smitten kitchen » Eggs

cauliflower and parmesan cake

deb — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:57:42 +0000

I used to make a lot of quiches and savory tarts. I still think they’re one of the food Greats; a delicious, buttery crust and almost any filling you can think of. With a salad of mixed greens and some crisp-tender green beans with flaky salt, I’m not sure I’ve ever needed anything else to fill out a meal. Oh wait, a glass of wine. Now that there is some Deb Meal Bliss.

But as you know, things shift. They change. Suddenly, I’m feeding three mouths instead of two and I’m kind of hoping for leftovers and those delicate little tarts don’t stretch as far as I want them to. I want heft. I’m pretty at peace with not rolling out a pastry crust on a harried Monday afternoon.

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scrambled egg toast

deb — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:18:40 +0000

Let me get this out of the way from the get-go: I cannot believe I’m discussing scrambled eggs today. I like to think of myself as somewhat particular in vetting out what I think is worthy or not worthy of your humble click over here, and I can’t say that scrambled eggs would normally make the cut. In fact, if you are happy with your scrambles, if you’re pretty sure you’ve got that whole moving the egg around the pan thing down pat, I won’t even be offended if you come back next time, when I figure out what to do with the four pounds of strawberries in my fridge. Or last time, when we made rhubarb tarts.

But this is for the rest of us, myself even, who do not let anyone else, not restaurant, not short-order griddle guy at the bodega, nobody, make our scrambled eggs. Because they are, almost without fail, terrible: dry, stiff and overcooked with a telltale brown spot where they stuck to the pan, forgotten. Shudder. Scrambled eggs are best made at home, and where their path from frying pan to plate to fork to your belly is as short as possible. Scrambled eggs should have a short lifespan.

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mushroom crêpe cake

deb — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:04:07 +0000

I spent my very first Mother’s Day weekend nearly baby-free and in the kitchen. I know, how did that happen? You see, Jacob sojourned at his grandparents’ and I was very sad and missed him terribly and then I drank wine without worrying about the repercussions, got 10 hours (!) of uninterrupted (!) sleep (!) and discovered that I can really cook a lot of things without a cute to the point of distraction baby in the next room and I was a little less sad. And then we hosted brunch for both of our families. The end.

Oh, you want to hear more about brunch, don’t you? Well, there were drop biscuits. Patted-out scones. A crazy braided sweet bread that I promise to tell you about soon. Buttered whole wheat toast triangles and cheesy scrambled eggs. Fruit salad. Mimosas and Bloody Marys. So much bacon, my apartment still smelled like a smokehouse the next day. And crêpes, stacked and filled with creamy mushrooms and cheese.

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spring asparagus pancetta hash

deb — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:42:37 +0000

A few times a year, I go on a Dinner Intervention, which might sound a little more gentle than it is. It sounds like a “Honey, I was thinking I’ll do something different with dinner this week” but in reality it is more of a “Gah, I am so sick of take-out and fobbed together meals! I’ve had enough!” wherein I throw down the proverbial spatula and demand we do better.

Dinner is not my strong suit; I love side dishes and “tapas-style” meals (a joke consisting of bits and pieces of leftovers from the fridge meals.) I’ve got pancakes, slaws and potatoes down pat, but when it comes down to what I consider the Holy Grail of home cooking — Getting Dinner On The Table with any regularity — I fall woefully short. Seeing as we can get great salads, hummus platters and cracker-thin pizzas delivered in no time, why would I want to bother cranking up the broiler?

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leek bread pudding

deb — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:00:17 +0000

I feel like I have been sitting on this leek bread pudding recipe forever, though it has technically only been six months — the New York Times ran this recipe from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home last October, when [updated: ahem, I had thought] leeks were decidedly out of season and apparently, I’m really becoming someone who really digs her heels in about these sorts of things. I imagine how much better something will taste in season, how much better it will look, how much more excited I’ll be when I “score” the thing I’ve been longing six months for and say “aargh, fine! I’ll wait.” And wait I did. (Jacob, too, was patient but mostly because he was just a little lump back then.)

Nevertheless, despite my initial grumbling that I was bereft of my favorite spring delights, I’ve been hauling back armloads from the Greenmarket since, literally as much as I can carry and leeks were finally among last week’s haul. (It has also helped that I’ve discovered the glories of Wednesday — glorious uncluttered, overflowing-stands Wednesdays! — shopping. Wednesday, I’m in love.) For this savory take on bread pudding, the leeks are sliced in pretty, pretty coins then cooked slowly in butter until soft and caramelized enough to bring tears to your eyes. I really get carried away with leeks, I know.

