Food on Friday :: Ode to Omelettes

We eat quite a number of omelettes in this house.

It hasn’t always been that way. I used to be terrified of making them and only pulled out my recipe during weekends when we had company. And really, who isn’t scared of making a fool out of themselves in front of others and who isn’t terrified that the eggs won’t stick and make a mess out of your lovingly prepared masterpiece and causing the aforementioned fool-making/feeling behavior?

The reality is, omelettes are a humble food, perfectly suited for those moments when you need something to eat, have tons of leftovers you’re not sure what to do with, and don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen. If you’re really short on time and patience there is nothing quite so satisfying as a warm cheese omelette whipped up in less than ten minutes. And while everyone is familiar with the lovely “Western” omelette of ham, cheese, peppers, and onions, two eggs slightly whipped make the perfect envelope for almost anything you have in your fridge. It’s incredibly freeing to think of omelettes as “only scrambled eggs with stuff inside” which is really what they are. Who cares that it’s folded half instead of perfect thirds, or if it breaks a little in the center, or there are holes here and there? It’s scrambled eggs with stuff in the middle! It will be delicious! And if not, start over again; you’ll have another, better version in five minutes or less.

I am not a pro by any means, so don’t think this is something that is beyond your capabilities. I will offer a few tips that have helped me out ::

• Use a non-stick pan that’s not scratched or beaten up
• Take the time to heat-up your fillings, whatever they may be, well, except for the cheese as that’s just messy
• Get everything set up ahead of time because the eggs cook quickly
• Two eggs, beaten lightly (streaks are just fine!) with salt and pepper, added to melted butter in a low-heated pan is all you need
• Once the edges of the eggs start to set ever-so-slightly, push them toward the center and let the rest of the runny egg flow to the edges
• Place your fillings on one half of your eggs now, and allow the eggs to set
• Let the whole omelette slide off your pan and then gentle flip the last empty half over the fillings
• Sprinkle with a bit of chopped herbs

I like to heat the plates up in the microwave to keep the eggs warm just a bit longer. It’s easy to do, but not at all necessary. I place a damp paper towel on top of each pate before stacking the next, then run it for three minutes or so. You don’t want the plates too hot to handle, and three minutes in our microwave gets them to just the perfect temperature. As an added bonus, your plates are all ready to go, which is always always the last thing I scramble for once I realize the first omelette is done.

And really, many times the omelettes are eaten faster than they can cool, so there’s another strike against wasting the microwave energy!

We’ve had omelettes filled with leftover greens; omelettes made from butter braised radishes straight from the garden; and although this one is super fancy and qualifies as “company food” last week we had omelettes made from leftover lobster and potatoes with a touch of raclette cheese, this one right here below…

…which I almost forgot to take a picture of before I demolished it entirely.

We’ve had a slight snag in omelette making recently, when one of our children was diagnosed with a bit of an egg allergy, and I have to admit it curtailed many a quick dinner plan for us. Recently, I realized that I could substitue a quick crepe instead of the scrambled eggs, which has made it a great deal easier to pull together an super fast meal for us all.

So, yes, omelettes and me are back on again, and I couldn’t be happier! I’d love to hear what kind of omelettes you’re making!

Food on Friday :: More From Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem

I am possibly, maybe, slightly obsessed with the food from Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem. It all seems so fresh and creative and beautiful and, well, alive. Not only are the recipes undeniably tasty, but I feel so healthy and good after eating them, these two especially.

The Swiss Chard with Tahini, Yogurt, Buttered Pine Nuts is quick, easy, and my favorite meal for the past week. I’m on my third batch. The yogurt tahini sauce is lovely, but a nice dollop of labne, ever so slightly thinned with water, is also beautiful.

This is going to be my go-to salad recipe for the remainder of the winter. We’ve made the Roasted Cauliflower & Hazelnut Salad several times now, although here you see it with roasted Brussel Sprouts. It’s nearly impossible to decide which one is better. With whole leaf parsley, crispy celery, and pomegranate (which plays amazing well off of the hazelnuts), and a lovely wisp of dressing including maple syrup (just a touch!), sherry vinegar allspice, and cinnamon, this salad is somehow simultaneously hearty and refreshing, a perfect foil for heavy holiday fare. On night’s when we want to make it a touch more substantial, we add a few smoked mackerel or sardines.

I’m on my last little bit of chard, and I have another head of cauliflower in the fridge, so I’ll be covered for the weekend at least. Then I suppose I should try another recipe or two.

Tea Time Gets an Upgrade

It’s been nearly eight weeks since the kids started school, and I think I can finally say that we’re back into the swing of things. I believed it was going to take a few more weeks before I could say that we all had adjusted, but minus a few hiccups here and there, I’m willing to concede that we’re back on schedule, we’ve regained our rhythm.

I think I have tea time to thank for that.

