Fifty-second Post ~ "Nest Egg" à la Accidental Chef

I got my Food Network magazine in the mail yesterday, and was thrilled to see that it features 50 recipes for eggs. Eggs are pretty much my mainstay for one of those middle-of-the-day "I need to wolf something down quickly before I leave" kinds of meals. So I was psyched.

On the cover is something called a "nest egg" and it looked yummy and easy enough to do - toast a piece of bread, cut out a hole, crack an egg into the hole, cover and cook - but I was wondering... where's the punched out hole? And couldn't we add SOMETHING else for a little flavor?

So I offer you the Nest Egg à la Accidental Chef - well, actually, two of them...

Here's what you'll need for this afternoon's pre-class snack.

~ One piece of bread

~ Butter

~ One egg

~ Fresh thyme (I imagine many other fresh herbs would be just as yummy, but thyme is my favorite for this kind of thing - fresh, lovely taste, no chopping...)

~ Coarse-ground salt

~ Persistence

After I made this the first time, I was surprised at how much resistance the spatula gave me as I tried to get it out of the pan. Then I finally succeeded in lifting it up, only to see that the underside was black. No scraping in the WORLD would have saved it. It was black half-way up the bread. I'm lucky I didn't burn down my kitchen.

Well, not really, but you can indulge me in my fears.

So I took another stab at it, and was successful, although the bread was still a bit crisp on the bottom. The method I thought of half-way through probably would have been best implemented earlier on...

Butter both sides of a piece of bread (potato bread for me, naturally). Get everything ready: prep the thyme (1-2 sprigs) and crack the egg into a prep bowl.

Start the bread grilling in a stick-free pan. Watch it like a hawk. Only grill it so that it is JUST starting to look golden. Take it off the pan and use a cookie cutter to cut a pretty hole out of the middle. I used a flower. It's actually the only cookie cutter I own, so that's the reason for that.

Set the flower aside and put the bread back into the pan. Carefully drop the egg right into the hole. Scatter the thyme over it and grind on some salt. Cover. Wait until the egg sets. And wait. And wait. And pray your bread doesn't burn.

:: PAUSE ::

When I was little, my mom had this neat technique for making bagels so that they were crispy yet not dry. She would slice and butter them, grill them on a griddle, then just as they were nearly done, she'd drop about a tablespoon or two of water into the griddle and slap on a lid. It would hiss like crazy, and it always intimidated me a little. But the steam would cook the bagels while the grilled side remained crispy and perfect. It was a neat little technique, and the hissing pan made me remember it. So I dropped in a little water and slapped the cover back on.

:: UNPAUSE ::

Eureka! The steam set the egg in seconds, and the toast remained unburnt. As I said, I'd go ahead and do that right off the bat before putting the lid on.

Third time's the charm, right?

I had this with my mandatory pre-class cup of coffee.

Here's to the love of good food and learning new (and recalling old!) techniques!

AL

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The blogger is not an experienced chef. She takes no responsibility for the quality of the meals prepared while following her advice. Use your own judgment regarding cooking times and proper food handling.

First Post: Mediterranean Supper

So this is my first ever blog, and my first ever post, so I guess I could say I'm new at this. I don't think that a decade-plus of "lurking" makes me any kind of expert, but here goes.

I've decided to start a blog for anyone who is interested, and my topic is food and wine. I'm a novice, by the way - hence the name "Accidental Chef" - but I am taking both cooking and wine as a serious set of hobbies, ones that I can say I thoroughly enjoy researching and studying!

Up until about a year ago, I thought that gourmet cooking was a sort of witchcraft that took place over double boilers and open flames, with incantations muttered in French, and thoroughly secretive to the outside world.

Then I discovered my own magic spell. Repeat after me: GOOGLE.

Right. I take the viable ingredients in my fridge (as a 20-something singleton, that can vary greatly) and Google them. I see what other people have done with the ingredients, and then I "make it my own." And by that I mean substitute anything that I don't have on hand, and muddle up the methods, and basically create my own dish out of a semblance of order that some might call a recipe.

Take tonight for instance. It's nearing 11:00, I haven't had dinner yet, I'm two-thirds of the way though analysing Stevenson & Greenberg, and I decide that I need to use up the Wegman's cheese flight in my fridge. (For those of you who don't know, Wegmans offers a "Cheese Flight" of small servings of 3-4 cheeses for singletons with a taste for dairy to enjoy). I quickly learned (via Google) that goat cheese, red peppers, eggs and oregano can be combined. So I do the following:

Heat olive oil in a small pan.
Sprinkle oregano into oil.
Throw some sliced veggies (anything from a previous meal or take out would do) into the oil. I had sliced bell peppers and yellow squash on hand, so I started that sizzlin'.
In a bowl, beat three eggs with a little milk.
Pepper the veggies in the pan, 'cause that seems like a good thing to do
Assuming that you're a slow egg-beating-person, your veggies are sizzling merrily by now. Pour the egg mixture into the pan.
Let sizzle for a bit, then crumble Wegman's herbed goat cheese on top. Use as much as you like. Lick your fingers off when you're done.

~PAUSE~

Here's the thing. This was supposed to be a special dish that was like an omelet, minus the pesky flipping part. It was served on an ocean liner in the 1940s and was said to be rather glamourous. Here's where things went wrong.

Know this, brave reader: I have a history of miscommunicating with eggs. My over-easies tend to turn out over-violent. This was supposed to turn into a flat, sizzling, Mediterranean specialty. Mine turned into a perfect version of that, but with a frustratingly undercooking middle. So I attempted the pesky omlet flip. The whole thing split down the seam. So I decided that the eggs were attempting to communicate to me that they wanted to be scrambled, so I decided to listen.

~UNPAUSE~

Scramble the eggs. It's what they want.
Hack them up a bit in the pan. Savor the smell of the cheese, oregano and peppers.

When it looks like it's cooked (it is by now, trust me) transfer the whole thing into a bowl. Instead of a Mediterannean specialty served on a plate with a garnish of parsley, you have a bowl full of Mediterranean goodness.

I paired this meal with a glass of Catawba and Concord Rose (Vetter Vineyards makes Cracker Ridge Rose - I'm a long-time fan). It's what I had on hand, and I thought the salt from the goat cheese would complement it. It did. The herbs and salt brought out the fruity sweetness of the wine, making it jammy, but not cloyingly sweet. Think strawberry jam on toast, mopping up egg yolk.

All in all, it was a good dinner. Not the prettiest in terms of presentation, but hey - it sure was delicious. And it gave me the energy and motivation to decide to start this blog. Hope you enjoy it, and that the posts to come bring you culinary enjoyment.

Yours in the love of food and wine,
AL

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* The blogger is not an experienced chef. She takes no responsibility for the quality of the meals prepared while following her advice. Use your own judgment regarding cooking times and proper food handling.