french fry frittata ( or "tortilla espanol")

You will be hard pressed to find a french fry frittata on any menu anywhere.  You may even find it difficult to find a good one on the web.  We shall then assume that this post should be considered important.  I am not a newbie to the frittata/tortilla español world.  I have been honing my technique for many years.  I'm not sure what's traditional in Spain and/or Italy, and I do not care.  This is what I did and may continue to do in the future.

     
Start with potatoes.  Slice them, and then julienne them.  One could push this idea even further and make shoe string fries.  I may try that in the future.

Good french fries are actually moderately difficult to make.  You want to fry them twice.  You fry them once in medium hot oil.  This is known among fry masters as "blanching" the potatoes.  Blanching the potatoes forces some of the starch out.  When you remove your fries from the oil, they should be limp but not golden brown.  The fries pictured above are actually on their second frying.  The exuded starch on the outside of the fries will caramelize during the second, high heat frying, which will result in a crispy and colorful french fry.  Salt your french fries as soon as you remove them from their second frying.

These are the fries that I added to the beaten eggs.  I ate one or two of them to see if they were any good.  They were.

The fries are salty, but you'll also want to salt the beaten eggs.  Eggs taste very good when properly salted.  When under-salted, they aren't all that tasty.

You'll want to put quite a generous amount of olive oil into the seasoned cast iron skillet before adding the eggs and fries mixture.  If you want, you can start cooking the eggs on the stove top, on low heat, before putting the whole mess into a low oven, like 250 degrees.  In Spain, tortillas may be traditionally cooked entirely on the stove top, not in the oven.  The secret is low heat.  You do not want to burn the eggs.  The other secret is that bit about a generous amount of olive oil.  When you put the egg mixture into the skillet, the oil should come up around the sides and pool on top.  

This is the finished french fry frittata or tortilla español.  Let it come to room temperature before eating it.  It's better that way.  You can also chill it.  I cut a slice of this one and put it into a baguette from Woodstar cafe.  I buttered the bread and spread a small amount of ketchup on the bread.  It was good.

Fried Rice (the movie)

If you're planning on making a stir fry on Wednesday night, for example, plan on making too much steamed rice.  Back in the day, an all-around helper at China Cafe Express, the chinese restaurant, housed in an X-Taco Bell, where I toiled for many a year under the amazing Simon "Shoe," one day I was allowed to make the fried rice in the enormous wok.  This instructional video shows you what I learned on that day, probably ten years ago, but in this case on a mini scale.  Enjoy...oh, and enjoy the song demo I wrote and recorded back in my China Cafe days...

how I take my eggs these days

 

Hash Brown Patties, Fast Food Style

So, I've always wanted to make McDonald's-style hash browns at home, you know, patties, but I've never really known how to do it, or rather, haven't really cared that much about learning how, since any old breakfast potatoes are usually good enough, so it was only by accident that I learned how to make hash brown patties.  The hash browns in my last film, "Breakfast with the Pixies," however terrible they look, were actually the prototype for these babies.

I don't really recommend making these at home.  The amount of work that is involved is not for the casual breakfast cook.  Nonetheless, this is what you do:

I happen to have a cheese grater that can shred a potato really finely.  Once shredded, I plopped my potatoes into a bowl and poured boiling water from the kettle over them.  This "blanches" them and removes some of their starch.    After blanching them, drain them and squeeze them dry.  You want them dry so that the patty doesn't splatter when you drop it into very hot oil.  Grease burns on the forearms are not for the home cook.    

 
Salt the potatoes and form the patties.  Easy.  Because they are so finely shredded, your patties should hold their shapes without the need for a binder.  Right.  That's done.  Now it's time to cook them.  Twice.  

Using the same technique I use for french fries, I first deep fried the patties in medium hot oil.  If you haven't blanched them enough, the remaining starch will quickly turn your patty dark brown, like molasses color.  OK, pull the potatoes out of the medium hot oil when they're getting a little color and set them out on a paper bag.  Then crank up the heat under the oil as high as you possibly can and finish your patties.  When they look like perfect hash brown patties, pull them out and set them again on a paper bag to sop up some of the oil.  

Apply ketchup.  EAt.

Breakfast with the Pixies

Hey all you sports fans out there, I got something to tell you!  The Packers won the Super Bowl and one day later I nearly carved my finger off with a bread knife!  Are the two related?  Of course they're not related.  Next on the agenda is this spastic cooking video I made last week sometime.  You've heard about Breakfast with the Beatles?  Well, this is Breakfast with the Pixies.  The recipe is "get bombed on Friday night and then cook breakfast the next morning while cranking out Trompe le Monde."  If you want to hold a seance in the middle or dick around with an ouija board, hey, that's your prerogative, right?  In the meantime, please enjoy the vid.  And if you're on the old MugBook, go ahead transport your web ass to the original link.  Peace!

