Just a quick gallery of some of the action the Kitchen has seen in the past week.
If you’re like me, you feel all rustic and bohemian when leaving a store with a loaf of French bread sticking out the top of your bag. Then you get it home, carve off a few slices that night, and by the time you check out the loaf the next day, you could hit a freaking fastball with it. Nothing goes bad faster than French bread. It is right up there with cilantro and strawberries.
Had an opportunity to use the French bread last night, making a couple of the Best. Burgers. Ever. for a lovely lady. This morning, I could pound nails with the loaf. Having a good serrated knife, I decided to make some French, nay Freedom Toast with what I could saw off the end. Think of it as freedom from having to throw this lead pipe in the trash. Now everyone has a recipe for French bread. Mine is equally simple, and just plain works. You’ll need:
- Hot cast iron skillet
- Knob of butter
- 6-8 slices of French bread, cut on the diagonal to get a lot of surface area, about 1/2 inch thick
- 3 eggs
- Slug of milk
- Nutmeg nut
- Maple syrup
- Powdered sugar
Pan on the heat, melt the butter. Let the butter sit until it gets browned, but not burnt. Break the eggs into a bowl and grate a nutmeg nut about ten times over the bowl. Pour in a slug (1/8 cup?) of milk. Stir until well incorporated. Dunk your bread slices into the mixture and shake off excess before laying them in the skillet. Cook until nicely browned, flip and brown the other side. Remove, plate, drizzle with syrup and powdered sugar. Good stuff.
I am a great artist. I steal pretty much everything I make from other sources. Good thing the US Copyright Office has bigger fish to fry than…well, the fish I’m frying.
Wanted to try grilling a pizza. I’ve done pizza before on a pizza stone in the oven, but grilling one sounded pretty badass. So when a lovely lady recently requested grilled pizza, I took that as the catalyst to start hunting for a recipe. Bam. Found one.
Not going to bore you with repeating the details you can read on the link above, but will offer some observations and tips from my attempt at the recipe.
1. Just buy a wad of pre-made pizza dough at the store. It’s fine, and you’re not impressing anyone with your dough-making skills. It’s the pizza itself that counts.
2. Clear off your kitchen counter and just do the flour and rolling thing right on the surface. My cutting board was too small, and it quickly became obvious this wasn’t going to be a neat-freak operation.
3. Remember the grill and flip. Brown the dough on one side, then bring it inside for toppings.
4. Less is best. I just did a simple pizza of sauce, basil leaves and mozzarella. If you put more on it, you run the risk of making it soggy.
Going to try this again soon. Thinking of throwing some meat on there, but for this recipe, I recommend not putting more than three toppings per pizza, just to keep it simple. Here’s a couple I thought up:
BBQ Sauce, Chicken and red peppers
Bacon, spinach and feta cheese
What will you make?
Just whizzed this up today and it was amazing. No pics because it didn’t last that long.
Throw one of those little cups of vanilla yogurt, a tin of pineapple chunks, two bananas, a lug of honey, a fistful of ice, small bunch of mint leaves and 5-6 grates of a nutmeg nut into the blender. Whiz that bad boy up.
Bet you won’t be able to snap a picture before inhaling it either.
The thing I love about breakfast egg dishes is that it is almost impossible to screw them up. Throw in a little bit of what you have laying about and you’re bound to come up with something good. Case in point, my breakfast this morning. I had a few things freshly acquired from the farmer’s market, and wanted something light (no cheese), colorful and crunchy. This was the perfect breakfast for a cloudy, lazy and cool Los Angeles morning.
2 eggs
1 small orange sweet pepper
2-3 button mushrooms
3-4 leaves fresh basil
Handful of Pancetta Italian bacon, small cubes
Coarse sea salt
Ground black pepper
2 slices French bread
Olive oil
Melt some butter in a skillet and whack the french bread in the toaster or toaster oven. Start with the Pancetta for about a minute. Chop and add the mushroom and orange sweet pepper, stirring for another minute. Beat and add the 2 eggs atop the mixture. Sprinkle sea salt and crank some black pepper to taste. Using a wooden spoon and working the pan, shape/stir as an omelette, ensuring it doesn’t stick. It won’t be perfect, but just try for a roundish shape. Right before the eggs set, toss in some freshly chopped basil. Plate the toasted French bread, add a drizzle of olive oil and fold the omelette over it by tilting it out of the pan. Throw some jazz on, grab a newspaper (ahem, iPad), and enjoy your Sunday morning.
