07.17.08
Posted in Breakfast, Dinner, Eggs, Fish, Leftovers, Seafood, Sides at 6:07 pm by julie
So it’s salmon season in the Pacific Northwest, and we are starting to see whole wild salmons appearing in the supermarket. Last week when we were at the grocery store, I talked Jeremy out of getting one, just for sheer size. But a few days later, he made a trip to Costco, and somehow a 3.5lb wild sockeye (sans head) jumped into the car and followed him home.
I roasted it pretty simply seasoned in a foil pouch, on a bed of parsley and dill and stuffed with dill, lemon, and spring onions. I also poured in some clam juice and fresh lemon juice, then sealed it all up and cooked it at 375F for about 40 minutes. It came out flaky and very flavorful, with that firm meaty flesh you just don’t get from farmed Atlantic salmon. Jeremy performed filleting duties while I made my favorite quick sauce for fish, based on this recipe: green onion sliced thin and sauteed until tender in a tablespoon of butter, then simmered in white wine until it has nearly boiled off.
To go with the fish, I made lemon-scallion rice in the rice cooker, according to Simply Ming
: Just add a few sliced scallions and some fresh lemon juice and zest to your rice and water before starting the cooker, and hit Start. I think the lemon juice gave the rice an extra-sticky texture, but it had good flavor, and married nicely with the lemony fish.
Needless to say, we had leftover salmon coming out our ears. I’ve already done salmon croquettes, and it is definitely too warm right now for chowder. So I found a few new recipes to add to my arsenal, a simple salmon frittata with corn, peppers and Gruyere, and a dilly salmon-potato hash with shiitake mushrooms.
For the frittata, I used the general recipe here, using frozen corn and diced frozen peppers, and subbing scallions for onions and of course leftover salmon for canned. It was very tasty, but I think if I make it again with salmon, I’ll use lots of red peppers and forget the corn.
The hash worked out nicely because I just happened to have a small bag of shiitakes that needed to be eaten before they dried out. I didn’t have any sour cream, though, so I took the chance and used some Greek yogurt instead. We couldn’t tell the difference. Nolan woke up just as I was finishing it, so the pic was taken one-handed, and I forgot I had meant to top the hash with some fried or poached eggs, but it stood alone just fine.
Salmon Hash
6 T olive oil
1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 C shiitake mushrooms, stems removed and quartered
1 tsp garlic, one clove peeled and finely chopped
3 C potatoes, cooked and peeled
1-1/4 lb salmon, cooked or smoked, skinned, boned and flaked
1/2 C Greek yogurt, full-fat
1 T lemon juice
2 T fresh dill, chopped
Sea salt to taste
Freshly ground pepper to taste
Place 1/2 of the oil in a heavy skillet over high heat, and when hot, add the onion and saute until slightly crunchy, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the mushroom, and cook until just wilted, about 2 minutes. Add the garlic and saute for 1 minute. Remove to a mixing bowl and set aside.
In the same skillet, add the remaining oil, bring to medium heat, and add the potatoes. Cook until the edges are just crisp, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and mix with the reserved onions, and add salmon, yogurt, lemon juice, and dill. Season to taste with the salt and pepper, and mix well, but do not pack the mixture.
Return the mixture to a skillet, and cook over medium heat, tossing to prevent the hash from sticking. Remove to a warm plate, and serve. Garnish the hash with anything you like best, from sour cream to poached eggs.
Source: Adapted from The Buffet Book, by Carole Peck (available online here)
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07.09.08
Posted in American, Cuisines, Dinner, Eggs, French, Lunch, Salads at 9:53 am by julie
We had a good 4th of July weekend. For me, that constitutes getting to leave the house a glorious three times, including trips to the grocery store and farmer’s market. Nolan had never been to either place, and he was quite a champ, looking around quietly from his sling while we shopped. At the grocery store, we picked up fixings for an all-American sort of dinner: New York strip steaks, baby spinach for a classic salad with hot bacon vinaigrette, and (at Jeremy’s request) Boston baked beans. The steaks were coated in a mixture of oil and clarified butter and seasoned aggressively with salt and pepper, then cooked to a perfect medium on our cast iron grill. The salad was a tasty complement, with crisp bacon, sweet shallot, and hard-boiled egg.
