.

7. Serve the abalone and sauce over sliced, toasted baguette.