While browsing through Flipboard on my iPad, I came across a recipe from Bitchin’ Kitchen that looked like a lot of fun. If nothing else, it was another chance to make something with bacon. If you haven’t figured it out by now, bacon is a common theme here. Look at that word cloud in the right column if you don’t believe me. Bacon…is there anything it can’t do?
I stuck to the original recipe, but did a couple variations with the eggs. Tried one with just a yolk, another with a full egg, and the rest were basically me figuring out how the heck to get “some” and not “all” of the egg whites in the tin. (The trick is to scoop some of the whites out of the bowl with one of the eggshell halves.) Finally, I thought they needed a little more color, so a dash of fresh cut basil tops them off.
While they were fun to make, this was definitely not a good recipe to try if you are reading it off the iPad as you go. I am a bit obsessive-compulsive about the cleanliness of my screens. Who am I kidding, I’m full-on OCD about the state of my screens! While the muffins were delicious and cleanup was a breeze, my iPad needed a pretty good scrubbing to get the bacon grease off.
Oh what a beautiful day for a Vespa ride along the beach. It was absolutely perfect, and the smell of all the people grilling out was inspiring. This sunny weekend brought out the culinary creative in me, coming to a spectacular finish Sunday night as I took some regular old burgers to the next level. Seriously. These were some of the best burgers I had ever tasted. Should you desire the same, read on.
You will need:
- 1 small chub pack of 80/20 hamburger meat (makes 4 burgers)
- 1 egg
- 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
- Coarse sea salt and ground pepper
- 6 strips bacon, cut into 1 cm cubes
- 2 tbsp onion finely chopped
- 1 jalepeño pepper, deseeded and finely chopped
- 2 handfuls of finely grated American mild cheddar cheese
- 3 tbsp honey mustard
- Sliced roasted garlic bread (I got some from La Brea bakery)
In your cast iron skillet (seriously, put that teflon shit away before you hurt someone) dump in a lug of vegetable oil and brown up the bacon and onions, until the onions are clear.
In a medium bowl, combine, the hamburger, egg, salt, pepper and worcestershire sauce and throw in the ‘fridge while the bacon finishes up. Just when the bacon starts to brown up, pull it from the heat and dump in with the hamburger meat. Combine with the cheese and form into patties.
Don’t clean out that skillet – what the hell’s wrong with you?!
Put the bread in the toaster oven at 400F for about 6-7 minutes, just enough to get stiff, but not burn.
Mix together the pepper and honey mustard. This is the only condiment you will need for these burgers. Trust me on this.
Plate ‘em up, spoon some of the mustard pepper mixture on the burgers and…well…I don’t remember much after that part. I kind of went to That Special Place.
Simply amazing burgers. You will love these. Shoot me a comment if you try them, and let me know how they turned out for you.
This was inspired by the latest Indian-themed episode of EpicMealTime. While I didn’t make anything in giant proportions or coerce hotties to mash it into their face, I threw this one together with what was in the ‘fridge and cupboard. Made it up as I went along, and lo and behold – it was, in it’s own way, epic.
You’ll need:
- Packet of stew meat
- 6 strips of bacon, cut into 1″ pieces
- 1 jar of Patak’s Jalfrezi Curry cooking sauce
- 1 container of Greek style yogurt
- 2 tsps Mint leaves, chopped
- 1/2 tbsp yogurt
- 1 piece naan bread
In your trusty cast iron skillet (you do have one by now, right?) heat up a little vegetable oil and brown up the stew meat and bacon. Throw a little salt and pepper on ‘em if it will make you feel good. When the bacon starts to crisp up, dump the whole jar of Jalfrezi curry in the pan and let it simmer for 15 minutes, stirring every once and a while. If the place smells awesome, you’re on the right track.
Toss the piece of naan bread in the toaster oven at 400F for about 5-6 minutes, until warm, but not crispy.
Mix the yogurt, mint and honey in a little bowl and set to the side.
Plate up by laying out the naan bread, dump some of the meat/curry mixture on top, and mash that yogurt in there. Best to cut the naan into a little strip, get some of the beef, bacon, sauce and yogurt sauce on there at once and throw down on that. The flavors will blow your mind. You really taste everything. I was quite impressed with myself, considering I was just making most of this up.
This show is pure uncut awesome mixed with explosions, guitar solos, high scores, sweet honeys and bacon. Gotta step up my game to some next level maneuvers. What you know about that, playa?
