Frittata

I know we've both posted about frittata, but this one is a little different for me. I saw it in Parade magazine in last Sunday's paper. It includes stale bread cubes, which give it a little French toastie personality, and it doesn't get watery the way it can with potatoes. I used one cup of bread cubes to six eggs. Delicious for a light dinner, and very good the next day as well.

Chard Tart with Pine Nuts

I remember you making chard pie when I was younger, Mom, and I got to thinking about it this week when I bought some tender, lovely Swiss chard. I didn't want something too eggy -- not a full-on quiche, but rather a light, creamy pie with lots of chard.

I used this crust recipe, which has become my favorite for both savory and sweet uses. It's pretty rich, but if you're going to go to the bother of making crust, why mess around?

I used the food processor this time, and it worked fine. I rolled out the dough, pressed it into a tart ring, brushed it with plenty of egg white, and put it in the fridge to chill.

For the filling, I sauteed in olive oil:

1 very small onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 big bunch Swiss chard (1 lb?), including stems, chopped

I let that cool slightly, then added it to a bowl in which I had beaten together:

3 whole eggs + the leftover white (the other leftover white was used to brush the dough)
3 oz cream cheese (I had no Parmesan, which is what I would have used; this gave it a nice mild smoothness.)
1/2 cup half and half, roughly
salt
pinch of nutmeg
lots of black pepper

I poured the filling into the tart shell -- it was very wet, another reason to make a rich crust -- and sprinkled the top with a handful of pine nuts. I baked it for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees.

As with most egg dishes, it was much better once it had cooled to room temperature. It was mild and clean-tasting, and the pine nuts seemed impossibly sweet, almost candied, against the dark green chard flavor.

Beet Pickled Eggs

I had only eaten one pickled egg before this. It was between undergrad and grad school, when my friend John was hanging out with some guys who met every week at a local bar to watch pro wrestling on the big screen. I went with them once, and one guy had pickled some eggs. He pulled a big warm jar out of a paper bag. I ate an egg. It was strange.

Now it's...what, 9 years later? A few months ago I saw a picture of a beet pickled egg, all purple and Easter-y and lovely, and I decided I would make a batch.

I poked through various recipes, thought about my own pickling past, and came up with this.

The Eggs

First, I hard-boiled a dozen eggs.

My eggs never seem to get that ugly blue discoloration between yolk and white. They used to when I was younger. I buy brown free-range eggs -- I suppose that could be a factor -- but it's more likely my standard method that makes the difference.

I put cold eggs in a pot of room temperature water and brought it to a boil over medium-high heat, uncovered. As soon as it boiled, I put the lid on and took the pot off the burner. I let it sit for about 8 minutes -- no longer -- and then took the eggs out and ran cold water over them and put them in a dry cool bowl immediatley into the fridge.

This method always seems to make perfect eggs.

I peeled them about 20 minutes later, as soon as they were cool.

The Pickling Mixture

I mixed the following ingredients and let them sit in a pan on the stove until the eggs were peeled:

• One small beet, roasted and peeled and sliced, left over from the previous night's dinner
• Two cups water
• Two cups vinegar
• One tablespoon sugar
• Two tablespoons salt
• Half teaspoon dry mustard
• Bay leaves
• One teaspoon brown mustard seed
• Several allspice berries
• One teaspoon dill seed
• Half teaspoon celery seed
• One teaspoon black pepper

I used a big glass jar with a hinged locking lid -- I love those. I put the eggs in it and brought the mixture to a boil on the stove, then poured it immediately over the eggs.

I got the jar cooled down as quickly as possible and put it in the fridge.

After three days, I ate an egg.

I loved it. Sweet and sour and pickly and mild -- really delicious.

I had to coax Lawson into trying one. After trying it, he said "I think that's something I'd have to be in the mood for."

Nobody else who's visited has wanted to try one, either. Pickled eggs are something they sell in rural convenience stores around here, all weird and yellow and bobbing around in massive jars next to the crock pot of boiled peanuts.

So I've been happily eating a pickled egg every few days. They're almost gone.

Look, a perfect dinner: vichyssoise, Heather's seeded sourdough, salad with Parmesan, and a few pickled things.

Not Yet Assembled Breakfast Burritos

I've been having intense cravings for breakfast burritos all week. I don't know why. On Monday they were quite strong, so I made some tortillas, but like all my tortillas they were too small for a big serious burrito and too thick to wrap happily around a bunch of filling.

