Egg Muffins Four Ways

What happens when my engineer wife cooks. Well, I get to eat the experiments. I woke up this morning to egg muffins wrapped in bacon. Ummm, bacon. The experiment: scrambled or whole eggs with the biscuit dough on the top or the bottom:

Before

After

Gail greased the bottom of the tins, wrapped the bacon around the edges and layered the eggs and biscuit dough to test the permutations. The whole thing went in at 350 for 12 minutes, enough to cook the bacon and the eggs.

Whatever was on the bottom cooked more than what was on the top.  So, when the eggs were cooked enough, the biscuits on the top were slightly under cooked.  Even with the biscuit on the bottom, the whole egg needed to be mostly firm. If you want them with a loose yolk, you would need to add the egg half way through the cooking.

The best arrangement was biscuit on the bottom, and scrambled eggs on the top. I'm a lucky engineer's husband.

The Best Chowder in the World as Far as I'm Concerned

Chowder is one of the worlds best foods, and Gail makes the best clam chowder I've ever had. Really, I'm not kidding here. Gail's not convinced, but she's never been able to show me better. The key is the bacon and the use of milk instead of cream.

Earlier this week we had some neighbors over for dinner. Gail adapted her clam chowder recipe into corn chowder as a way to use the volume of corn that all came ripe at the same time. I love corn chowder almost as much as clam chowder. Gail's chowder base makes it great.

Along with the chowder, Gail served garden beans two ways. The first was sauteed with garden tomatoes. It was good. But the second dish, with the green beans simply roasted with oil and light salt, was the best. Gail also made a tomato, basil, mozzella salad, dressed simply with a nice olive oil.

In addition to the apple crisp Gail made for dessert, our guests brought these flavored rice candies from his recent business trip to Japan. The rice candies are jellied. The green ones tasted like tea. The black and brown ones were covered with sesame seeds and filled with bean paste. Each is delicate and lightly sweet, a fun treat.





The Best Chowder in the World
Makes 2 cups

1 T olive oil
¼ c chopped onion
½ c peeled chopped potato (higher starch potatoes will fall apart and thicken chowder; lower starch will retain shape)
1 c fish or chicken stock
½ t salt
3 oz cooked or 4 oz raw clams
2 t potato or corn starch
½ c whole milk
freshly ground black pepper

1. Heat oil in heavy soup pot over med heat. Meanwhile, chop onion; add to pot; immediately reduce heat to med-low; saute until tender, about 5 min.
2. Meanwhile, peel potato; cut into bite-sized cubes. Drain seafood if necessary, reserving liquid;  cut seafood into bite-sized pieces. Add stock to any reserved seafood liquid to make required amount.
3. Add potato, stock and salt. Cover; simmer until tender, 15 min.
4. When potatoes soften, mash some right in pot with potato masher, if desired.
5. Stir potato starch into milk until all lumps dissolved; stir into pot.
6. Add seafood; heat through, making sure raw seafood is thoroughly cooked.
7. Best if cooled, refrigerated overnight, and reheated.
8. Serve with oyster crackers or in a bread bowl.
9. Season at table with freshly ground black pepper.

Variations:

• Corn chowder: Add ½ c corn niblets per serving, either in addition to or in place of fish.
• Add garlic.
• Substitute white fish or other seafood for clams.
• Start by sauteing 2 slices bacon in pan until crisp; use drippings in place of oil and salt; add chopped bacon to chowder; season to taste.

Taste Testing Prague: Knedliky and Smazeny Syr

Noele is away on her semester abroad "enjoying" the food of Prague. In solidarity, we made two of the recipes she shared on her blog. I think we might be better cooks than the ones at the restaurant she went to. While we didn't think these were the greatest dishes ever, they were good and fulfilling country food, and gave us a taste of the culture she's living in.

First we made the knedliky, a boiled dumpling that incorporates stale bread. The most interesting difference in this recipe from other dumplings we've made is that the dough is whipped until the gluten is worked up.

This picture shows the consistency of the dough after the gluten has been worked up. The recipe was a bit unclear on this. I'd call this a thick sponge, not quite as thin as pancake batter.