During the break, tea time fell by the wayside as we visited family, swam at the shore, collected rays of sunshine, dug in our garden, and drank in all that sweet summer had to offer. No one wanted to sit and sip while there were butterflies to catch, and I wasn’t about to stand over the stove supervising kettles to boil.

Come September, tea time rolled gently back into our schedule along with drop-offs and pick-ups and homework and earlier bedtimes in the shortening days. This year we’ve added a few upgrades; we now use the fancy cups and saucers as well as the silver-leafed plates for our cookies. I was surprised at the small number of times I’ve had to remind them to be gentle and careful; so far we’ve avoided any casualty-inducing catastrophes.

Although we’re never 100% successful maintaining the schedule over the weekend, it has been fun introducing other family members and friends to our little ritual. Sometimes having company means a trip to the local cupcake hotspot for a special treat, baking being an activity that still remains a bit beyond my abilities.

Who needs to fret and slave away over ingredients and the oven when you could help such awesome local businesses!

I still try occasionally though. And even if I forget an ingredient or two (or maybe even three), sometimes the results are still edible.

And now that there are a few boxes of cookies stashed in the pantry, even those regular baking disasters haven’t been so catastrophic.

Sure wish it was as easy to upgrade the baking skills as it’s been to add a little flair to the tea time table. But I guess you really can’t have it all.

Food on Friday :: Fresh Caught Squid

We had in our possession a gift certificate that was burning the proverbial hole in my pocket. Luckily, I noticed that my cookbook shelves had a few empty spots in need of filling, so fill them I did.

I have to admit that there are times that I have purchased a few new highly blogged recipe books that didn’t quite measure up to the hype. However, none of these book suffer from that particular malady; they have all lit that flame of inspiration I was missing for a while and I’m itching to get into the kitchen and give a few new recipes the old college try.

I started with a saffron chicken & herb salad from Ottolenghi’s new book Jerusalem, which did not disappoint.

I did, however, make a substitution…

Fresh, local-caught squid, right off of our very own coast.

A few weeks ago we found out about a local Seafood Exchange, similar to a CSA but  supporting our local fisheries and folk. It has been incredible, and we’re going to do it again come November when our current share expires. The selections this particular day were :: squid, flounder, whiting, cod, and something else I can’t remember. I think it’s obvious what I chose.

One of the more interesting techniques in this particular recipe was taking an orange, removing the top and bottom, simmering the slices in honey, vinegar, saffron, and water for an hour, then pulsing it in the processor to make a paste. Although an hour seemed a bit long, by the time I shaved the fennel, washed, picked, and tore the herbs, as well as prepared and cooked the squid, it was done and ready to be thrown in the food processor.

The husband does not really care for squid, which is too bad because it only took seconds to cook, but he did finish his entire bowl.

As did I.

And although I was sad that he mostly doesn’t really love squid, I was more than happy to demolish the leftovers the next day.

Wonder how it tastes with chicken…

Food on Friday :: Apple Cider Soup

Today was a blustery Autumn-y day… absolutely perfect for soup. So soup was had.

We’ve reached that time of year when it becomes more difficult to take pictures with natural light, since the days are getting shorter (and soon the end of daylight savings… Eek!) but it seems a small price to pay for soup weather. The wind has been blowing quite awesomely tonight so I’m hoping tomorrow we’ll see some big rollers washing over our sea-bound lighthouse, a favorite Fall activity.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes… soup weather.

The thing I love about soup is just how easy it is to make. Throw a few things together in a pot, add some chicken stock, a few herbs, a little time, and a blender, and there ya have it! Soup. It’s a great way to get the kids to eat some vegetables, especially when I haul out the ole Make-It-Yourself trick. A small bowl of soup, a few fun topping (popcorn, home made croutons, apple-celery hash, and bacon!), and there my kids are, eating vegetables they would normally not touch and even calling it delicious. Such is the power of the Make-It-Yourself (and Bacon) Magic.

It also helps that the soup becomes a convenient dip for crackers or bread. It’s taken years of training, but my kids finally see the benefit of dip.

As an added bonus, many soups are quite tasty for lunch the next day, when the light is much better for nice pics!