French Fries and Eggs

In England it's typical to eat french fries with your eggs.  I think it's probably typical in some parts of France, too, you know, an omelet with french fries is pretty common.  In America, though, we usually isolate our french fries to plates with burgers or dogs on them.  I'm not sure why this is.  In any case, french fries are a great breakfast item, especially if you are hungover, which is exactly what I was when I made this breakfast at two in the afternoon yesterday.  I'd finally summoned the motivation to make some food, and I knew that the potato in my pantry had to be included.  Would it be hash browns or french fries?  

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I keep a 12" cast iron skillet in my pantry which is always full of oil for deep frying purposes.  Now, in the past I shirked the fancy pants, high-end method of making fries because I thought it was unnecessary.  Now, however, I do not.  The key to good french fries is frying them twice, first on medium heat, then later on the highest flame you can get.  Here's how you do it:

FRENCH FRIES

Slice your potato lengthwise.  You can slice them thickly or thinly; that's up to you.  Then, when you have your sheets, grab a stack three or four (or more if you can) and slice them into strips.  These will be your fries.  

Next, rinse and dry your strips.  Dry them thoroughly so the hot oil doesn't go ballistic when you drop them into the pan.  When the fries are somewhat limp, scoop them out of the oil and onto a paper bag.  The paper bag will be unfit for the recycling bin after this.  Sorry, Planet Earth.  Crank the flame up to high, and let the oil come up to temperature.

When the oil is wicked hot, return your fries to it.  Here, use your eyes and your nose.  They will tell you when your fries are done.  When they are crispy and have nice color, pull them out of the oil and immediately salt them.  Eat ASAP.  


This method will produce very good fries.  If you just slice them and throw them into hot oil, you will get an edible product, but the product will also tend to go limp and get soggy.

biscuits and gravy

If you are among the 2% of my readership that has viewed nearly every post, you will know that it has been over a year since I did biscuits and gravy.  The weather is very nice today, or it appears to be through the mini blinds that are all around me.  Mini blinds are all over this planet, but do we take stock of them?  Do we grant them the rightful presence that is their due?  I am not sure what the answers to those questions are, but I suspect that if, where every mini blind hangs there hung instead a splattered plate of hot biscuits and gravy, we would notice them.  This post should really be called "gravy," because it's the gravy that I'm most interested in.  

The night before I made this, I was saying that there is nothing in the world that I want, that I cannot envision a future for myself, and that I would be happier if I were dead.  Because nothingness is so difficult to understand, who is to say that nothingness isn't blissful?  Whatever.  I woke up in the morning feeling very good, celebratory even, and so, to match my mood, I made biscuits and gravy.  Notice the citrus on the plate.  It's crucial.

I am not showing the biscuits because I have not yet found a biscuit recipe that produces biscuits that satisfy me.  These biscuits are good, but they are not good enough.  The gravy is also somewhat different than the gravy that might pop into your mind upon hearing the words biscuits and gravy.  It is not the thick opaque substance that passes for gravy in establishments such as the Whatley diner.  That gravy happens when milk is added to a powdery substance.  This gravy happens when you start from scratch.  To make this gravy I did this:


Since I couldn't find a tube of premade breakfast sauasage at the co-op, I had to start from scratch: ground pork.  The ground pork I found was fatty, but not fatty enough.  So, to remedy that, I purchased a slab of uncut bacon, diced some of it, and added that to the ground pork along with two dried chilies and some dried sage leaves that I'd ground up with my mortar and pestle.  But you don't have to do all of this.  You can just buy breakfast sausage that's already seasoned.  

 
 The thing you want to look for in your sausage is fat.  Fat is the thing.  When you cook the sausage (on medium heat), you want a good amount of fat because you will use that fat to make the gravy.  When your sausage is fully cooked, pull it out of the pan and put it aside in a bowl, leaving the fat in the pan.  Then, in that fat you want to cook some flour.  If there are two tablespoons of fat, you'll add two tablespoons of flour: it's a one-to-one ratio of flour to fat.  Cook the flour until you notice a change in the color and the smell.  You don't want to taste raw flour in your gravy.  Once you've accomplished this, you can then start whisking in some room temperature milk.  You can use whole milk or skim milk; either one will do.  Continue adding milk until the gravy reaches the desired consistency.  Then return the sausage to the gravy, and there you have it.  Taste it and see if it needs salt.  Then smother a biscuit with it.  