This was my compromise: a plate of burrito fillings served with a basket of small tortillas.

The beans are just canned beans cooked down with a little olive oil, some chopped cilantro, a smashed garlic clove -- I cooked them until they were less wet. The potatoes were cubed, microwaved for about 5 minutes, and then sauteed in olive oil and salted. The eggs were soft-scrambled. The avocado and lime were sliced. And I served some habanero-carrot salsa on the side.

Mushroom-Swiss Tart

This was very good as impromptu dinners go. On Friday I really, really felt like cooking, but we had a strange assortment of things in the fridge -- no meat, lots of mushrooms -- and I was sick of frittatas and pasta dishes. Enter the mushroom tart.

The filling consisted of:

• an onion and a container of mushrooms, sauteed in olive oil and simmered with a little sherry
• three eggs
• parsley
• Amish Swiss cheese, cubed
• salt and pepper
  

For the crust, I used the recipe mentioned in this post. Here it is with my slight changes:

***
Super-Serious Crust

• 7 T unsalted butter, cold
  
• a pinch of salt, or more, depending on whether the recipe is savory or sweet
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (I used White Lily. This is a very good use for Southern flours.)
• 2 egg yolks
• 3-4 tbs cold water

Mix the flour and salt. Cut in the butter quickly with a fork and/or fingers. Add yolks and water and mix briefly to form a dough. Roll into a ball and chill for at least 1/2 hour. Roll out quickly on a floured board with a floured rolling pin. Fold into quarters to lift into tart pan, then unfold and shape as desired.

In this case there was a lot of dough, so I folded it way over to make a messy top crust for the tart.

***

One of the reasons the crust was so good was that I used butter from Happy Cow Creamery in Pelzer, SC. I've always wanted to buy their butter, but it comes in huge 2-pounds blocks with no measurement markings on the wrapper. Since Annie Postic told me I could freeze it, and since I got a kitchen scale for my birthday, I can now weigh the butter to measure it and keep it in the freezer so it won't go bad.



And such butter it is. It's got so much flavor -- on bread you need only the thinnest smear. I love it.

We had thin slices of the tart with a salad topped with a sort of diced red pepper vinaigrette/relish.

Shrimp Tortilla after Thanksgiving

I somehow managed to not take one single photograph through four days of eating, cooking, and talking about food with Lawson's relatives. We were all socked away in a house in North Carolina miles from anything. In a classic liberal-conservative/Target-Wal*Mart split, Lawson and I worked on the new trail we're cutting up there, while almost everyone else stayed inside or rode ATVs in a circle around the yard.

After all that eating, though, we needed light food yesterday. We saved some leftover shrimp from Saturday night's oyster roast and shrimp boil, so I made a tortilla espanola with them: an onion and four cloves of garlic, sauteed very slowly for about 40 minutes until golden, followed by a diced roasted red pepper, about 15 big cooked shrimp, a handful of parsley, 5 beaten eggs, and salt and pepper. I cooked it in the pan for a few minutes more, then browned the top.

Impromptu Sonoran Enchiladas

There was a bit of leftover tamale sauce in the fridge, a mediocre, tomato-enhanced batch I made a few weeks ago to go over the last of the 2007 Christmas tamales from the freezer. I used the rest of it to make some Sonoran enchiladas. I added some of Lawson's carrot-habanero salsa (the orange stuff) for heat and brighter flavor.

Sonoran enchiladas are a good thing to know how to make: instead of making a whole bunch of corn tortillas, or dealing with the flabby bland excuses for corn tortillas available in Columbia grocery stores, you just make a few Sonoran corn cakes and you can have homemade enchiladas.

My recipe varies. Sometimes I make them partially out of grits, which I soak first to soften; sometimes they're all cornmeal or masa harina. Here's the basic recipe, adapted from James Peyton:

1 1/2 cups masa harina or cornmeal
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 egg
up to 1 cup water

I don't measure very carefully. These can get too wet easily, so be careful with the water.

Form into 4 cakes. Pan fry over medium-high heat until browned. Set on paper towels. Assemble enchiladas.

