Insert 'Egg' Pun Here..............

Egg-citing? Egg-specially delicious? Egg-stra super special (and somewhat delayed) springtime egg-themed blog post? Oh, I just can't do it! No more egg puns from now on, I mean it.

This time of year, I find myself thinking a lot about eggs, and not just the chocolate coated, caramel centered kind, either. Maybe it's a deep primal urge that strikes at springtime, relating everything my metaphorical gaze falls upon to the cycle of new life and rebirth. Baby lambs, tender green buds, all things ovoid, that sort of thing. Or maybe it's just the ever-present shelves of those damned aforementioned chocolate eggs in the grocery stores. Regardless, it's been an EGGSTRAVAGANZA (ouch, sorry! that one just slipped out!) over here lately, and I want to share a few egg secrets with you. I had initially meant to time this egg-themed post to coincide with Easter Sunday last week, but real life and deadlines stepped in for awhile, and anyway readers......is there ever really a bad time to talk about eggs??




So, we at the Orange & Salt household discovered something a few weeks ago that I can only describe as culinary gold, which seems pretty fitting since they are, in fact, golden. At least on the inside. What we found is a desert plant nursery in South Phoenix that also houses a small farmer's market stand indoors, where they sell cartons of some of the most beautiful eggs I've ever tasted. After bringing home the first carton of chicken eggs (in a delicately hued rainbow of blues, greens and browns) and demolishing them in record time via some very serious breakfasts and quiches, we were ready to move on up to the deluxe dozen of duck and turkey eggs, if for no other reason than curiosity. Have you ever eaten a turkey egg before? Neither had we.




The duck eggs were not much larger than the chicken eggs we'd eaten previously (although they themselves were fairly large, so that's not saying much), just slightly more elongated. The turkey eggs, however, were jumbo-sized footballs by comparison! A little intimidating to say the least, but it's also hard to resist anything so adorably freckled, so we dove right into those first. I had to try my first turkey egg solo, simply hardboiled with just the lightest sprinkling of sea salt crystals and fresh black pepper standing between me and (at least, what I hoped would be) fine, fine turkey egg goodness.

It's true, they're delicious. Really. There's a subtle difference between them and the more conventional chicken eggs I've eaten, a flavor that I really, really hesitate to call 'barnyard-y' because that sounds so unpleasant, but I can't quite put my finger on a better term for it, either. Maybe they're just richer? At any rate, far from being unpleasant, I actually think these taste better than their smaller brethren in that they seem to be missing that faint whiff of sulfur that hardboiled chicken eggs always seem to come with (the downside of eating eggs, which most egg lovers just usually pretend doesn't exist), which in my mind is a huge improvement. And speaking of huge--these eggs are! The yolk also seems a little bigger than you'd expect, proportionally speaking, which is a nice surprise. And of course any variety of farm fresh egg is going to have richer, deeper golden (almost reddish orange!) yolks compared to the pale, flabby specimens sold at the supermarket. Real, pastured farm eggs contain at least twice (often several times more) the beta carotene, Omega-3s and vitamins A, D and E of conventionally 'farmed' eggs. One turkey egg (six minutes for lightly hardboiled) is a filling breakfast indeed.

Once you get tired of eating straight-up boiled eggs (and I wouldn't blame you if it took awhile), you could move on to any number of things. The perfect plate of scrambled eggs, in my world, includes a handful of grated cheese and a sprinkling of fresh green parsley at the end. It's another simple way to enjoy the taste & most of all the shocking yellow color of these eggs. This is also the moment when I discovered that, in addition to being merely deeper in color than most egg yolks, turkey yolks are incredibly dense. When I first plunged in my fork to scramble these bad boys, it reacted almost like a ball of yellow caramel: dense, thick, sticky. It actually clung to my fork whenever I lifted it from the bowl! Amazing things, these turkey eggs.

A carton of eggs lying around in my fridge is always, always an invitation to make a quiche, so that's just what we did. This particular quiche actually combines 2 chicken eggs, 1 duck egg and 1 turkey egg with cheese, sauteed baby spinach, garlic and lightly caramelized onions.

Finally, when you're down to your very last egg, you can treat yourself to the meal we had for our own Easter dinner, a tasty lamb meatball concoction with a fresh, cool yogurt dressing.....see recipe below (it's also easy to double or triple these amounts if you're feeding more than two people). Now get yourself to the farmer's market and pick up some fresh eggs!