At the farmer’s market the next day, our score included white asparagus, three kinds of wild mushrooms, dinosaur kale, and a big head of frisee lettuce. I would have liked to get more, but I couldn’t carry much with the baby, and Jeremy had his hands full with Freyja, who was in rare form trying to keep our little herd together. (Every time I went into a booth to buy something, she whined something fierce. Everyone stared at her, and several people commented on how protective she was being of me. She just wouldn’t let me out of her sight.) Anyway, I decided to use the frisee to make us another classic salad with eggs and bacon for lunch that day: a bistro salad with poached eggs and a sherry vinaigrette. Its similarity to the spinach salad was not lost on me, but the overall effect was quite different, mostly due to the extreme bitterness of the frisee. Tasty as it was, I think I prefer this salad in its fried egg sandwich incarnation, which cuts down on the volume of frisee.
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04.04.08
Posted in Eggs, Persnickety Bits at 3:08 pm by julie
I remember making deviled eggs for the first time when I was a little kid. I was an incredibly picky eater (what? really?), but deviled eggs were definitely on my list of eatables. So at some point I decided to try making them myself. I knew where my mom’s recipe was, so I pulled it down while the eggs boiled (20 minutes at a hard boil, eek! No wonder the yolks always turned gray around the edges.) and opened it to the right page.
I knew deviled eggs had mustard in them because I had watched my mom make them before. It gave me pause when I first found out, because I don’t use mustard as a condiment, even today, but the taste of the eggs was so wonderfully creamy that I just tried not to think about the contamination while I was eating them. But it was a different story when I went to make the recipe myself.
I happily sliced eggs and popped out the very hard-boiled yolks with a spoon, mashing them up with Miracle Whip, cider vinegar and salt. I pulled the squeeze bottle of mustard out of the refrigerator and spent a long while contemplating whether or not I should leave it out. Would it really make any difference if I did? In the end, I convinced myself that the mustard was in the recipe for a purpose (though what that might be I couldn’t imagine). I made myself squeeze a blob of day-glo yellow mustard into the measuring spoon, accompanied by a trickle of watery liquid that made my nose wrinkle in disgust, and plopped it into the egg yolks. I stirred it through as quickly as possible to put the whole traumatic experience behind me, scanned the yellow mush for heterogeneous streaks of mustard, and stuffed them back in the whites with a sprinkle of ancient paprika for the final touch. Cautiously nibbling my first bite, I was pleased to discover that they tasted just like my mom’s deviled eggs, wonderfully creamy and salty with an edge of vinegar tang and not a bit of mustard taste to be found.
That moment, I believe, was the origin of the Persnickety Palate. Even though I have continued to be—and am to this day—a very picky eater, that moment was the first time I willingly put an ingredient I didn’t like into a recipe and had faith that I might still be able to enjoy the outcome. It was a small step because I already knew I liked the taste of deviled eggs, but the fact that I was making them myself—controlling the amount of the abhorrent ingredient and the ultimate flavor of the dish—gave me the confidence to proceed. And that is what the past few years of cooking have been about for me.
Not that I am always happy with the outcome of my personal culinary adventures—there have been many meals that I ended up eating only a few bites of. But I have also taught myself not to be afraid of trying so many new foods that the successes are totally worth the disappointments. Among the ingredients I am no longer afraid to use? Mustard, of course. I don’t use the day-glo sort in a squeeze bottle, just Dijon and whole grain; and I still don’t use it as a condiment. But it frequently pops up in many other capacities in my kitchen, and I think I am a better cook because of it. I might even have to try making my own mustard one of these days.