This particular batch was part northern New Mexico, part southern Arizona, and part Central America: I topped the Sonoran cakes with chopped white onion, leftover Anasazi beans, a fried egg (all Four Corners/New Mexico traditions) and some white cheddar. Equal parts gringo-style red chile/tomato sauce and Belizean carrot-habanero sauce made this quite the ethnic blend. It was also a pretty good finger in the eye of the idea that there's some monolithic thing called Mexican Food.

Easiest Frittata

The oven is still broken. So I made a frittata out of a potato, an onion, rosemary, parsley, oregano, and four eggs. And lots of pepper.

I cooked the cubed potatoes separately in the microwave to soften them before browning them with the onions.

I usually use the broiler to brown the top, but with no oven, I had to flip the entire frittata to cook the other side. It worked, miraculously.

We ate it with some of Lawson's habanero-carrot salsa. He made a new batch this past week.

Sunny Side Up Salad

Attention: The best salad dressing is a sunny side up egg, sprinkled with white wine vinegar and salt and pepper, draped over a salad and then mixed up so the semi-cooked yolk emulsifies a little with the vinegar and forms an impromptu dressing. Best lunch ever.

French Omelet Brunch

For the last few years I've been using Julia Child's technique for French omelets, but only a few weeks ago did I discover that someone has uploaded this video excerpt from her show demonstrating how to do it.

This omelet contained Brie and fresh basil. I ate it with big funky local muscadine grapes, some buttered toast, and a few dedo di moça chiles from the garden. These chiles are quite mild and bell-pepper-like; they go with everything.

Homemade Pasta with Pesto and Green Beans

The pesto Lawson made over the weekend was so fresh and good and perfumey that I decided it deserved some homemade pasta. The combination of pesto, homemade pasta, and green beans is not untraditional (though I skipped the potatoes).

The pasta recipe (from both Marcella Hazan and Jack Bishop) was simple: 1 cup of flour and two eggs, mixed in a food processor and then kneaded by hand. I ended up adding a good bit more flour during the kneading and rolling, but stiff pasta dough is not a bad thing.

After reading Ms. Hazan's rant in More Classic Italian Cooking about how pasta machines are evil, I nonetheless pulled out Lawson's lovely old hand-cranked Atlas pasta machine and proceeded to make some fettucine. Here it is waiting to be cooked. The local eggs I used had vibrant, almost orange yolks, which made the raw pasta a lovely yellow.

We had it with the barest salad: red romaine, lemon juice, salt, olive oil, and pepper.

Day 1: Carolina Food Only

The Eat Carolina Local Food Challenge crept right up on me: starting today, for one week, I've agreed to eat only products grown and/or processed in North and South Carolina.

So I'm going to post my daily updates here.

I went to Rosewood Market yesterday and found myself in the odd position of worrying how I would get enough fat this week. I'd intended to buy some local butter, but the Happy Cow Creamery's butter only comes in giant quantities, like five pounds or something. I probably should have sprung for it and made a few cakes later this summer, but it just seemed excessive. Funny, considering I had no problem buying the gallon jug of olive oil from World Market a few months back.

On a semi-related note, here is my dog inspecting a large garden zucchini.

Anyway, here's what I ate today:

• coffee - Sumatra Mandheling, roasted in our backyard
• whole milk - Happy Cow Creamery, Pelzer, SC

• peach - SC grown, from Rosewood Market
• cornmeal mush made with Anson Mills blue grits, City of Columbia tap water, and Celtic Sea Salt

• French rolled omelet with eggs from Wil-Moore Farms, goat cheese from Split Creek Farm, and basil from our garden
• Tomatoes from our garden
• Cucumbers from our garden
• Beer - Thomas Creek Pilsner and Multi Grain Ale -- the former of which is TOTALLY FOUL. Seriously, do not drink the Thomas Creek Pilsner.

For the omelets, which need just a tiny smear of cooking fat, I ended up rendering a little 1/2" square piece of Caw Caw Creek bacon -- we got a deal and bought far too much of it a few months back, so I guess I'm all set for fat for the week after all.

Tomorrow's dinner will involve ground pork. First I have to get through lunch, though. I'm dreaming about the leftover cornmeal mush fried in bacon grease, with cherry tomatoes cut up on top. Maybe some chives scattered over the whole business.

Tricolor Frittata

You know, I've made a lot of decent food in the last week, and I have some pretty pictures and longer posts knocking around, but our frittata dinner tonight was so simple and right that I'm having a hard time thinking about other food.