Lamb 'Egg' Meatballs with Mint-Yogurt Sauce

For the meatballs:

1 lb. ground lamb
1 whole egg, lightly beaten
3/4 C. bread crumbs
1 tsp. ground cumin
pinch of cinnamon
salt & pepper

For the yogurt sauce:

1 C. plain yogurt (thick, Greek-style yogurt would be excellent here)
3 T. finely chopped fresh mint (we might have used more than this, since I have an explosion of mint in my backyard garden at the moment and always feel the need to use it......just do what looks and tastes right to you)
1 tsp. honey
salt

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Combine all meatball ingredients in a bowl, mix very lightly by hand until the mixture is just combined. Beware over-mixing! It's a texture thing. I'm always tempted to pull out a wooden spoon or even the food processor at this point, but the result will be heavy, overly dense and homogenized little meatbombs, not juicy and tender lamb eggs, so beware. Trust me, your best utensils are often the ten digits at the ends of your hands, so wash up, take off your rings and get in there, okay?

Roll meat mixture into balls (makes about 12 meatballs) and, if you're cutesy like us, form gently into 'egg' shapes. Place on baking sheet. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until nicely browned.

While meatballs are baking, combine all yogurt ingredients in a small bowl (add salt to taste). Again, stir minimally, as too much stirring might cause your yogurt to get overly thin. Serve next to meatballs, dip and enjoy.

'Smitten' with Warm Mushroom and Arugula Salad........

It should come as no surprise that, as a food blogger, I read other food blogs. Clotilde's Chocolate & Zucchini arouses a little Parisian frisson every time I read a new entry (and you have to love a good ampersand), David Lebovitz always inspires, I have read the entire famed 'Julie/Julia Project' blog from virtual cover to cover, and Deb's smitten kitchen and Molly's Orangette very often make me actually laugh out loud. Even the venerable Judith Jones (she of discovering-Julia-Child fame) blogs, for God's sake, and the woman is in her mid-80s! There's a wealth of food bloggery out there for the taking, the reading, and the (pardon the inexcusable food pun) digesting. And yet I read somewhere that most people don't actually use the wonderful recipes they come across online via food blogs; most people are in it largely for the breathless thrill of food porn alone. Whatever takes your fancy, I've been guilty of the same in the past......but when we're backed up against the wall over here with no dinner ideas in sight, and our imaginations fail us, we turn to three possible sources: The Library, The Files, or The Blogs.

The Library, as the name suggests, refers to Mike's and my collection of cookbooks. No tidy, Dewey decimal'ed shelf of books is this, but rather a sprawling, uneven clutch of books whose epicenter is the far corner of our small kitchen. Hardcovers, paperbacks, large and small books and pamphlets of all kinds squat together, punctuated by the occasional corner of a white sheet of paper protruding from a book, on which might be a handscrawled recipe for cornbread from Mike's dad, or printed out instructions from Alton Brown on how to construct the perfect holiday turkey from all the way brining to roasting. A pickling cookbook sits next to one specifically for soup, a book of traditional Austrian recipes nestles between Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook and Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook, and even Julia Child and Martha Stewart manage to bunk decently together without any elbowing or girlish hair-pulling.

The Files, as they are so vaguely referred to, represent years' worth of pulled recipes from magazines of all sorts that long ago met their fate in the recycling bin. These include such venerable publications as the New York Times Sunday magazine, Food & Wine and Bon Appetit, but also Every Day with Rachel Ray (what can I say? She's had some good recipes) and even the now-defunct JANE magazine (R.I.P.). When I see a recipe I'm likely to try (or even one I'd like to think I'll get around to, you know, someday), I pull it for The Files. Don't let the name fool you. Much like The Library, The Files are no glossy, organized affair, but an unbound, messy, sliding stack of loose magazine pages that have occupied various spots in the house and occasionally gets lost (as it did a few weeks ago when we misplaced the whole stack somehow and were desperately searching for a certain treasured jerk chicken recipe that was certain the be in The Files.....if only we could have found them! Alas.). The Files currently occupy one corner of a low ottoman in the dining room, next to some back issues of the Times and empty boxes we are saving one at a time for our move. At least, I think.



Finally, we also sometimes turn to The Blogs, a category which includes all the blogs I listed above plus many, many others. And it was in turning to The Blogs this past Monday that I found this gem via smitten kitchen: Warm Mushroom Salad with Hazelnuts (original recipe can be found here). My heart went pitter-pat. Warm mushrooms! Hazelnuts! Peppery greens and slivers of sharp pecorino! I had to have it, exactly as Deb suggested, with a slice of crusty bread alongside it and a warm poached egg snuggled on top. I even baked a loaf of bread specifically to have some on hand to go with this salad.

After making a few substitutions (okay, I hesitate to say 'compromises'), the tale of the warm mushroom salad had a happy ending.....it was delicious! I used grated parmesan as the cheese, formerly-dried morels and baby portobellos instead of an assortment of fresh wild mushrooms, and pecans stood in for expensive hazelnuts (oh, for the day we move to Oregon, where the streets are paved with hazelnuts and fresh morels!), it's true. But once the runny golden yolk of the poached egg was pierced and spread silkily throughout the warm innards of the salad, I was hooked on the nutty, rich, crunchy flavors. A little compromise worked out just fine in this case. With crusty bread in hand, I wiped the plate clean, readers.