I don’t have an official recipe for this yet, as I need to work out a few measurments kinks, but this is a close approximation ::

:: A Close Approximation of An Apple Cider Soup Recipe ::

1/2 lbs carrots, peeled and sliced into rounds (I used my food processor)
2 fennel bulbs sliced into 1″ cubes (1″-ish… fennel isn’t square)
2 TBS grated ginger
4 TBS olive oil
1 tsp salt
1/2 c hazelnut meal (or just toast, peel, and grind your own hazelnuts… OK that’s crazy.. also the amount might be closer to a cup… I have to test this out)
4 c chicken stock or water
3 c apple cider
2 TBS lemon juice
Walnut Oil

In the bottom of heavy bottomed pot, heat olive oil over med heat, add carrots, fennel, and ginger, and salt, and gently sweat until the carrots darken, and fennels softens, approximately 15 minutes. A touch of browning is fine. To this mixture add the hazelnut meal and toast for 5 minutes being careful to not allow the meal to scorch, then add the chicken stock and 1 cup of the apple cider. Bring heat to high until soup begins to boil, then lower heat to a slow simmer, covered for at least one hour, although the more time you allow this to slowly cook, the better the results. After an appropriate to your family amount of time (are the children biting your ankles? Time’s up!), transfer contents in small batches to a blender, cover with a towel you don’t really care about, and blend as long as is effective, returning all creamy, dreamy, carroty sludge to the pot for a bit more cooking. Add the remaining 2 c apple cider, and lemon juice, simmer for a few more minutes (or longer if you prefer) and adjust seasoning to taste. Serve in a nice white bowl, with croutons, apple-celery hash, and bacon. Add more bacon if you live with carnivores that complain when there isn’t enough meat. Drizzle a touch of Walnut Oil around the centered garnish. Do a little dance. Pro-tip :: This soup gets better with a nice long rest in the fridge! Pro-tip The Second :: Cut the bacon into small little strips and cook in a cast-iron pan low and slow-like. Pro-tip The Third :: This soup is “rustic” which is a fancy, hoitey-toitey way of saying NOT STRAINED. Strain if you’re fancy, or add more bacon.

Apple-Celery Hash
1 Granny Smith Apple
2 stalks celery

Peel and chop apple into the smallest pieces you can stand. Same with the celery. Take the pan that fried the bacon, dump out the rendered fat, but don’t wipe, throw in the apples and celery with a bit of salt and pepper over med-low heat, let sit for a few minutes to brown up on one side (resist the urge to constantly move it around), toss a bit, repeat until apples are nicely brownish. Then toss it into the middle of your soup.

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Pick a Peck of Pickles

Four weeks ago, I ran into the farmer’s market and grabbed a whole lot of pickling cucumbers. I had a fresh cukes, some dill, garlic, salt, and most importantly, a gorgeous crock.

A few years ago I tried a recipe for crock pickles that used cider vinegar. After carefully tending to them for a five or six weeks, we were all giddy with anticipation… and sorely disappointed. They were terrible. The cider vinegar seemed all wrong, harsh, even bitter. So I was a teeny bit trepidatious when setting up my lacto ferment with the baby cukes this time around.

Have you heard of half sour pickles? You might know them as barrel dills or deli style pickles. They aren’t actually “pickled” per se, but are fermented. The cukes, other flavoring ingredients (peppercorns, garlic, and dill head), and grape leaves (the tannins help retain crispness) are placed in a water tight container, covered with a salt solution which prevents bacterial growth that will lead to spoilage, and allowed to ferment with the naturally occurring lactobaccili, which turns the vegetable flesh into a tangy, slightly salty treat. It is the same method used to produce sauerkraut.

Here you can see the cukes are contained under a glass pie plate and a glass jar filled with the brine solution. You can use food-grade plastics, but glass is non-reactive and  leaves me with no worries that anything may be leaching into my brine. Of course, you have to be super careful with glass; if it should break into your crock, well, you’ll have to throw the entire batch out.

I check on them almost daily, or at least every three or four days. There is some surface mold to deal with, but otherwise they are pretty low maintenance. You just have to make sure the cucumbers stay under the brine (air is the enemy of lacto ferments!). Finally, after four or five weeks, mine are ready. This week, I have to place them in clean jars with new brine, give a bunch away to neighbors, and place what’s left in the fridge.

I might add that these pickles, along with a nice cold beer, make an excellent dinner! For me anyway… the kids get cereal… and milk.

Worth Waiting For

Last week all six of us came down with a virus which kept our 5 year old out of his first two days of school and our 7 year old home early on a Friday. I know, I know… the number of viruses that run through our home is not really news worthy. I’ve gotta tell you, I’m sick of being sick. I need our immune systems to step up a bit. I’ve got stuff to do… you know, like write a few blog posts. My mom gets antsy if I don’t get a few posts up a week.

Last week my husband brought home a gorgeous side of king salmon. And even though I felt like death warmed over, I dragged myself downstairs to trim it up, remove the pin bones, and set it in a apricot, fennel, Pernod cure. This weekend we absolutely devoured it. De-VOURED. We couldn’t stop eating it.

The recipe isn’t mine, it’s from Sondra Bernstein’s book The Girl and The Fig, which incidentally, was one of my favorite restaurants in Sonoma. It’s pretty simple. Take some dried apricots, soak them in Pernod, grind them in the food processor with a few fennel fronds, add salt, sugar, and pink peppercorns, smother the filet with the paste, cover it in a clean tea towel or cheesecloth, put it under weight in the fridge and let it alone for a few days.

