Yummies for Breakfast - Taters and Curried Eggs

Howdy there. Despite my relatively busy schedule, I (Iain) am determined to make up for my dearth of posting during March and most of April by posting a lot right now. So now I think I bring you one of my specialties, perfected by repetition: eggs and potatoes for breakfast. And yes, I know I've been posting a lot of potatoey posts lately - that'll change, but for now enjoy them!

Breakfast Taters

Ingredients
5 potatoes
1 large white onion
4 cloves garlic
About a tablespoon of canola oil
Seasonings (see variations below)
Salt
Black Pepper

Music Listened To:
Matt Molloy's most excellent album, The Stony Steps

Procedure:

1. Prep the potatoes: cut into a shape of your choice. My favorite one is almost certainly the 1/2 in by 1/2 in square-ish shape (about 1/8 thick). Other favorites are the 1/8 in by 1/2 in strip and the disc (possibly the easiest to cut, and works well if your dealing with small potatoes). Also dice the onion and mince the garlic.


2. Heat the oil in a skillet and add the onion. Saute for a minute, then go ahead and add the potatoes with about a clove of the garlic. Add salt and pepper. Set the heat to medium. Stir occasionally and cook for about 15-20 minutes until the potatoes start getting soft.

3. Add your seasonings from the set of options below:

The Classic: Rosemary! Simple, yet delicious, and it goes well with the garlic.
The Red Classic: Like above, except add a good couple teaspoons of paprika before taking the potatoes off the heat.
Scarborough Faire: Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Hehehe.
Illegal in Arizona: Bad joke. Cumin, chili powder and either a diced red chili or cayenne powder.
Curried: Instead of oil in step one, use butter and add a teaspoon of turmeric before you add anything else. When you get to this stage, add curry powder and either a diced red chili or cayenne.


4. Time to make them crispy! Some recipes will tell you to make the potatoes crispy at the beginning and then cook them through. What I find is that this makes the potatoes generally soggy and un-crispified. That's why now, once the potatoes are already edible, we crank up the heat to maximum, add a little extra oil and get ready to scream "shut up!" at your smoke detector if it's as over-sensitive as ours. Start stirring nearly constantly. All the moist residue on the outside of the potatoes should start to evaporate and the outsides should start to brown. When most of the potatoes have been browned, you're good! Serve em up!


Curried Eggs

The process for this is rather simple, but I still wanted to share it with you. Heat some butter in your skillet and add to it a few shakes of turmeric and a couple shakes of curry powder. Spread the turmeric butter around so that the butter turns a bright orange or yellow. Crack your eggs into the skillet and immediately shake some salt, pepper and a couple more shakes of curry powder. Once the whites start to solidify on the top, flip the eggs and cook either just a second (over easy), for about 20-40 seconds (over medium, oh yes, that elusive over medium) or a good minute or two (over well). Serve em up!

Aerarbran Stew

Hello denizens of the internet! My post of a na latha (of the day anns a Ghaidhlig, which I am speaking in for no good reason) is a little bit dorky. Today, I bring you the best in regional foods of regions that don't exist!

Perhaps I should explain myself. Here at Yummies Kitchen, we do more than just cook. All three of us are also writers of fiction, and all of our works deal with fictional cultures. The other day, a thought struck us: what do they eat in these places? And then we decided to answer that question by cooking their food!

The culture I was exploring that created this dish is based in a forest with flora and fauna greatly resembling the North Woods. That means there were such things as edible roots, cherries, wild rice and mushrooms, which is exactly what I decided to make this dish out of. Exactly half of us were skeptical of combining these things (Emily and half of me) and the other half were really enthusiastic about it (Bozzie and the other half of me). It actually turned out better than I could have hoped, and the results caused Emily to say "I never would have thought it, but this turned out really well!"

Aerarbran Stew with Cherries and Wild Rice

Ingredients
3 cloves garlic
1 white onion
1 turnip
1 large potato
5 mushrooms
2/3 cup wild rice
1/2 cup rice
2/3 cup dried sour cherries
2 cups Veggie broth
1 tbs butter
salt and pepper

Materials
Knife and Cutting board
Medium-large skillet
Lid that fits over skillet
Wooden Spoon

Music Listened To
Amal and the Night Visitors was playing on MPR, I believe

1. Chop the onion and garlic. Peel the turnip and cube both the turnip and the potato. Slice the mushrooms.

2. Sautee the garlic and onions over low-med heat until translucent. They should taste generally sweet before proceeding.

3. Add turnip and potato. Add the broth, rice, wild rice, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and simmer 5-10 minutes.

