Blood sausage with fried egg and balsamic glaze

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This is Part Five of my week-long celebration of eggs.

L and I have one simple, sacred agreement that goes like this: I agree not to bring blood sausage into the house and she agrees to stay married. What she has against a “pudding” of congealed spiced pig’s blood and fat, I will never understand, but a deal is a deal.

So, before I go any further, let me state this directly to my wife on the off chance she reads this : L, I would never, ever bring blood sausage, also known as black pudding or blood pudding, into our happy home. And, furthermore, even though it is considered, in its many forms, a delicacy all over the world, I am steadfast in my resolve never to cook with it, especially not while you are out at book club or whatever that was on Tuesday night.

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20 good egg tips

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This is Part Four of my week-long celebration of eggs. Today, 20 tips for storing and cooking eggs.

  1. Generally, eggs work best at room temperature. If eggs have been in the fridge, warm them up for five minutes in warm tap water before using.
  2. However, for poaching or frying, use eggs straight from the fridge, they will hold together better.
  3. Also, cold eggs separate more easily than room temperature eggs. So, if you need to separate eggs, do it while they’re cold and then set them aside for 30 minutes to come up to room temperature.
  4. Unless your eggs are very fresh, add a tablespoon or so of vinegar to the water when poaching eggs and they will hold together better.
  5. Brown eggs have slightly thicker shells than white eggs and are easier to peel after they are boiled.
  6. Crack eggs on a flat surface rather than the lip of a bowl to help avoid pieces of shell mixing with your food.
  7. To test an egg’s freshness, put in a deep pan of well-salted water. If it stays on its side at the bottom it’s fresh. If it stands upright on the bottom it’s not so fresh, but it’s still good. If it floats, throw it out.
  8. Fresh eggs hold their shape better when poached, fried or used in meringues.
  9. Hard-boiled eggs are harder to peel if they are fresh. Use ones that are a week old for better results.
  10. Store eggs with the pointy end down to keep the yolk well centred. Continue reading →

Potato, egg and green bean salad

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This is Part Three of my week-long celebration of eggs.

Our timid winter sun shone for two whole days this weekend and the light was glorious. But the snow is still there and the temperature is still well below freezing. I am now officially tired of winter and am quite ready for a week-long celebration of tropical drinks imbibed at swim-up bars on Caribbean Islands.

In the meantime, here’s a little bit of summer on a plate – a warm and bright (hear that, sun? I said warm) potato salad taken from side dish to main dish by adding halved hard-boiled eggs. This is adapted from a recipe by Chuck Hughes of Montreal’s Garde Manger, a renowned restaurant in one of North America’s best restaurant cities.

This salad is easily substantial enough to be a meal, but fast enough for a busy week night. Grainy mustard, white-wine vinegar and a bit of garlic gives it sharpness, crisp green beans give it more summer (hello, sun?), while the anchovies lurk in the background giving flavour without being prominent. The eggs, served on top, cut the sharpness of the dressing wonderfully. Continue reading →

Scotch eggs

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It’s Day Two of my week-long celebration of eggs but, it’s also Super Bowl Sunday. So, here’s the dilemma I faced: how do you fit the wholesome, goodfoodness of eggs onto a menu that consists of the greasy, fatty jumble of nachos, chicken wings, corn dogs, meat-lovers pizza and beer?

And, no, egg batter doesn’t count. It’s too easy. Pickled eggs are passé, devilled eggs are too dainty and poached would be laughed out of the man cave. There had to be a way to give eggs their proper place among the heart-stopping, acid-reflux-inducing, mouth-watering array of North American sports bar cuisine (if I can use that word).

For the answer, I turned to my Scottish cousins, who seem the most able to turn every dietary virtue into a culinary vice (anybody for boiled-for-an-hour veg?). The Scots can even make bad food worse. Witness the deep-fried Mars bar.

But, perhaps I’m being too harsh.  I’m not even sure that Scotch eggs are from Scotland. They could be just another ploy by the sourpuss English to give the Scots a bad name. After all, they’re still jealous because it was the Scots King James who wrote their Bible.

Anyway, I digress. Wherever they came from, what we call Scotch eggs are perfect sports-bar food and have nothing to be ashamed of next to a plate of deep-fried cheese sticks  and a bottle of Bud – they’re even shaped like footballs. Anything wrapped in sausage and then breaded and deep-fried is sin food, even if you are rooting for the Saints.

But, unlike corn dogs or pretzels, these are not limited to the rec-room table. Half a Scotch egg next to a small green salad is right at home at  an upscale brunch and would make an elegant appetizer (imagine tiny ones made with quail eggs.)

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An egg in every pot

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One of the questions I’m sometimes asked, almost always while eating, is “what would you want as your last meal?” I always give the same answer: “How about you?” I say in my best imitation of Hannibal Lecter, “more Chianti?”

It really is a morbid question when you think about it and your mind ends up in uncomfortable places if you try to answer honestly. I mean, so much depends on the time and circumstance. Will it be a hasty muffin and coffee gulped down before rushing to a morning appointment at the gallows? Or, will you absent-mindedly walk into the path of a bus while texting, after a leisurely lunch with old friends (“omg u woodn’t believe wat i just 8″…SMACK).