I have a few things to show you, so it should be a “post-ful.” Hopefully, Mom, it will be  worth the wait.

A Garden Dinner Disaster

A few short hours ago, the fam and I arrived back home safely from a quick trip back to Pennsylvania. Since I did all the driving, once we walked through the door and got the kids some cereal (they only get cereal for dinner when they’ve been really, really good!), Daddy was in charge while I got dinner together. And even though I considered grabbing us both a bowl and a spoon, after walking out back to check on the garden, I realized dinner was at my fingertips.

Beets, cukes, chives, lemon balm, and thai basil, all ready for some dressing-up. I would like to take credit for the cherry tomatoes, but I can’t as those are from my father’s little backyard plot; my tomatoes aren’t quite ready yet. I am starting to wonder if I might have a case of late summer tomato blight, but I’m not sure that their current condition wasn’t brought about by an unfortunate lack of watering while we were gone. Oh dear.

As I lovingly washed my veggies, then sliced into the cucumber, I thought I could whip up a Thai/Vietnamese summer noodle dish that would highlight the beet greens, herbs, and veg… it would also be quick and require little more stove time that boiling a pot of water. Done!

So I grabbed the fish sauce, limes, garlic, sugar, and chili sauce (I’m plumb out of fresh chilies)…

Soaked, rinsed, and distributed the noodles…

Juilenned, chiffonaded, and dressed the greens and herbs on top of the tomatoes and cukes, which were resting ever so gently above the rice noodles.

Doesn’t look so bad, right?

It. Was. Terrible.

I mean awful. Ridiculously disgusting. Bitter, overpowering… soapy! Really… I swear it was like eating flakes of Ivory. So much time and energy and patience wasted while watching and tending to those little guys when I could have just plopped down a dollar at the pharmacy for a bar of soap. The sauce was delicious, but everything else was so over-the-top strong, that both my husband and I cut our losses and ran back to the kitchen for some noodles and cukes (after fishing out all of my dad’s tomatoes!).

I have a feeling that tomorrow there will be a clean patch of dirt where I’ve stripped the earth of the offending romantic-garden-ideal-busting Ivory soap plant. Oh yes, Hell hath no fury like the woman frothing at the mouth from a sudsy leaf!

Seeking Comfort

This week… well… this week is one I’m hoping to put behind us as soon as possible. With an accidental head injury that caused an emergency trip to the hospital, it’s been a struggle—quite literally—to stay on our feet. Unfortunately the blog had to sit on the sideline for a bit while we figure out how to keep our little one still and calm. We need some time for rest to allow that little body to heal.

Today my mom came from out of town to stay with us for two weeks, and the timing could not have been any better. I am so grateful that she’s here. To show my appreciation, I made her an omelette with some butter braised radishes, pea shoots, and radish greens from the garden with a bit of ham and feta. Omelettes are one of our preferred comfort foods here, and making a few is one way I have tried to restore some sense of order and normalcy to help wrap up this week.

I guess if taking pictures while you make and eat your food is what you might consider normal, then we may have seen a tiny glimpse of it today.

What a Week

And, I might add, it’s not even over.

There is no surer way to invite disaster than to go and make plans when the first grader is off of school. So, to celebrate having her back home, a whole bunch of us went and got sick. Fevers, chills, sniffly noses, coughs… The kids are mostly feeling better, but now I’m down and out and all I can think about is how much longer it will be until I can crawl back to bed. It makes for long days.

Doesn’t matter how I feel though, I still have meals to prepare. Time for Make-Your-Own Soup… That’s a fancy name for ramen noodles.

I have some ramen stashed away for days like these, a natural brand with less sodium and no scary names on the ingredients list. I try to assuage my mama guilt by getting the kids excited to “make their own” by adding a bit of extras: a thinly sliced omelette made with two eggs and sesame oil; a chopped up cucumber; shreds of basil; some edamame in pods. Sometimes I have bits of chicken, peanuts, or broccoli; this time we added some toasted sesame oil.

See that pyrex measuring cup? Yeah. That’s how we roll when Mama’s sick. It’s not all crystal and china ’round here… OK, fine. It’s never crystal and china here.

The edamame is great for nights like tonight, when the kids need something to keep them occupied, and I need to burn through some time. Oh, and it’s healthy. Guess that’s a win/win/win.

Here’s the craziest thing about these quick “make your own” meals we do; I’ve found no better way to get my kids to try new things than to let them spoon, or smear, or sprinkle it over something themselves. Who knew ramen could be the gateway drug to broccoli and basil?

I mean, seriously, this is what my son, that we call the walking talking cheerio, put in his bowl. And he ate it all. That’s BASIL people. It’s green!

Doesn’t look so bad for ramen noodle soup, right?