Sometimes frittata is perfect. It's substantial without being heavy or bulky; it's vegetable- and protein-laden; it's room temperature and creamy and mild and great with wine. And it's therapeutic, like a relief from major meals.

I used almost all the vegetables we had left, and tomorrow I will go to the farmers market and grocery store. So it worked out on that count, too.

Quiche Rosé

I made a quiche last night with beet greens, artichoke hearts, and goat cheese. It was delicious, but the beets were really dye-filled and stained the whole underlayer of the quiche. Fortunately I had spread the sauteed greens in the shell and poured the quiche mixture over the top; if I'd mixed it all together first the whole thing would have been a lurid pink. As it was, it just bled when I cut into it, like some kind of Catholic miracle -- weeping statues and La Virgen de Guadalupe appearing on toast and the like. Stigmata Pie. I keep having to shoo pilgrims off my porch.

It started with this easy olive oil crust -- no rolling, no fanciness. I like oil crusts, but then again we're not much for fancy pie crusts in this family. Mix in a food processor:
- 1 and 1/3 cups all purpose or whole wheat flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt

Add and pulse for just a moment until dough comes together:
- 1/3 cup olive oil
- 1/4 cup milk

Press into a 9-inch pie tin. I like rustic-looking crusts, so I made mine pretty flared and irregular. Pierce all over with a fork and bake at 425 degrees for about 10 minutes.

Separate one egg, saving the white for the quiche filling, and smear the yolk all over the inside of the pie shell. Return to the oven for about a minute until set. This keeps the crust from getting soggy.

Saute a small bunch of Swiss chard, beet greens, spinach, or other green. Arrange in bottom of shell. Cut up a drained can of artichoke hearts and arrange them on top.

Whisk together:

- 4 eggs plus the extra white
- 1/2 cup half-and-half
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- a ton of black pepper

Add:
- 4 ounces of goat cheese, in chunks
- 2 or more tablespoons chopped parsley

Mix. Some of the goat cheese will melt into the egg mixture, and some will remain in small chunks, which is what you want.

Pour over vegetables in shell and bake for about 30 minutes. you may brown the top under the broiler at the end if you wish. Let cool. The longer it sits out of the oven, the better it will taste.

For those of you reading in South Carolina, check out this Columbia food blog. The Free Times recently put up a link to it next to the link that goes here. I have to warn you that it makes liberal use of the word "foodie," a word that makes it sound, in the words of Chris Onstadt, "like food is something we discovered in 1995. As though it were a novelty thing."), but otherwise is really nicely put together, with a big emphasis on locally grown foods. Anything that celebrates the Midlands of South Carolina as a distinct food region is a force for good. We need to work on that more.

Double Beets

Here's another light meal for this season when I seem to spend a lot of time recovering from eating or drinking too much.

- Beets, roasted and tossed with olive oil, salt, and the juice of one tangerine
- Large green beans, steamed and tossed with olive oil, salt, and tarragon (as suggested by Jack Bishop)
- A tortilla española containing onions, potatoes, the beet stems and tops, and Parmesan cheese, served at room temperature. I was worried the stems would dye the potatoes and eggs a nasty pink, but it wasn't too bad. Maybe the potatoes were a little rosy.

I make this kind of meal a lot, but this time around it was well seasoned and came together especially well.

Tortilla Española

Or frittata. Or omelet. Or kuku. It's pretty much the same thing around here: the best way to use up random vegetables and have a light dinner. I make Spanish omelets pretty regularly, often when we are recovering from something meat-laden the night before.

Most vegetables work well. Here are some of my favorite combinations:

- Swiss chard (leaves and stems) and potatoes
- young eggplant and basil
- spinach and assorted fresh herbs
- rosemary, garlic, potatoes, and onions

Really, though, anything goes. Zucchini is great. Asparagus is great. I almost always use an onion. I would probably stay away from the winter squashes and the lighter lettuces, but heck, I could be persuaded.

I use a nonstick 12" skillet for this, because it sticks horribly to non-nonstick cookware, especially if it contains potatoes. The skillet needs to have an oven-safe handle, because it spends a minute or two under the broiler.

First, cut up the vegetables. I cut onions into rings here because it looks pretty and adds texture. Most other big vegetables I cut into roughly 1" cubes. Asparagus is in 2" lengths. Leafy things are chopped. Garlic is minced.