4. Add the cherries and mushrooms. Simmer 10-15 minutes, until the rice is soft enough to eat.


It's really quite a simple recipe, when it comes down to it, but it turned out delicious. It can work either as a main course, or you could have it alongside other dishes. Perhaps you may want to try it for your Christmas dinner, side by side with your favorite savories (or your fave saves as I have just decided I like to call them).

And, as is our philosophy at Yummies!, don't just do it by the book! Improvise a little! I was thinking that next time I'd try to get some wild mushrooms instead of button or crimini. Maybe you're more carnivorous than me, so try putting some white meat in it! Or maybe a splash or white wine? The choice is yours!

We now close with the prayer of thanks I came up with on the bus knowing one would be required:

We thank the forest
We thank the earth
for our food
and for our birth.

Latkes!

Ok. So basically what happened is that I didn't get to make latkes on Sunday (the day I'd planned because my friends came over to bake cookies and we had tons of fun but didn't finish up until almost 9 and we'd all eaten so many cookies/so much dough that something as heavy as latkes was completely out of the question. So instead I waited until Tuesday, which was the next day that the Ia(i)ns and I would be able to eat dinner together. This also happened to be the day Bozzie was making chili. He'd thought about cornbread as a side, but that just didn't happen.

Latkes go as deep into my memory as anything. I don't remember the first time we made them, but I have a number of images of my Dad standing in the kitchen, apron on, potato in one hand and grater in the other. (Ok, so sometimes we used the cuisinart too). Latkes are deep-fried, so there's no point in trying to make them healthy, but they taste amazing. Believe me. I'm not normally one to go for fried foods. Since latkes are a traditionally Jewish food, there are probably as many recipes as there are Jews in the world. This is the one my family uses. Happy Hanukkah!

Potato Latkes

Ingredients
Note: This recipe is given in proportions rather than exact amounts. The numbers in parentheses are what I used, and I made about 20 latkes from the batch. Each person ate about 3-4 and we had leftovers.

• Potatoes(6 medium)
• 1 onion for every 2 potatoes (3 medium)
• 1 egg for every 1 potato (6)
• 1/4 cup flour for every potato potatoes(1 1/2 cups)
• 1/4 tsp salt for each potato (1 1/2 tsp)
• Black pepper. Lots.
• Ditto on the canola oil

Procedure

• Put up a pot of water to boil
• Scrub the potatoes. You can peel them if you like, but I wouldn't suggest it. Grate them into little bits like hashbrowns. You can use a food processor, but, as my Great Grandma Rhea from what is now Belarus said "Latkes are no good unless they have a little bit of knuckle in them." (Apparently this phrase was not her invention--I've heard it tossed around by other Jewish grandmothers).
• Parboil the potatoes for about 5 minutes. You don't need them to be completely soft, but you want them to get cooked enough that they run no risk of tasting like raw potato once finished. You may have to do this in batches, depending on how many potatoes you have.
• Meanwhile, grate the onions and stick them into a large mixing bowl
• Drain the potatoes into a colander, rinse with lots of cold water, and squeeze out the excess moisture. I found the method for this to be picking up handfuls and squeezing them repeatedly, then tossing them in the mixing bowl.
• Throw in the eggs, flour, salt and pepper, and mix well. It'll look pretty gooey and white at this point, most likely. That's a good thing.
• Get the oil going. I pour 1/4-1/2 inch depth on the bottom of the skillet and the way I test its readiness is by throwing in a little tiny piece of latke. When it starts sizzling, you're in business.
• Using a spoon (or whatever really) scoop latke mix from the bowl and throw it into the skillet. I usually do three at a time. Let them sizzle along and press them down a bit with a spatula or spoon. The time will vary wildly, and so will the temperature you need to keep the skillet on, because the oil keeps getting hotter. When it's nicely browned on one side, flip it and let it cook until it seems done on the other side. Taste the first one to make sure it doesn't need more salt. If the batter seems too thin, add some flour.
• When the latkes come out of the skillet, have a plate layered with paper towels ready so they can drain. Once they've drained a bit, it's a good idea to put them into an oven on "warm" until it's time to eat. You can cook all of the batter and reheat the leftovers in the oven (a microwave will do too, but that doesn't lend the nice crispy quality of an oven or toaster oven). You can also store batter in the fridge for a few days.
• For the record, applesauce is a much better accompaniment for latkes than chili, but chili worked surprisingly well. Some people like sour cream on top. I'm not really sure why. In fact, I'm not really sure why people like sour cream on top of anything....