Dinner could be even worse. With my luck, it would be airline food.

A better question, I think – or, at least one that keeps me in a happier mental space – is this:  “If you were shipwrecked on a desert island, what single ingredient would you want to have with you so you could make a good meal for yourself and Scarlett Johansson, who oddly enough was the only other survivor? ” (Ladies, you can be shipwrecked with George Clooney if you like.)

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Chocolate chip Sunday

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There is something close to atavistic about the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking; it’s an aroma that takes you back to your childhood, even if your mother didn’t bake. The heavy, almost cloying scent is strong enough to lure even our teenage zombies, blinking in the daylight, from their lairs. Bite into the cookie – just slightly crisp on the outside and molten sweet in the middle – and you want to fill your pockets with them and run outside to play.

Sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, sipping red wine, talking about nothing in particular and watching L bake rack after rack of  cookies seems like  a  more grown-up thing to do. But, when those cookies come out of the oven and I can hardly wait for them to cool enough to hold, I become, as the cliché goes, a kid again. Thanks, L.

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A search for secret sauce

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This is my version of steak frites with the secret sauce

Sometimes lucky  little things happen that change everything for the better. Things like meeting a life partner at a party that you weren’t planning to go to but got dragged to anyway; or having an errant bullet stopped by the bible you always carry in your breast pocket; or, better yet, discovering a spectacular new secret sauce that changes the way you think about steak frites forever.

But even really good things have their downsides: Life partners snore and chew with their mouths open (not you L, you’re perfect in all ways. Just saying that I’ve heard that can happen sometimes… to other people); a ruined Bible is no use to your everlasting soul; and, secret sauces are just that… secret.

And the Release de Venise version

Except that, in the internet age, there are no secrets. Cures for snoring, multiple versions of the good book and everybody’s secret sauces are just a google away.

When I walked into the Manhattan branch of the Relais de Venise L’Entrecote on the recommendation of a New York acquaintance, I was not really sure what I was in for. The front of the house is run entirely by women  dressed as French maids, the walls are covered with poorly executed murals of Venice (remember, it’s a French restaurant) and the menu is limited to one item. It felt more like the set of a low-budget foreign film than midtown at lunch.

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Rules to eat by: when in doubt sauté with garlic

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There is no shortage of rules about eating. From the Bible (do not eat that apple) to Michael Pollen (Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants); from Scarsdale to South Beach; from kosher to Special K, the list of diet restrictions and advice goes on and on. And, while I refuse to  adhere to any  single regimen (I’ve always had trouble with rules), I love to read about them. Especially when they come in top 10 lists like this: 10 Tips for a Healthy Diet.

Tip number 7 makes me think someone has been poking around in our crisper drawer, where nothing is very crisp: “…often they [vegetables] sit around in your fridge and go bad because you don’t know what to do with them. In a pinch, just chop them up and sauté them with olive oil, garlic, and salt. This works for everything…”  It’s good advice; everything is better with garlic.

Candy sushi

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“I need to make an unusual dessert for French class homework,” our daughter announced the other night. “What can I make?”

“French class?” I asked reflexively, dumbly, before I could help myself.

“Yeah,” she said as if unusual dessert is a normal part of French class  (she meant to say “like, duh?”), “What can I make?”

“Meringues?” I suggested.

She just looked at me as if I had said “cat food.”

“Macaroons?”

“Ugh.”

“OK, let me think.”

“I want,” she said in that tone that 13-year-old girls must go to secret classes to learn, “to make candy sushi.”

“OK, why didn’t you say that?”

“I just did.”

“Ugh.”

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Artisan bread for really lazy artisans

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I am not easily duped by gimmicky sales pitches. I don’t believe for a minute that I can rocket my abs from flab to fab in five minutes a day (or eight hours a day, for that matter). I do not buy anything  sold with the words  “instant” or “miracle” or “magic.” I do not believe I can make $7000 a day selling real estate in my spare time.

But the promise of bread in five minutes a day was too hard to resist. So, when I saw Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (subtitled: The discovery that revolutionizes home baking), I leapt off the turnip truck and bought a copy (at full price: $30.95). No infomercial required.

As I write, I have made three batches (of four loaves each) of boule (round bread) from what the authors, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois, call “the master recipe” and I have to say, it’s pretty good; a hard, chewy crust and a moist, solid, but not too dense, crumb that tastes more like sourdough the longer the dough ages (more on that later). It’s certainly not the best “artisan” bread I have ever had, but then again, I am not an artisan who has spent years learning the art of bread making. I have also never had much confidence baking bread and the little moment of triumph I feel when I pull one of these simple loaves out of the oven has made me want to do much more.

Artisan Bread tells you how to make dozens of different breads built from one very simple master recipe, which takes about 10 minutes active time to make. After resting, the dough goes into the fridge where it lasts up to two weeks, taking on more of a sourdough flavour as it ages. When you want to make a loaf you simply pull off a grapefruit-size chunk of dough, let it rest at room temperature  for 40 minutes and bake it on a pizza stone for about half an hour.

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