Ten Pounds of Winning

Pretty much goes without saying.  From one of my favs, Charlie Podrebarac.

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day

Southern Saturday with Virginia

While Superbowl Saturday may have found most of the country shopping and prepping their chip dips, their wings, pre-ordering their delivery pizza and stocking up on carpet cleaner, Virginia Willis was not convinced that her Southern Saturdays should be spent elbow deep in dip. Instead she found herself hungry, hungry for Breakfast. Be still my cholesterol-laden heart!
I adore breakfast. Eggs, bacon, pancakes, French Toast, Benedicts, I love it all. Apparently Virginia loves breakfast too because she offered up FIVE different recipes for this week's episode of Southern Saturday with Virginia. What the heck should I make? The Mini Country Ham Cheddar Biscuits are always a good choice but I've still got yeast rolls hanging around so that was a no. The Fried Apple Pies look great especially a recipe with dried apples but I think I'll save that for another day. That left the frittata, the baked eggs or the Dutch Baby Pancake. I settled on the pancake because I'd never made one before. And it's really easy.

Here's how easy it is, preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Melt half a stick (1/4 cup) of butter, put it in your black iron skillet and put that skillet in the oven. Mix together 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup all purpose flour, 2 large lightly beaten eggs and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Pour the mixture into the hot skillet with the melted butter and bake for 15 to 20 minutes until it gets all puffy. Once it comes out of the oven you can slice it up and top it with any sort of sweet treats like blackberry jam or sliced strawberries or you can just dust it with powdered sugar. Hot, savory and sweet all at once. It's a great way to start your day.

Of course, I couldn't just leave it at that. I mean the oven was on anyway, why not take advantage of it. I blame Virginia with her damned Baked Egg suggestions. So I decided to make muffin size pancakes in some of the cups of my muffin tin and in the other cups? Come on people.....it's ME! Bacon nests with a baked egg. Once they were all baked, I put the bacon/egg nest in the mini Dutch Baby Pancake and made my own freaky McMuffin.

Now it wasn't perfect, the muffin tins proved too small for the mini-pancakes if the bacon nest was going to fit better. I'm thinking a glass custard cup next time which will solve my other problem. My eggs cooked quicker than the pancakes but since they were in the same muffin pan, not much I could do. With the pancake in it's own cooking vessel, I can take the eggs out when they are done and leave the pancake to keep cooking.

Not that any of these issues kept me from eating this combo recipe. Because you know no bacon goes wasted in my house.

Amuse or Refuse?

Found myself browsing through Rick Tramanto's 2002 book, Amuse-Bouche, Little Bites of Delight Before the Meal Begins, at the library last week. I got sucked into the food porn photography by Tim Tucker enough to check it out. But after getting it home and really digging into it, I found myself wondering if I was really the audience they were trying to reach with this cookbook? I'm a home cook, not a chef. Sometimes when chefs undertake a cookbook endeavor they rely on what works best for their restaurant and try to translate that directly onto the printed page. However the general public at large can't always find French Green Lentils, Baby Purple Kohlrabi, or Bresaola in their humble grocery stores or farmer's markets. Still I couldn't be too picky, the amuse bouche course is a restaurant creation. You don't order an amuse, it's a mouth teaser given by the chef as a indicator of how a chef cooks and presents his food. No, I was hoping to find something that would be a fun appetizer to add to the culinary arsenal. I tried picking out something fairly easy and low key. Something that could be whipped up fairly quickly with ingredients I might have on hand. Yukon Gold Potato Chips with White Anchovy seemed to fit the bill.It's an easy recipe but you need one of these unless your knife skills are that good that you can consistantly cut paper thin slices of potatoes you'll need to make the chips. You don't need to spend a ton of money on a mandolin, this once was priced under twenty bucks.

You start by peeling a largish Yukon gold potato. Then you make your thin slices on your mandolin. Choose 5 or 6 similarly shaped slices and cut two slits in the middle. This is so you can thread your white anchovy through like a belt through a belt loop. As it just so happened, I had marinated white anchovies in my fridge. I found them at Whole Food's deli counter. (Unfortunately I'm not sure if this is the same as they used in the cookbook version. It just calls for white anchovies.) Once you've placed all the anchovies in their potato slots, brush all with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and white pepper. It's here that the recipe gets a little funky. It calls for putting the slices on parchment or silpat (on a cookie sheet) and then sandwiching with another layer of silpat or parchment and on top of that another cookie sheet in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes. At first I liked the idea of baking them but once the first 15 minutes had passed and I checked on their progress the chips looked like they had barely cooked. Gave them another 10 minutes. A little better but still very limp. I decided to jettison the top layer and let the chips cook unimpeded. Finally after another 10 minutes in the oven, the edges had browned up and they had finally achieved some firmness. They tasted OK, a little chewy but the anchovy totally overpowered the potato chip. Plus if you don't eat these immediately you really shouldn't eat them at all. Some things are fantastic hot and only hot. Now I'm not saying these aren't fantastic in Tramonto's restaurant, I bet they are although I also bet they deep fat fry them. There is that option in the cookbook I just wasn't in the mood to try it. I just wasn't really impressed with the results of this particular recipe. However you know I couldn't let this particular recipe pass without trying a little Baconization.Oh yeah, that helped.

While Tramonto's book is very pretty and a detailed look into how they developed these amuse bouches at their restaurant, I'd definitely check it out from your library first. If it connects more with you than it did with me I'm sure you could find space in your kitchen library to add it to your collection. It would also make a great gift for the restaurant chefs in your life.