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02.27.08
Posted in Breakfast, Cookies & Candies, Dessert, Dinner, Eggs, Lunch at 11:02 am by julie
For some reason I always have a really hard time wrapping my head around what to make with flavored chicken sausage. From time to time we pick up a package of chicken-apple or tomato-basil, and I scratch my head trying to come up with something more interesting than grilling them and sticking them in buns. Such was the case with the spinach-feta sausages we got earlier in the week, but I was able to put at least a few of them to good use in an easy crustless quiche.
The recipe hails from Baking Bites, and I chose it because it calls for similar flavorings and also because crusted quiches are my nemesis. I keep thinking the idea of eggs and cheese and pie crust together sounds great, because I love all of them, but whenever I eat it, I am bitterly disappointed by the sog-factor. Homemade pie crust is just enough work that, for the most part, I don’t consider quiche worth the risk unless it is crustless. (The single exception to that, so far, was the leek and bacon tart from All About Braising. That was deliciously sog-free, and I’d make it again in a heartbeat, presuming I had the braised leeks.)
Every so often I make a crustless broccoli quiche with feta and cottage cheese (and will post my cobbled-together recipe next time I do so). This recipe involves more flour—I used my faithful white whole wheat—and a looser batter than I am used to, but it baked up perfectly. I used a big handful of thawed and drained spinach from the freezer because it was all I had available, and similarly had to forego the sprinkle of feta on top, much to my dismay. The sausage that started it all was uncased, sliced, and sauteed briefly with the onion and spinach mixture.
The quiche gave me a new problem, however: I had an extra egg white in the fridge, though for the life of me I can’t recall now why that would be, so I used it up in the quiche and consequently ended up with an extra egg yolk that I wasn’t about to waste. I took the opportunity as a challenge to test out another chocolate chip cookie recipe that required an extra yolk: Robyn Lee’s Killer Big Fat Chewy Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cookies, as posted on Serious Eats.
The best thing about this recipe was clearly the size of the cookies. It calls for quarter-cup scoops of dough, about twice as much as I typically use for home-baked cookies. It also makes about the most iconic looking chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever produced: perfectly round, thick, golden, and studded with big bittersweet chocolate chips (see photographic evidence). In case you’re wondering, I baked on my Silpat for exactly 23 minutes as specified, and got exactly 16 cookies out of the batch with a spoonful leftover for the baker’s treat.
Warm from the oven, these cookies tasted as good as they looked: crisp on the outside and around the edges, with a soft chewy center. Unfortunately, once they had cooled, they hardened up a bit much for my personal tastes, and required consumption with a glass of milk for dunking. That certainly didn’t stop us from polishing them off within a few days, of course!
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07.17.07
Posted in Aussie, Breakfast, Cuisines, Eggs, French, Sides at 8:50 am by julie
We really need to hit the grocery store for supplies. Guess that means it’s time for another eggy post, eh?
But what could I possibly write about scrambled eggs? You take some eggs, beat them with a fork, and stir them about in a hot skillet with some butter. Nothing to it. Well, there is a pretty wide range of things done with scrambled eggs all over the world, and they’re some of our favorite easy meals.
French: Low and Slow
One of our go-to recipes for eggs is a simple slow-cooked scramble on toast. I don’t do my slow scramble quite as low and slow as French-style eggs would dictate, but they still take a good 10-15 minutes, and end up with a soft, creamy texture. If I’m in a hurry, I bump the heat up to medium at the beginning to get the eggs heating up, and as soon as they start to cook, turn it down to low or medium low again, adjusting it to keep things moving forward but not too quickly. The touch that puts them over the top is a drizzle of white truffle oil and a pinch of fleur de sel at the very end. Although there is very little butter in these eggs, the manner of cooking makes them seem far richer and more decadent than the usual scrambled eggs.
Slow-Scrambled Eggs on Toast
1 T unsalted butter
5 eggs
2 T water
Pinch of kosher salt and fresh ground pepper
4 pieces of bread or English muffins
White truffle oil
Fleur de sel or another high quality sea salt
In a nonstick skillet, melt the butter over medium low heat. Meanwhile, break the eggs into a small bowl, add the water, and whisk thoroughly. When the butter is melted, add the eggs and salt/pepper, and stir continually over low/med-low heat until eggs become creamy, with a consistency akin to loose oatmeal.