I'm easy like Sunday morning..........

Without a doubt, there are days around here when I wake up ready to tackle some new challenge in the Tricky Food arena: my first souffle (not so tricky, as it turns out), a complicated curry, a brand new cake with three kinds of flour, a page from Mastering the Art of French Cooking........there are days when this all seems like a great adventure and nothing could possibly go wrong! There are days, chez Orange & Salt, when we are just positively rarin' to go.

And then. Well. There are days when the morning alarm fails to go off, the dog needs to be walked, the deadlines need to be met, and the people need to be fed, period. Days like this call for recipes that can be eased into gently and fit as perfectly as an old, washing-softened pair of favorite blue jeans. Comforting, maybe even slightly forgiving, and ready to go in almost no time at all. Welcome to comfort cooking, Orange & Salt style.

It's not all soufflés and mousses around here, people! In fact, since we're both actively trying not to gain any weight (everyone's favorite New Year's resolution), Mike and I tend to fall back on the same marginally healthy meals quite often. Things on Bread is a popular category around here (broiled tomato bruschetta with mozzarella slices and fresh basil is our staple summer meal), as are Things Scrambled with Eggs, Things in a Bowl with Homemade Vinaigrette (otherwise known as 'salad,' although it looks different every single time), or Things Blended into Some Kind of Soup. Oh, I know you've been fooled lately by my fancy photos of pastries and homemade delicacies, but we certainly don't eat this way every day; the true fact is we're lazy folks just like everyone else who just want something good that hopefully isn't going to bloat us up to orca- or Macy's-parade-balloon-sized proportions over the long run! This is where our comfort recipes come very much in handy.



.........behold an entry from my personal favorite category, Things Scrambled with Eggs. Shown in this photo, 2 eggs scrambled with sauteed kale, garlic and red onion, dressed with a dollop of fire-roasted salsa and a sprinkling of white cheddar. Fold this charming mess into a whole wheat tortilla (hunt around at your supermarket for the kind without preservatives and extra flour additives...you have to eat them all within a few days, but they're so tasty that you'll want to!), and it's good, in my opinion, for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Done in five minutes.

There are about a million interesting way in which this could be modified, as well, which is what makes Things Scrambled with Eggs such an enjoyable category. Spinach substituted for kale would be great, of course. You could add a sprinkling of cilantro or parsley, a plop of yogurt and harissa, or swap the cheddar for crumbled feta or ricotta salata. This meal kind of begs to be taken in different directions: Mexican, Middle Eastern, Asian. It's a no-brainer, so play with your food.

Next is an important entry in the Things on Bread category! Shown above is an example of the instant flatbread we learned to make from none other than Jacques Pépin himself. It's nothing more than flour, water, baking soda, a pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil, but it's absolutely sublime. It's also a lifesaver when you're hungry and having nothing in the house but random ingredients that might be candidates for Things on Bread. Instant bread! Better than pizza! What could be better?

To make Jacques's flatbread, heat a 12" skillet to medium high with enough olive oil to generously coat the bottom. In a bowl, combine the following:

2 C. flour (I have used every kind of flour known to man for this, including wheat and soy flour. While they give perfectly respectable results, you might want to use regular all-purpose flour, at least the first time around)

1 T. baking soda
1 tsp. salt

1 1/2 C. water

Stir until everything is combined, the result should be something like a thick batter or very, very loose dough. Pour into hot pan and spread with the back of your spoon until bread more or less reaches the sides of the pan and could be called, you know, 'flat.' Continue cooking on one side until bread starts to form attractive little brown blisters on the side facing down (see photo), 5-7 minutes. Drizzle the side facing up with a little extra olive oil. Flip it. If the thought of flipping it in one smooth motion like Jacques or Julia fills you with unholy terror (and who can blame you?), use a spatula, but be warned: This bread is fragile! Think of it as more like a giant pancake or biscuit which, at its essence, it is. It's liable to crack apart on you if you hesitate, so whatever your method, be quick with the flipping.

This recipe in its above incarnation is actually a Frankensteined version of two Jacques recipes wedged into one (in case it hasn't become obvious by this point, we are big Jacques disciples around here, in fact, my husband even credits the man with having taught his adolescent self to cook in the first place! Through the power of television, that is, alas, not in person. Jacques, call us!). His original recipe for 'Smoked Salmon Pizza' used storebought lavash bread as a base, which is also quite tasty but not as sturdy as you might hope. We knew when we
found his flatbread recipe that we had a winner!

