eggs – Page 2 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Swiss Chard and Red Pepper Gratin

What? Another gratin? Has the kitchen really gotten this boring? Well, actually no. This gratin couldn’t be more different from last week’s Sweet Potato and Spinach Gratin. In fact, I’m not even really sure that this is a gratin. It seems a lot more like a frittata, but if the New York Times wants to call it a gratin, who am I to argue?

I bookmarked this one a year and a half ago, and every time I came across it subsequently, it just didn’t catch my attention the way it had at first. But this week, for some reason, it stood out. I think it was the red peppers. I buy red peppers so infrequently in the winter that I can’t even remember the last time I had them. But the red peppers at the produce market last weekend were so brilliantly red I couldn’t resist them. And I was intrigued by what looked like a frittata with rice, which I’ve been eating a lot more of lately, so I decided I had to try it. I only wish I’d tried it sooner.
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Poor Man’s Brioche

Brioche is the gold standard of bread. It’s incredibly tender crust and rich, buttery flavor purportedly lost Marie Antoinette her head when she callously prescribed it to her starving countrymen: It’s richness was so far out of their reach that their only possible reaction was revolution. I think they really just wanted the brioche.

I’ve avoided making it until recently because I’ve heard that in order to get that flaky, tender crumb, you have to stir and knead forever, and my little weakling arms just were not up for that. One of the first things I thought of as I unpacked the shiny new stand mixer was that I could finally give brioche a try. Good timing, too, because it was quickly approaching in my quest to bake every bread in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.
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Laura’s Mike’s Mess

My first year of college I wasn’t quite ready to leave the comforting embrace of my small hippie college town. Unfortunately, I found it a little bit tricky to find a job in that town. I graduated during the last serious plunge in the employment rate, in 2001, and it was not a good time to be a newly graduated Lit major, I can tell you that. I ended up working in various coffee shops and restaurants before I finally landed that first desk job, and while I was certainly extremely poor and had to defer payment of my student loans for too, too long, I wouldn’t exchange the experience for anything. I met great people, I had a lot of fun, learned to carry multiple cups of coffee at once, and I discovered what remains to this day my favorite breakfast: The Mike’s Mess from Zachary’s, in Santa Cruz, California. This year, I decided I need to try to make it myself.
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Caramel Walnut Buche de Noel

When I was in high school I was a bit of a Francophile. Ok, I was a lot of a Francophile. I took French throughout high school, and most years our teacher would bring a buche de noel to share before our winter break. One year we even got to take over the home ec room and make one. I loved them and every year I think of making one again, but I never have. This year, for our library’s holiday party, our lovely admin asked me to bring a dessert. I poured over cookbooks and holiday cooking magazines before it hit me: Of course I had to make a buche de noel!
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Cookie Time: Snickerdoodles

Snickerdoodles are a new holiday cookies for me. In fact, I don’t think I’ve made snickerdoodles since I was about 12 years old, when my friend Kari and I made a batch. We ate more of the dough than we baked, and ended up feeling pretty unwell, and I subsequently stayed away from snickerdoodles for about eighteen years. But for some reason I started craving them lately, so I had to make them as part of my holiday cookie baking fest. And for this one I decided to break out the Betty Crocker Cookbook. The cookbook was a gift on my 18th birthday, and I don’t think I’ve ever made anything from it before. That might have to change, because these cookies were perfect.
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Greek Celebration Bread

Crazy, but true: I have been writing this here blog for three years today. A lot has happened in three years, and not just in the kitchen. I know I’ve said it many times before, but it’s true: When I first started writing here, I really didn’t know much about cooking at all. I’d always enjoyed doing it, but my technique left much to be desired. My favorite meal was rice and beans from a box, and I was so freaked out about raw shrimp I didn’t look closely enough to see that they weren’t de-veined before cooking them. I thought baking bread from scratch was Little House on the Prairie stuff, and I didn’t have the first clue that broccoli has a season.

In celebration of three years of cooking and writing and taking pictures of food, and learning my way around an oven, I decided to splurge this week and bake this lovely Greek Celebration Bread, from Reinhardt’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, as my weekly breakfast loaf. And it does feel like a splurge from my usual plain, whole wheat loaf. This bread is fragrant and tender and rich and really freaking fabulous.
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Mushroom Sausage Puffs

I love puff pastry. I consider it a culinary wonder. But it’s not exactly something you can have for dinner every night, and most of the uses to which puff pastry can be put fall firmly in the appetizer category. So I relish the opportunity to make appetizers for dinner parties, and I was given just that opportunity this past weekend. Our awesome friends Stan and Charity hosted a dinner party and invited me, Mr. X, and some kind of pre-dinner treat, so I decided to throw together these.

They are very similar to the Mushroom and Goat Cheese Triangles I have made for several dinner parties in the past, but I wanted to do something a little different, a little more substantial. So sausage it is! And frankly, I think they are much better for it.
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Peanut Butter Bread, new favorite breakfast

My housemate, Christa (of the Turkey Chili Rice fame) gave me a wonderful old cookbook for Christmas: Good Housekeeping’s Book of Menus, Recipes, and Household Discoveries, from 1922. The binding is delicate, the pages yellowed, and it has the great musty old book smell that I would wear as perfume if I could (um, maybe). It offers recipes for every day of the year (as long as you don’t mind eating cold boiled tongue and buttered asparagus every Sunday in May), and I can waste hours perusing the pages, awed by the odd ingredients and the minimal instructions. It’s clear reading this that back in 1922 it was unnecessary to explain every step of a recipe because the woman reading it (and yeah, it was almost always a woman) already knew more cooking basics than most people do today. I’m totally fascinated by this cookbook.
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Eggplant Parm? Oh hell yeah!

Eggplant Parm

Thank god things finally cooled off a little in this hellhole we call Boston. I wasn’t about to turn the oven on this week, and I had an eggplant in the fridge, patiently waiting to be put to good use. And I was deadset on making eggplant parmesan. “Why,” you might ask, “in the heated hot humidity of August, does a girl want to make eggplant parm?” Well I have no good answer to that question, but it got in my head and I couldn’t shake it out. And finally, today, with nary a trace of damp stickiness in the air, today was my day. Or the eggplant’s day, rather.

I gotta tell you, people, this was glorious. I never made eggplant parmesan before and I rocked its pants off. I wish I wasn’t the only person around these parts who eats eggplant, but hey, more for me. The tomato sauce was light and just the right amount of tang and sweet, the eggplant didn’t mush up at all, the seasonings were just right and the copious gloopy beautiful mounds of melted cheese…oh, that is bliss, my friends. Heavenly cheesy bliss.

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