Meanwhile, toast the bread or English muffins (or English muffin bread, as we used in this case) and spread with butter or margarine if desired. When the eggs are ready, spoon them evenly over the prepared toast. Drizzle a few drops of truffle oil over each piece of eggy toast, followed by a pinch of fleur de sel. The fleur de sel adds an intermittent salty crunch to the creamy eggs, and the truffle oil makes everything fantastically fragrant and decadent.
If desired, you can combine this open-faced egg sandwich with cooked vegetables of some variety. Molly suggests leeks cooked slowly with butter and swirled with a dab of creme fraiche, a lovely combination that felt so rich I couldn’t even finish eating it. Another excellent option, and one we’ve employed many times, is the long-cooked broccoli from Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book, but any tender vegetable that you could imagine pairing with eggs could stand in.
Australian: bills breakfast
For dinner the other night, I decided to make an Australian breakfast. Time-wise, it probably wasn’t too far off, come to think of it. I’ve been wanting to try Bill Granger’s corn fritters for quite a while, so I made up a batch of those and a skillet full of Bill’s scrambled eggs to go with them. The main element that sets these eggs apart from your run-of-the-mill scrambled eggs is the addition of heavy cream, which makes them incredibly fluffy and tender.
bills Scrambled Eggs
2 eggs
1/4 C cream
Pinch of salt
1/2 T butter
Whisk together eggs, cream and salt. Do not put more than two servings of eggs in one pan, or the eggs will get over-cooked.
Melt butter in a non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. Pour in egg mixture and after about 20 seconds, using a spatula or wooden spoon, push the egg mixture on the outside of the pan to the center in a folding motion. Let eggs set for an additional 20 seconds, then repeat. When all the eggs are just set in the center of the pan, looking soft and somewhat wet, turn them out onto a plate. Serves 1.
Source: Slightly adapted from Baking Bites and Bill Granger
My Way: Lazy Eggs
Just for good measure, when I just don’t feel like fussing over my scrambled eggs, this is how I do it: Tablespoon of butter in a nonstick skillet, melted over medium heat. Turn the heat down to low and crack the eggs (usually 4-5 for the two of us) into the skillet, add a splash of milk, and as quickly as possible, stir it all around vigorously with a wooden spoon until moderately mixed up. Return the heat to medium and continue stirring, giving it a few seconds to set between stirs. Cook just until all the egg is barely set but still moist. This method means no extra mess in a bowl, and produces your standard fluffy scrambled eggs.
I sometimes mix it up by cooking some veggies or whatnot in the butter before adding in the eggs. A favorite is kielbasa: We sometimes pick up sandwiches from a barbecue place on the walk home for lunch, but they’re too big for me to eat all at once. I save my leftovers with their accompanying sauteed onions and peppers, dice it all up, and scramble it with some eggs and cheddar cheese for another day’s lunch.
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07.05.07
Posted in Breakfast, Cuisines, Eggs, Lunch, Mexican at 3:16 pm by julie
Lunch has never been an easy subject for me. I’m not a huge fan of sandwiches or salads; leftover soup is ideal, but not in this heat. And now that we’re going home for lunch every day to let the pup out for a stretch, I’ve also had to consider what Jeremy wants for lunches. So from time to time here, you’ll see posts about things that worked out well for lunches, as either a quick meal, one that can be prepped ahead of time, or one that can be reheated without much detriment. For today, the subject is migas.
I don’t want any grief about the definition of migas, which apparently is up for debate as either an egg dish or a soup, depending on what part of Texas or Mexico you live in. For my purposes here, it’s an egg and tortilla dish, but I didn’t use any sort of traditional recipe, just going on the general idea and fitting it to my tastes. All I cared about is that it was quick, filling, tasty, and used up the stale corn tortillas I had hanging around the fridge from making chicken enchiladas. The recipe below is generally what I did, but feel free to adjust on the fly, as I did. Also, I don’t tolerate spicy foods very well, so I kept this on the mild side.