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classic cobb salad

deb — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:13:01 +0000

When I am considering recipes I might share with you all, there are a lot of foods that I arbitrarily rule out. Sandwiches? Nope! With rare exception, who needs a recipe for slapping things between two pieces of bread? Fruit salad? Oof! No! Again, unless you’re doing something fancy-fancy to it, I’m pretty sure people can find their own path to chopped fruit in a bowl. So when I got to thinking about making an old-school Cobb salad a couple months ago, I quickly rejected it because given the Cobb salad’s ubiquity on lunch menus everywhere, who doesn’t know how to make it?

As it turns out, someone does not. Last month, at a restaurant in New Jersey, both my mother and I ordered Cobb salads, my mother the “small” version, along with a cup of soup, and myself, the regular one, with no soup. When the waiter brought out a bowl that was a third the size of the table, I groaned and tried to shuffle objects around on a table to accommodate it. “What is up with these ridiculous portion sizes?” I complained, as usual. Oh, little did I know, people! Little did I know, because the waiter next brought out a bowl I can barely describe. Imagine the bowl you would take down to make a salad for 12 people, or a vessel large enough for this guy to take a nap in, or this bowl, with a diameter so staggering that it would only fit if partially hanging off the table. This was my entrée Cobb salad.

And within those acres of iceberg, not a speck of bacon was to be found.

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shakshuka

deb — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:24:26 +0000

There are a lot of reasons to make shakshuka, an Israeli dish of eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce: It sounds like the name of a comic book hero. Or some kind of fierce, long-forgotten martial art. Or perhaps something that said comic book hero would yell as they practiced this elaborate martial art, mid-leap with their fist in the air.

Or you could make it because when I talked about making eggs in tomato sauce a while back a large handful of comments were along the lines of “oh, this sounds like shakshuka” and “I think you would love shakshuka” and “you really should make shakshuka” and you may have shrugged and forgotten about it until you finally had it at a café one day and whoa it turns out you really would like shakshuka!

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breakfast pizza

deb — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:15:18 +0000

My son’s favorite game in the whole world is Let’s Play With The Other Baby! You Know, The One We Keep In The Mirror. We bring him over to this giant mirror in the hallway and he goes berserk, he paws at the “other” baby, kicks his legs, squeals and laughs. It cracks us up too. Babies: they’re so cute when they’re kinda confused!

It took us a few weeks to realize how sad this game actually is. My little monkey is so outgoing and eager to make friends that he’ll play with an imaginary baby that lives in the mirror to get his fix. Perhaps, we realized, hanging our heads in the shame of being the worst parents, ever, it is time for him to meet some other babies his age that he can paw and squeal at in person and they can hopefully paw and squeal back. But, of course, this isn’t a story about Jacob’s first playdate, it’s about what I made for breakfast.

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ginger fried rice

deb — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:38:39 +0000

According to my calendar — the one I believe I just looked at for the first time since last September, when someone made my life go all date- and timeless — the Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day fall on the same day this year. In New York at least, the Lunar New Year is an excuse to eat egregious amounts of fried rice, spare ribs and to make your way through Chinatown streets over piles of strewn red paper* from firecrackers. Valentine’s Day, however, is dominated by French food because what could be more romantic than copious amounts of wine, butter, cheese, steak and chocolate?

Or, you could stay in and have a little of both. That’s what this ginger fried recipe is to me, a classic Chinese dish, clearly reinterpreted by a French hand. For one, it has leeks, which although used in both Chinese and French cooking, I can’t say I’ve ever seen them caramelized for fried rice. Second, egg isn’t scrambled into the dish, but pulled out, fried whole and laid on top of the rice. There are other deconstructions too: the ginger and garlic are fried until crisp and scattered over the dish, like bacon bits from the Far East, rather than tucked within. And rather than cooking the rice in gobs of soy sauce and sesame oil, both are conservatively drizzled on top at the end like droplets of a pan sauce.

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spinach and cheese strata

deb — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:27:40 +0000

I have spent the last few months unearthing recipes I’ve had bookmarked for an eternity. A whole lot of them, mostly things I have spared you, did not exactly age like fine wine, as they say; fillings ran, vegetables never caramelized, spiced mixed nuts were grimy and cookies were painfully sweet. The rest of them, however, caused me to become consumed with regret when I think of all of the times we could have already consumed mindblowing butterscotch, caviar-esque creamed mushrooms and speedy, rich biscuits but did not know of them yet. This is one of those times.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m all about hosting brunch, but only if I can make everything in advance. When it comes to biscuits, bacon, baked French toast and fruit salads, pulling it off is obvious. But I always get lost on the eggs, and for a whole lot of people, it’s not breakfast if it doesn’t involve eggs. This strata — really, a savory bread pudding — is the missing piece because not only can you make it the night before, you are supposed to.

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