To make this 'pizza,' layer one finished flatbread with a thin smear of sour cream (Greek yogurt might also be nice), thinly sliced red onions (raw or pre-marinated in a little red wine vinegar), smoked salmon pieces, capers (it's obvious the grocery budget was running a little low this particular week, because in the photos we actually have finely chopped green olives standing in for pricey capers. Both are good, the main point is the hint of salt.) and plenty of freshly ground black pepper.

As with all of our comfort recipes, this one has appeared on our table with endless variations. The same way you can pair a different top every day with those favorite old blue jeans and come up with a thousand 'new' outfits, comfort foods are by their very design easy to fool around with and recombine in subtle new ways. The above entry in the Things on Bread category is also especially good under a thick green blanket of chopped baby arugula, or with a sprinkling of fresh dill. One ambitious evening, faced with a little leftover roast chicken, a tomato, and half a ball of mozzarella, we even made something more closely resembling a traditional pizza. It was delicious, and best of all, it was easy. Just like Sunday morning. Or any time at all.

Another unfortunate side effect of Hong Kong...........

.......is my continued craving for sweet, sweet Cantonese egg tarts. I've never had anything quite like these before our trip to Hong Kong, but it's clear we were made for each other. Do not adjust your monitors--that supernaturally dense, rich sticky yellowness, that melted-yellow-crayons-in-a-pie-crust appearance that shouldn't be appetizing but somehow is--that really is how they are supposed to look. I discovered these at our favorite bakery two blocks from the hotel we were staying in and, like I said, promptly fell in love. At $2 Hong Kong (about 25 cents) each, it wasn't hard to convince myself to get one for breakfast...or lunch....or dinner........or a midnight snack.............

Contrary to their super-yellow appearance, there is no artificial coloring in these whatsoever. That somewhat scary hue is due to the very same thing that gives them their rich, sticky egginess: a custard rich in egg yolks. You know how farmer's market eggs always have those carrot-orange yolks compared to the plain yellow of supermarket yolks? Well these, I have to admit, were made using ordinary supermarket eggs...I'd love to try them with those velvety orange yolks I've picked up at the farmer's market, just to see how vivid I can get these tarts! Will keep you posted.

Some egg tart recipes I've seen call for evaporated milk, and you're welcome to try them, but I don't tend to keep evaporated milk on hand in the kitchen, and I didn't feel like making a special trip to the grocery store. I do, however, usually have milk or cream and sugar, and I had great success with this recipe. I should also point out that the goal here is to cook the custard gently without browning the top (this preserves that beautiful yellow color.....for Portuguese/Macanese-style egg tarts with browned tops, try Rasa Malaysia's excellent version) and most importantly, without superheating the custard so that it puffs up and then--NOO!!--explodes. Since the custard bakes at a relatively low 300 degrees, this should be no problem. Just trying to scare you. Ha.

For the tart shells: I always use Martha Stewart's classic Pâte Brisée recipe. All hail Martha. Press a small amount into mini-tart pans to form 6 tart shells. Makes about 6 mini tart shells.

For the custard filling:

1.5 C whole milk (at room temperature)

2 whole eggs plus 3 egg yolks (at room temperature)

1/3 C sugar

1/4/ tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly beat all egg ingredients and press through a mesh strainer to remove any solid bits. Add milk and beat quickly by hand or in electric mixer on medium-ish speed for about a minute. Add sugar and vanilla, beat for another minute and let sit for ten minutes. Pre-bake tart shells in tart pans for a few minutes until pastry begins to stiffen and just barely turn brown. Remove and lower heat to 300 degrees. Returning to custard mixture, skim off any foam resulting from the beating, and pour custard mixture into into tart shells. Bake at 300 degrees for about 15 minutes, or until custard mixture has set (you can test this by jiggling the tart pans slightly, the custard shouldn't move). Remove, let cool, enjoy for breakfast...or lunch......or dinner......or a midnight snack............

(Originally posted on 8/11/09)

Thoughts from the Late-Night Chef..............So, what do you do when you've just come home from watching 'Julie & Julia' (fabulous, by the way) at ten at night, and you're coming down with a bit of a head cold and your beloved (also coming down with what is most likely the same head cold) turns to you and says.....'I'm hungry.' You pause and say, 'I'm hungry, too.' What do you do?



.......You make Oeufs en Cocotte à la Julia! Mostly because it's what you had in the fridge (three eggs, a splash of cream, some leftover gruyère and a handful of parsley, baked gently in ramekins in a water bath in a dutch oven), and because it's the best thing you can eat at ten-thirty at night. We ate them while streaming old episodes online of 'The French Chef' and went to bed with happy bellies.

P.S. - dork that I am, I actually had a Julia dream last night. She turned out to be my real paternal grandmother, and was very wise and raucously funny. Good dream, dorky girl. ;-P