Eggamuffin

There's a whole list of foods that thrive off of indifference. For example: gyros. The more care and concern and love you put into a gyro, the worse it gets. You can make your own cucumber dressing, you can make your own pita bread, you can spend hours making a sandwich that, when all's said and done, still isn't anywhere near as tasty or as cheap as the guy standing behind the greasy cart in front of your office building could have made you in 30 seconds. Your gyro guy is able to do that because he's probably made a lot of gyros in his day and he's to the point where he doesn't actually have to think about it all that much. He's in the zone.

Okay, I might be mythologizing the grease truck guy a little, but the point remains: Some foods taste better without care and attention. Some foods taste better when the guy at the griddle is doing a half-dozen breakfast-related things simultaneously. Some foods have been reduced to the bare minimum steps required to make them both tasty and fast and there aren't many places to take them anymore.

Diners are cathedrals to indifference food.
...but corner delis are the storefront churches where the miracles happen.

It's taken me some time to get to the point where I can make a ham (or bacon, or sausage, or whatever) egg and cheese sandwich that tastes right to me - it became a bit of a priority once I moved out of the deli capitol of the world and had to start making my own breakfasts again. I guess I just...stopped worrying about it.


Ingredients:

1 bagel/roll/croissant, etc.
1 egg, beaten fast but not too much
2 slices sandwich ham
1 slice American cheese
1/4 tablespoon butter

salt
pepper


Don't need a thing more than that. You're in a rush, right?

Put the ham in a dry frying pan and put it over the stove on medium. Leave it until the bottom of the ham chars a little (3-4 minutes), flip it over and repeat (2-3 minutes). set aside. That was your prep work.

Put your bagel (or roll, or what-have-you) in the toaster.

While the ham is grilling, beat the egg and pull the slice of cheese out of the fridge. You're going to have to do the bit coming up a little fast.

In the same pan after the ham's been removed, melt the butter just until it starts to bubble. Your pan should still be hot and over medium, so that shouldn't take more than a few seconds. Make sure the butter has touched the whole bottom of the pan.

Pour in the egg. It will start to cook as soon as it hits the pan. Once the egg has solidified and started to seriously cook (30 seconds or so) flip the egg with a spatula, or, if you're fancy, with a flick of the wrist.

This is the part that requires a little bit of speed and coordination. You should have a circle of egg in your pan. Put the cheese on top of the egg with one side of the cheese touching the edge of the circle, and put the ham on top of the cheese. Fold the egg in half on top of the ham and cheese, then in half again. You should end up with a wedge of egg/cheese/ham/egg/ham/cheese/egg. Put it on a bagel, throw some salt and pepper (and ketchup, if you're me) on it and dig in.

Don't worry about cooking the ham, it's cooked long before it gets to you. Don't worry about melting the cheese, either, the egg will do that for you once it's all on one bun. And coffee - don't forget the coffee.

Baconation

From the "don't knock it 'til you've tried it" department, I wanted to highlight one of my favorite sandwiches of all time: a toasted poppy seed bagel with cream cheese, scallions and bacon. It isn't exactly a light breakfast - it hits your heart like a mallet - but, um...

I was going to try to defend it, but let's be honest here:
you're topping cream cheese with bacon and furthering the injustice of it by sprinkling it with just enough green, leafy material to highlight how completely insignificant that green, leafy material is considering what it's sitting on top of. This shouldn't be a daily thing, is what I'm saying. It's a treat, a Thursday morning pick-me-up, not a Dunkin Donuts, pulled-up-to-the-drivethru-and-realized-you-don't-know-what-you-want afterthought.

I like sandwiches that dance, and this one's got potential. It's salty, but not crunchy-salty, sweet, but not tongue-smackingly so and just a tiny bit earthy and gently bitter, but still lighter than a classic deli bacon egg and cheese, and much faster to make. Everything in it needs everything else: ham doesn't work, and it has to be a bagel, and incidentally? It tastes better with sweet, creamy tea, not so much with coffee.

Now THAT'S what I call garlic!

I'm generally of the 'laws-and-sausages' school of writing about food in that I don't particularly care for process photos. Step-by-step photos about dinner seem to say, more than anything else, "these are some beans. These are some beans in a colander. Here are some other beans." like Patty and Selma's vacation slides, and that just ain't my style.

All that said, you gotta see this.
Penny included for scale.