Saute the vegetables in olive oil in the proper order and at the proper temperatures. I'm sorry I can't be more help than that, but it's going to matter whether you use potatoes (cook them first using medium-high heat so they form a skin, then remove from the pan and cook the onions) or garlic (add it last so it doesn't burn) or zucchini (saute for just a minute or two, and don't crowd the pan or it'll get watery).

Preheat the broiler.

Now, here's the key, I'm convinced: salt the vegetables to taste before you add the eggs.

Then turn the stove heat down to medium low and add:

- 6 to 8 eggs, beaten with 1 teaspoon salt
- any herbs you may be using

Stir to distribute the eggs and arrange the vegetables evenly. Top with:

- 1/4 cup grated Parmesan, if you like, or some other cheese (Swiss? As with the vegetables, anything goes.)
- grated black pepper

Cook for 3 to 6 minutes on the stove, until the middle is mostly set when you jiggle the pan. Then put it under the broiler for a minute or two until slightly brown.

I prefer my tortilla española at room temperature.

Egg in a Frame

Proof that you can make anything look pretentious by serving it with arugula:

I know I keep making posts about lunches, especially ones that require very little cooking, which is not exactly the point here. I guess I'm enjoying the scale of the meal -- small plates, short prep time, lighter ingredients. Lunch is a summer meal.

Hangover Breakfast

The day after Lawson and I threw a party at which we drank a lot of beer, we ate this restorative breakfast.

The omelet contained cheese and chives. And bacon is sometimes extremely necessary.

Closely Read Asparagus Bearnaise

You know the Deconstructed Menu Item conceit? I guess it's a few years old now. This is where a pretentious gourmet chef will serve, say, a Deconstructed Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich, which will be candied grapes, roasted sugarcane rolled in chopped peanuts, and sauteed wheatberry triangles, or something.

The idea is consistent comedy gold. I like to present Lawson with dishes like Deconstructed Spaghetti alla Carbonara (a box of uncooked spaghetti, a package of bacon, an unbroken egg) and Deconstructed Cat Vinaigrette (a bottle of vinegar, a bottle of olive oil, and the cat). The joke never, ever gets old.

All this is by way of introducing my dinner last night.

Lawson has been working absurd hours -- the contract he works under is up for rebid -- so he hasn't been around for dinner much lately. I believe that dinners cooked and eaten alone should be a little weird. (I think this comes from you, because we would always eat lighter, stranger dinners when Dad was out of town. Also, you once told me that when you were first married you just ate tortillas and cheese when he was gone.) Sometimes weird means mildly embarrassing comfort food, like pieces of cheddar cheese topped with powdered cumin. Sometimes weird means mismatched dishes: on Thursday I ate a spinach omelette accompanied by sauteed Swiss chard, because spinach and Swiss chard are two of my favorite things and I wanted them both. Generally I wouldn't serve two dark green leafy things at the same time, right? But mostly weird just means unbalanced, like one elaborately sauced vegetable and nothing else.

Anyway, yesterday I wasn't very hungry, but I wanted to eat the asparagus from the fridge. And I'd never made hollandaise or bearnaise sauce. I'm not sure I've even had them as an adult. You must have made hollandaise a few times when I was young, and that's the only time I've ever had it. So I wanted to try it, not least because of its reputation for difficulty.

But I was out of lemons. No citrus, period. So instead I invented this, which contains all the components of asparagus bearnaise but is infinitely more refined and witty. The recipe is doubled here, but you should halve it for solitary authenticity.

Steam until tender and arrange on two plates:
-One bunch asparagus

Top each plate with:
-One egg, fried, over medium
-Olive oil drippings from pan
-Salt
-Pepper
-Chopped fresh tarragon

Imagine:
-Lemon wedges

It was tasty.

Vegetarian Reaction

We had a four-pound pork stew last night in honor of the visiting aunts and uncles. That menu was: Italian Pork Stew; Grandma's scalloped potatoes with tomatoes and onions; Grandma's salad with apples, glazed pecans, and Gorgonzola; freshly baked whole wheat bread; and Kathy brought a rum cake.

The general porkiness of that sort of meal, however delicious, turns me into a vegetarian for several days afterwards. So tonight we had vaguely Persian things, including potato and egg kuku, Dad's collards with olives and lemon, bulgur and walnut pilaf, and tomato/herb relish. Very restorative.