Migas
2 corn tortillas, rather stale
2 T olive oil
1 T bacon fat (optional)
6 eggs
1/4 C mild chunky salsa, or to taste
3 green onions, sliced and whites kept separate from greens
1 clove garlic, minced
Sharp cheddar cheese for grating
Heat the olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium high heat. Meanwhile, cut the tortillas in half, then into triangles (I got 16 triangles from each tortilla). Drop the tortillas in the oil and fry them quickly until they begin to crisp up. Add the white parts of the green onions, the garlic and the bacon fat, and saute until they are tender.
Meanwhile, beat the eggs and salsa together until combined. Pour into the skillet and stir briskly to scramble, lowering heat somewhat if necessary. Add sliced green onion tops, reserving a few for garnish, and season to taste with salt and pepper. When eggs are cooked to desired degree, remove to plates and top with grated cheese and a sprinkle of green onion. Serves two.
Update 7/6/07: We made migas for the second time for lunch today (the first being sometime in the last week or so). I had run out of green onions, so I just subbed in some chopped sweet onion instead, and it was still very tasty. That was the last of our corn tortillas, though, so unless we start buying them just to make this dish (and maybe we should!), it may be a while before we get to make it again.
Update 8/17/07: We rarely have leftover—or for that matter, fresh—corn tortillas in our house, but I’ve been wanting more migas, so today for lunch I went ahead and made migas-less migas, basically salsified scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese. Frankly, it was almost as yummy as the tortilla-filled kind, so this variant will definitely find its way on the menu again.
Update 1/1/08: I made migas for lunch today with a stale multigrain wheat tortilla, and they did just fine in place of corn ones. Good to know.
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06.20.07
Posted in Cuisines, Eggs, Mediterranean at 11:57 am by julie
Well, I may have gotten started too late to participate in any of the End of Month Eggs on Toast Extravaganzas, but any time of month is good enough for an Eggs and Toast Extravaganza at our house. We have eggs whenever the fridge is looking empty and Jeremy wants some protein without waiting for a trip to the store or for a packet of frozen meat to thaw. And—who are we kidding?—sometimes eggs just sound better than that other stuff anyway.
I’m going to make a periodic running series of our egg adventures—though, admittedly, many of these meals are more comfort foods than culinary stretches—so I thought I would start things off with a bang, in a garlicky puddle of Greek yogurt.
Jeremy has been on a poached egg kick lately, so good thing my technique is improving. It’s really not as intimidating as it seems, provided you use the freshest eggs you can. I’ve deposited them on pan-roasted asparagus with Parmesan and balsamic reduction, braised Belgian endive with cream and prosciutto, fantastic hash browns from the Good Enough to Eat cookbook, and even on plain buttered toast when he wasn’t feeling so well. So when he asked for poached eggs again on Sunday, I scratched my head and tried to come up with something I hadn’t made before.
The answer was Turkish poached eggs with yogurt and spicy sage butter, a recipe introduced to me by Molly of Orangette several years back. It was one I mentally filed away to try sometime when I was feeling brave, because the plain yogurt made me nervous. I usually keep vanilla yogurt at home for snacks instead, and that works beautifully in desserts, but now we always have at least one tub of plain yogurt on hand also (sometimes in multiple varieties, since Jeremy likes Greek-style yogurt and we always have Nancy’s to supplement the puppy’s meals). While the eggs poached, I scraped the bottom of a container of plain Greek Gods yogurt and stirred it up with some salt and minced garlic, and spread it (a bit nervously, I admit) into rounds on two plates.
I then snipped and rinsed a few sage leaves from the garden, happily tossing them into the melted butter with a healthy sprinkle of my current favorite spice, smoked Spanish paprika. By the time I had some slices of lovely spinach-onion sourdough bread toasted and buttered, the eggs were ready, and the paprika-butter had started to brown a bit.