That is one hell of a garlic clove, a b-movie monster-sized foodstuff, and it tasted nothing like its more common cousins (it came in the CSA box this week). It was sweet and just slightly tangy without any of the oily bitterness that can accompany garlic. It's mild, too, mild enough that I threw that whole clove into the recipe below and didn't end up backing away in fear of my own breath once I had to eat the stuff. It was the shallot of garlics.
...and it was great in the Mexican-inflected rice I threw it in, though in retrospect a pasta with cream sauce would have let it shine better. Maybe next time - we've got more of it.

In any event.

Ingredients:

1 cup brown rice
2 1/4 cups water
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp salt

1 huge sweet garlic clove, chopped coarse
1 1/2 cups raw corn
1/2 cup green onion
1 tomato, diced

1/2 tbsp butter
1 tsp crushed red pepper
1 tsp parsley
1/2 tsp yellow mustard powder
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
juice of half a lime, halved
salt and pepper

The Gist:

I used our rice cooker for the rice because rice cookers are awesome, but a saucepan with a lid works fine. put the first four ingredients in the saucepan, heat until boiling, cover, and simmer until done. You may have to play with the water content - slightly less that 2 1/4 cups seems to be perfect for the brown rice we usually have around, but it can vary.

After the rice is halfway done (20-25 minutes or so, but be careful) heat the butter over mediumish heat in another pan until it bubbles. add the rest of the ingredients except for the tomato and half the lime juice. Cook slowly, keeping it moving, until the corn is tender and the garlic smells awesome. Add the tomato and remove from heat. Tomato is delicate and you want it to warm, not cook and dissolve.

When the rice is done, put it in a large bowl, add the other ingredients and mix it together with a spoon. Add the rest of the lime juice and serve.

1 cup of brown rice turns out to be a lot of rice once you add all the other stuff to it - this quantity will serve 3 as a meal unto itself. As a side, probably closer to 5. It's good with shrimp and sour cream, too, but what isn't.

Big Shrimpin'

Made lunch today and was pressed for time (still am) and didn't feel like digging through the fridge for all of the "right" ingredients, so I grabbed the first few things I saw from the CSA shelf and chucked them into a bowl with some cut-up shrimp.
It turned out really well.

That's shrimp, green onions, (the last of the) garlic scapes, mayo, lemon juice, paprika, and black pepper on toasted pumpernickel with (the last of the) muenster. Very light. Lean a little heavy on the lemon juice, no extra salt, light on the pepper. The muenster was just a bit too strong; sharp provolone would have been better. It would be good next to a bowl of soup, I imagine.

Slaw Disposal Method 1

It didn't occur to me, though it probably should have, that having too many radishes to eat in a week and turning those radishes into slaw would inevitably result in having too much slaw to eat.
...So I've been putting it on pretty much everything. For the record, that's turkey, muenster, slaw, cucumber and mayo piled onto rye, and it was epic.

Next, I'm thinking omelets.

Radish Slawghter

We joined a CSA this year. It was a practical choice, for the most part - our vegetable intake was a bit on the low side and our preferred supermarket, while being awesome-cheap for most things and having generics that blow their name brand competitors out of the water in price and, shockingly, taste, is a bit hit-or-miss when it comes to produce.

This hasn't been a good summer for Massachusetts agriculture so far. Too much rain and not enough sun means all sorts of normal summer crops are behind schedule (no local corn yet and no tomatoes) while green leafy things are doing just fine. With our first CSA box last week, we got some lettuces and peas and other tasty things, along with a gigantic mess of radishes, and how many radishes can two people realistically eat? CSAs are the Right Thing To Do, I think, but they're also expensive - you get what you pay for but you get a lot of it, and every last bit thrown away because you can't find a use for it or forgot about it in the crisper (sorry, arugula; sorry Farmer Dave) hurts a little.

The other thing about CSAs is, we went into it thinking we were going to save money off of our weekly grocery trips because we wouldn't have to buy as many vegetables. That might be a little true, but realistically we just end up eating more vegetables - we're eating healthier, not cheaper.

Anyway. What do you do when you have radishes coming out of your ears?
Make slaw out of them.

