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!

Sloppy Bozzies

Good evening! I would like to share with you tonight, or today, depending on your time zone, a childhood favorite of mine adapted for the particular circumstance of Iain and I being both under pacts of vegeterianism and, for him, an abstinence from high fructose corn syrup. Thuswise, this dish became an experiment for me in slow-cooking a hearty and manly all-vegetable dish. For these were the days of the MAN HOUSE, when Emily had left and we had yet to reconvene the Boshenke household in Chicago.

Iain taking over the keyboard for a minute here. This dish was a really fun collaboration, and I might actually say I enjoy it more than the original! My main contribution aside from sous chef/consultant was the pan-fried french fries, which is a lovely side I recommend coupling many-a-dish with. These are pretty different from the chips of my fish and chips recipe, so ready your taste buds!

Sloppy Bozzies

Ingredients
3 Tablespoons veggie oil
2 celery ribs
1 onion
1 bell pepper
6 garlic cloves
4 cups red and black beans
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon cumin
salt and pepper
1 Thai pepper
1/2 cup beer
1/2 cup ketchup (OH NO!! Iain had lenten vows of no high fructose corn syrup, and our ketchup had it in it. Here's what we substituted: 1 tomato diced, 1-2 tsp cider vinegar, several glubs Worchester, 2 Tablespoons corn meal, 1 Tablespoon tomato paste)

Music: Green Day, hehe

Procedure.


1. Finely dice celery, onion, and bell pepper, and garlic.
2. Cook over medium heat in an oiled wok or large skillet: onion, peppers, garlic, celery, beans, and salt and pepper! Have this going for 10-15 minutes, until onions are softened and nicely translucent.
3. Add beer, Worchester, and ketchup (or ketchup substitute mixture). Partially cover and simmer for 15 or so minutes, but if you have longer, let the heat be lower and cook it for longer. I think this dish would be even nicer if it had more time to soak in the flavor.

Pan-fried Garlicky Fries
Ingredients
About 1 1/2 russet potatoes per devourer (or 2 if the devourers are bottomless pits)
About as many cloves of garlic as there are potatoes
A couple sprigs worth of rosemary
About 3/4 cup canola oil (for 4 potatoes)
salt

Procedure:

1. Alright ladies and gents, the key to making these fries with maximum deliciousity is to properly season your oil first. About 1-2 hours before you begin frying, put your oil in a jar and add the garlic (minced) and rosemary (broken if fresh) and let it sit. Once in a while it helps to stir it, but the main idea is to let the oil soak up the garlicky and rosemary-y juices.

2. Proper fries procedure! This step is nearly identical to the chips of my fish and chips recipe. Cut up your potatoes into whatever shape you want and let them soak in a bowl of cold water for about ten minutes. Once the time is up, drain em and dry em!

3. Skillet time! Pour about a half cup of your oil into your skillet and set it to high heat. Make sure NOT to put in your garlic and rosemary with the oil - you do yourself no favors by burning these tasty morsels to a crisp! Add about 2 potatoes worth of the fries to the oil and let them sizzle! Keep a close eye on them, and check their undersides frequently. Once they're starting to turn a crispy golden brown, flip them using a spatula or your preferred flipping utensil. Let them go another few minutes, adding some garlic and rosemary right before you're ready to take them out.


4. THEY'RE BROWNED! TAKE THEM OUT!! TAKE THEM OUT!! Phew, that was close - that one looks a little blackened. Good thing you have me to keep an eye on you. Place them in a bowl or on a plate with a paper towel to absorb the runoff oil. Put the place somewhere warm, like inside an oven set to warm, perhaps. Add the rest of your oil and fry up the second batch. These will go faster than the first, so be ready to flip them faster, but still follow the same general procedure as above.


5. Aaaannd, that's it! You're done! Serve them up with some sloppy bozzies and enjoy!


I hope you enjoyed our joint post this evening (it was afternoon when we started it) as much as we enjoyed cooking it. Well, I guess that'll only happen if you cook it. So cook it! Tada! I'm hungry - I'm going to go make food now. Tata!

Foccacia!

Ok, so call me a blog hog, but the boys are being lazy and I have ambition to post. It's winter, and winter is major bread-baking season for me.

This particular baking adventure of sorts came up last weekend when I watered my little rosemary plant in the living room and the smell made me smile. Plus, since my little rosemary plant was getting sorta big, I wanted to prune it. I added the caramelized onion topping purely because we had leftover caramelized onions from another meal; you are in no way obligated to caramelize onions specifically for this bread.

Focccacia is sometimes referred to as a flatbread, but I don't see it that way. There's yeast in it, and it puffs up significantly by the time it's done. It's awesome plain, dipped in olive oil, or sliced in half to serve as sandwich bread. This recipe came originally from the Rebar Cookbook, but I've altered it to suit my purposes (namely, a bag of whole wheat flour close to expiration and a consequent effort to deplete it).

Two-Topping Whole Wheat Foccacia

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cups wrist-temperature water
  
• 1 TBS yeast
• 1/2 tsp. sugar
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 1/2 cups white flour
• 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (note: you could try using more whole wheat flour/less white, but for a light bread like foccacia I preferred to stick with mostly white)
• olive oil to drizzle over the top
  
• 5 minced garlic cloves
• 2-3 TBS minced fresh rosemary (you could use dried, but fresh is better)
• salt (I used sea salt-- a coarser one like rock or kosher would probably be better)
• black pepper
  
• 1/4 cup caramelized onion
• 1/4 cup feta cheese crumbles

Procedure

• Put the water into a large mixing bowl and sprinkle the yeast and sugar in. Let it sit until fragrant and foamy, about 5 minutes.
• Mix in the salt and olive oil.
• Add flour one cup at a time (I alternated white and wheat). If the dough gets too stiff to mix in the bowl, don't worry about it. Just dump it onto a floured counter and start the kneading process.
• Knead for 8-10 minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic. Clean out the bowl of any clinging bits of flour and coat it with a thin layer of olive oil.
• Dump the kneaded dough into the oiled bowl, roll the dough so all surface gets oiled, and let it rise, covered, for 1- 1 1/2 hours, until it's about doubled in size.
  
• Punch the dough down and let it rise until it doubles again (this should take less time than the first rise). This is a good time to mince your garlic and rosemary.
  
• Pre-heat the oven to 350°F and oil a cookie sheet (preferably one with short sides-- but we're not talking a brownie pan here). Dump the dough onto the sheet and coax it outward to meet the edges of the sheet.
• Toppings! Drizzle olive oil generously (or not-so-generously, depending on your preference) over the surface of the bread, and follow it with some salt and pepper. This is where the foccacia splits, if you're choosing to follow the two-flavor recipe. Sprinkle the garlic and rosemary on 2/3 of the foccacia and the onion and feta on the other 1/3. (Obviously you could do it half and half too-- I just had appropriate proportions for 2/3-1/3).
  
• Use your fingertips to poke little dents all over the bread and let it rise for about 15 minutes.
• Bake for 20-30 minutes or until the bread is puffy and the garlic is golden.

Also...off topic, but in the interest of full disclosure, and because Bozzie wrote a pointed comment on my last post, I will just say that I am also writing a fantasy story of sorts and the stuffed eggplant (as well as any other middle eastern/Mediterranean recipes I might put up here) are based on my city of Gabrilim. But I also love middle eastern food for its own sake, so this isn't to say that I wouldn't be cooking middle eastern without my story. The story just gave me a little nudge in that direction. Anyway, enjoy the foccacia!