This was a fantastic meal. I can always tell when I’ve made something Jeremy really likes because he starts suggesting I should open a restaurant or bakery: dear man. In any case, the garlicky yogurt was perfect with the eggs, and topped with a drizzle of that melted butter, made everything taste really decadent. It was so wonderful that even I was compelled to sop up every bit on the plate with my toast, and I’m absolutely not the toast-sopping sort. This will definitely be one to keep in regular rotation, even with more mundane toast.
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06.13.07
Posted in Cuisines, Dinner, Eggs, Italian, Leftovers, Mexican, Pastas at 5:26 pm by julie
I know it’s been a few days since my last posting, and for those of you who may have been concerned—yes, we have still been eating. I made a few recipes I’ve already posted about, and a few that were new and fantastic but less than photogenic.
For instance, this weekend I made chicken enchiladas with the leftover roasted chicken. I’ve made it before, a few years ago, and we both really liked it. This time it just didn’t work out. I’m tempted to think that my oven is having temperature problems again, because it took much longer than expected to heat up, and the onions in the filling were still crunchy. Disappointing… guess I should have made another batch of white chicken chili.
I made some fantastic (but visually unappealing) omelets for lunch one day this weekend, using a recipe from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook that I’ve had my eye on for a while: Madeleine’s omelet with mustard croutons. Jeremy is usually quite specific about what he wants in his omelets, but this time he gave me carte blanche, so I ran right to that recipe and got to it. Judy Rodgers’ technique is of the fold-and-roll variety, which I’ve never used before. This particular recipe also called for 12 eggs, with the finished omelet divided between 4 plates. I didn’t have a pan large enough even for a half size, so I made 2 2-egg omelets in my little non-stick skillet, and that was good practice for the technique. I saved myself some angst and just garnished the finished omelets with grated cheese (good aged Gruyere to sub in for the recommended Beaufort) instead of trying to put it inside with the croutons. The latter were just fantastic: full of flavor and balanced between crisp and soft bits. We had a few extras that wouldn’t fit in the omelets, and they vanished off the baking sheet moments after Jeremy took his plate back to the kitchen. All in all, a delicious and unusual omelet. We’ll definitely be having them again whenever there are leftover chunks of bread floating around, so I’ll try and get a photo one of these days.
On Monday we had our favorite fusilli salsa di noci. (I was still working on using up that half-gallon of cream.) Very tasty as always, if a bit too garlicky… aged garlic cloves pack can quite a punch! We had our house salad to go with it, using toasted walnuts, apple slices, some Silver Falls goat cheese, and a cherry-white balsamic vinaigrette.
Yesterday, I made some linguine primavera in an effort to use up some asparagus and yet more cream. I didn’t really use a recipe, but threw in what I had on hand: sweet onion, carrots, garlic, celery hearts, rehydrated porcini mushrooms, that asparagus, and some frozen peas. I sauteed the first 5 elements with some olive oil, and the latter two went in with the pasta water at strategic points as the pasta cooked. When it was nearly ready, I reduced the mushroom soaking liquid with some white wine in the saute pan, and stirred in some cream and grana padano, then tossed the pasta and blanched veggies in with the rest, and that was that. Tasty, in a clean-the-fridge sort of way.
Tonight, Jeremy wasn’t feeling well, so he requested poached eggs on buttered toast. I tried to talk him into something more interesting, but he wouldn’t budge. Good thing I’m getting better at egg poaching. At least the toast was new: a local loaf of fragrant amaranth bread from LifeSource that we had pulled out of the freezer this morning.
The fridge is starting to look empty, though I still haven’t managed to use up all of the asparagus I got yet. Good thing it holds up so nicely in a glass of water… I hadn’t realized the bundle I picked up was some 2.5 lbs of asparagus! I’ve been holding off going back to the grocery store because we are supposed to be getting our new car any day now, but apparently I shouldn’t have been holding my breath. As long as it arrives in time for our anniversary, all will be well.
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