After working up the gluten we add the cubed bread. The bread cubes do eventually disappear, but it takes a while. The result is a thick batter that will form a loaf in the cheese cloth.

You ball up the dough and boil the heck out of it. We made three-eighths of a recipe to use a single egg, so we may have over-cooked it a bit. Not that it would make much difference. The result was a dry, compact, bread-like dumpling, which you slice and cover with a cabbage and bacon mixture.

This is traditionally served with roast pork, and since we skipped that, we used a bunch more bacon in ours. It came out as a hearty dish, which didn't need the pork. If you serve it with pork, a much smaller portion of the knedlicky and cabbage would do.

Smazney Syr is szimply fried cheese. It's made with Edam cheese, and typically served with tartar sauce. Noele reported a rubbery, bland dish. We think she must have gotten cold cheese, because ours was gooey and delicious. We cooked it longer than the recipe said to, the cheese oozing out of the sides. Noele, try cooking this yourself. I think you will like it.

The dish was like our bar-food cheese sticks, but the Edam had a more delicate flavor. We could see how tartar sauce would work with this in a different culture, but it didn't work for our tastes. We have 3/4 of a ball of Edam left over. We might fry up some more. It is often served with boiled potatoes, but we skipped that since we had the knedliky.

The recipe said to serve it with a glass of beer, so I poured a Czech BOOM Böhmerwald’s Majesty. It was unusually malty-sweet. I'm not sure how they got so much residual sugar without the yeast finishing their meal and exploding the bottle. I'm glad they succeeded.

The leftover knedliky is said to make a good breakfast cubed and fried with eggs in the morning. I think I will be having eggs for breakfast.

Both recipes are at the end of Noele's blog entry.

Eclectic Asian at Brooklyn's Talde

This weekend we spent some time in New York helping Noele get to her semester abroad in Prague. Yes, that was tough, but we are excited for her. On one of the nights, we took Noele, our older daughter Anna and her housemate to dinner in Brooklyn at Talde. Anna picked it using our tried and true method of searching restaurants by rating and picking the one we haven't been to.

Talde was a delight. While we waited at the bar for our table, we had an odd round of drinks that the bartender helped each of us pick: a seltzer with a splash of cranberry, a Sorachi Ace from Brooklyn Brewery, a lychee martini, an Alsatian wine, and the showpiece, a watermelon margarita decorated with a watermelon slice dipped in black lava salt. This should have been a hint of the meal to come.

Dinner was an equally odd pan-Asian mix with American twists. For example, we had a pad thai dish that included crispy oysters and bacon. Yes, bacon. And our Singapore noodles included corn and lobster. The food was both interesting and delicious. We would highly recommend Talde.

Olympics Day 3: Traditional English Breakfast

Yesterday we picked up a few coffees to extend the international fun. From Starbucks, we got the Brazil Peaberry Yellow Bourbon. From Peet's we got the New Guinea Highlands, Costa Rica, and Kenya Auction Lot, which I'm drinking right now. We were surprised that Starbucks didn't have more variety, and that they only had pre-packaged beans.

The Kenyan beans were notably shiny. We ground and brewed them the way we usually do, using half a scoop per cup. I expected strong aromas, but the cup lacked any aroma. The flavor started out watery, but finished strong and bitter with a taste of iron.

When we were in London last year we enjoyed the traditional English breakfast. Gail made one this morning including eggs, bacon, sausage, fried potatoes and tomato. This is sometimes called a fry-up for obvious reasons. Look how nicely the eggs came out of the pan. The most unusual part of this breakfast was the tomato. That was an excellent sweet addition to the saltiness of the sausage and bacon. Looks like I'm developing a taste for sweet-salty.

The traditional English breakfast is supposed to be a hearty, "full" breakfast with eggs, two meats, and various side dishes. The potatoes and tomatoes are very common, as are beans. We decided to skip the beans thinking our intestines were sufficiently full of cabbage.

Bacon and Egg Breakfast in a Muffin Tin

Gail stumbled upon a recipe for making bacon and eggs in a muffin tin. Here is the delicious result on our new Mickey Mouse plates. The recipe comes from this video from RecipeCards.