This recipe might not be to everybody's taste - I'm pretty easy-going, food-wise, but I'm overly picky about slaw, about water content and texture and cut and...I get excitable in diners, is what I'm saying. Also, there's no cabbage in this slaw, mostly because I didn't get any from the CSA this week, but there ARE garlic scapes in it because I did get those. Throw a little bit of garlic in it if you'd like and if you don't want to go scape-hunting, but don't overdo it.


Ingredients:

(I did this by eye - you know what slaw's supposed to look like, right? Keep adding stuff until it's the right combination of colors. I've listed the ingredients relationally with a basic idea, but your gut's probably a better guide. The recipe itself is a modification of this one from myrecipes.com.)

Salad:
1 cup Radishes, rough cut in slivers
1/3 cup bell pepper, chopped
1/2 as much of the bell pepper as Carrot, rough cut in slivers
1/2 as much of the bell pepper as Garlic Scapes

Dressing:
2 tbsp vinegar, any will do, I used Apple Cider Vinegar
1 tsp Sugar
2 leaves fresh Sage, slivered
1/2 tsp Olive Oil
1/4 tsp Mustard Powder
generous twists of Salt and Pepper

The Gist:

You can use a food processor for this, but I don't - hand-cut ingredients in slaw makes it less paste-like and less uniform. It shouldn't take long to cut your veggies by hand.

Combine the salad ingredients in one bowl and the dressing ingredients in another. Whisk the dressing and pour it over the salad. Refrigerate for 15 minutes or so and serve. The quantities above will serve 2 people as sides or 4 on sandwiches. Personally:
...I like it with bacon and muenster and a little bit of mayo on wheat.

Is That a Zucchini in Your Pocket? Thought So.

Angela and I don't see each other much during the week but I don't work Fridays, and Fridays are for dinner-for-two. Recently it's been pizza and beer because, really, who wants to cook at the end of a long week, but now that we've settled more or less into our new apartment and now that our kitchen is (comparatively) frikkin huge, I'm starting to cook again. Also, there's nothing good on TV during the summer. Ahem.

(For those of you keeping score, that was my off-hand explanation as to why I haven't posted in 6 months. Sorry about that.)

I was raised in a household were every meal was balanced, even if balance meant burgers and fries and a salad. I have very few active dislikes from the vegetable kingdom, cauliflower being the big one, the I-don't-care-how-much-cheese-you-put-on-it, I'm-not-eating-it one, and that's more of a texture issue than anything else - eating cauliflower is like chewing on brined tree bark and I want nothing to do with it.

And despite the fact that I'll eat practically anything, there are some vegetables that, for whatever reason, weren't around when I was growing up. Zucchini was one of them - I had a habit of confusing zucchini and cucumber until embarrassingly recently because, hey, they're both green and phallic and waxy and I couldn't for the life of me remember a situation where I had the two at-hand at the same time to reenforce their differences.

Laugh if you want, but I guarantee if you think about it, you've got a similar hang-up that "normal" people (not me; I'm a gentleman) think is batty.

Anyway. Summer's here, and summer means good produce, and good produce means I can throw a little of the balance that's been lacking in our diets back into the rotation.

We had zucchini in the fridge and I needed something to go along with the pork chops (Yes, pork chops. I'm still me, after all) and this:
...is what I came up with. It's a zucchini salad, light and crisp and hassle-free in the extreme. It helps to have a whiskey barrel filled with herbs outside, but if you don't have any fresh green leafy things lying around, use dried ones. You're not going to be cooking this (although you can if you want to; see below) so the balance may be tricky to pull off.

Give it a whirl.

Ingredients:

1/2 zucchini, cut into bite-sized pieces
1/2 onion, chopped
1/2 bell pepper, ideally something colorful and over-sweet, chopped
1-2 cloves garlic, chopped
Juice of 1/2 lime
olive oil
Parsley, a heavy pinch or two should do
Fresh sage, 2 leaves, chopped
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

The Gist:

This is so simple it's ridiculous - take those ingredients, put them in a bowl, mix them up by hand and put it in the fridge for a bit. Tada! Salad.

If you're more in the mood for a warm vegetable, heat some oil in a pan, toss the salad in and cook it until the zucchini is cooked through. Or bake it. Or stir fry it. It really is a versatile collection of ingredients - it'll turn into whatever you want it to after the application of a little gentle heat.

Considerations:

I don't tend to get specific about salt and pepper, but here (like on any salad) freshly ground pepper and kosher salt make a difference - you want them to stand out instead of blending in with the background.