You will want an orange or some other citrus fruit to finish off this meal.  Trust me. 




 

breakfast tostada

Made these breakfast tostadas yesterday.  Delicious.  Fuck!  Excuse me for a moment...take this time to think about the things you will do wrong today: use a shovel instead of a rake to move wet leaves; drive a car with a cup of coffee on the hood; make a tent out of propane: I am back.  Had to run inside and take care of some business.  Right.  My thoughts about variations on Mexican themes: I used to be anti-fusion, still am, really, hate the fusion movement in cooking because, honestly, the dishes usually end up being violations against good taste.  Not that the food tastes bad, but really, what's the point of stuffing Korean BBQ into a four tortilla?  Or Mexican ravioli?  Just satisfy yourself with making a good tamale.   Just eat your BBQ and get on with it.

Really, I shouldn't be against fusion.  I mean, I understand how the world of food goes round and round.  Cultures share, steal, dominate, push their agendas onto other cultures, trade, borrow, and so forth, and food changes with time.  We eat whatever foods are available, and our diets are a consequence of our situation, our station, our location in time and on the planet.  Still, this fusion movement reminds me of someone who has read Darwin, but someone who has misunderstood evolution.  Foods and food cultures change as they will, not as we will them to.  Some fusion chefs just push too hard.  The audiences love it.  Some people want to ram Tibetan foods into pierogi.  Tibetan pierogi.  Whatever.

  
If break these breakfast tostadas down into their component parts, it becomes pretty obvious that I have not reinvented the tostada; in fact, this is a pretty traditional tostada, whatever that means: deep fried, stone-ground yellow corn tortilla (CRUNCH!), mashed up beans (with lots of added fat; I used butter, not traditional lard), cheese, scrambled egg (wanted runny yolks, fucked up), and sauteed KALE.  It's really only the kale that pushes this recipe into a somewhat new-ish terrain.  I don't know how big Mexicans are on kale.  Not that big, I imagine.  Small on kale.   

Steak and Eggs

My mom made flank steak last night.  I made steak and eggs this morning.  For brunch.  My dad got wind of this, so I made him a small plate.  He added the gum and said, "I better see this on the internet soon."  Anyway, I'm in the Village Market coffee shop in South Haven, Michigan, taking advantage of their wireless and paying some bills.  I need to run because my baby wants to do some shopping in Holland, but I need to say one thing about steak and eggs before I leave this coffee shop with its scenic vista of a parking lot: you should only make steak and eggs when there is left-over steak in your fridge.  It's obscene to make steak in the morning just so you can have steak and eggs.    

dad's plate

my plate: note the expert hash brown

soft boiled eggs with fresh peas

Eggs are one of those foods that seem easy to cook, and they are easy to cook, but to cook them really well, well, that's less easy.  Chefs and food writers always talk about eggs, about doing them perfectly.  Alice Waters talks about it; M.F.K. Fisher talks about it; probably even the portly Emeril Lagasse talks about it.  I talk about it, too.  Or rather, I talk about it when I feel like talking about it.  Today I feel like it.

      
I eat eggs a lot.  I don't have any problems with that.  I don't care what the heath experts say about eating eggs.  The health experts are constantly changing their minds.  One day eggs are bad, the next day they're a super food.  For me, eggs are a super food all year round, except that, in summer, eggs should be soft boiled to be super.  They should be soft boiled, broken up with a fork, and garnished with whatever fresh herbs you've got in your garden.  This is how you eat eggs in the summer.  Not over easy, not over medium, not deviled, soft boiled.  Otherwise, they're too heavy, too buttery.  In the summer, eggs should be pert and light.  That's just how I feel.

I know I just said that soft boiled eggs should be garnished with fresh herbs, and that's true, but if you've got some sweet 'n tender peas in your garden, well, there's no reason why you shouldn't slice up those peas and garnish your eggs with them, too.  This scant pile of snow peas was my first harvest of the season, and I sauteed them in butter and finished them with chopped dill.  Raw, the peas still tasted a little "green."  But cooked, ahh, when I cooked them (gently) their sweetness really sang.     

Midnight Special #2

Last night I needed a sandwich before bed...

 partially "savaged" sandwich pile

The bottom tier is a grilled cheese sandwich.  The grilled cheese sandwich was then topped with shredded Genoa salami and shredded cabbage, both of which I sauteed.  Then, on top of that, plop went an egg, and on top of that, like a little poof on a winter hat, some baby arugula.  I scarfed it down and went to bed.  

This is my second Midnight Special.  Click here for the first.  

Bon appetite