UnRecipe: An Egg-splosion of Flavor!

Don't give me that look of, "...but Easter was, like, FOREVER ago." You still have more than a few brightly-hued hard-boiled eggs sitting in your fridge, staring at you, begging you for a Special Purpose. Begone, glazed-over stares into the fridge! I present to you the BEA Sandwich. (Bacon Egg Avocado). *Boom* (that's me, dropping the mike on the stage and walking away)

Beautiful eggs that I couldn't bear to crack. OK, I eventually gave in - Photo by Wasabi Prime

OMG a Recipe: Greeting Spring With AsparaGUSTO

I get a little crazy around asparagus season. Maybe because it's literally like tasting Spring. When you're eating asparagus in season and it's not costing, like, $8 a pound because it was barged over from a continent away, you know the cold weather season is coming to an end. Things are growing again, leaves will start to bud, flowers are ready to bloom. Asparagus isn't in season for very long, you just enjoy the weird, alien-looking stalks for the time it's available, but you definitely feel a change in the air. Celebrating asparagus season is like you're actively taking a role in how our plates will be having a delightful, dramatic makeover. And yes, your pee will smell weird. Viva Asparagusto!

Once more, with Asparagusto! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

OMG a Recipe: Crusty Like a Pie Shell, and This Post

It's safe to assume it's mostly bloggers who read other blog posts, so when I say this, it's not for shock value so much as Can I get an Amen, fellow blogger sistahs and brothas? This post took me almost a year to go live. There was no catastrophic human tragedy. The rights to edible food wasn't in litigation hell, being argued over by teams of overpriced Hollywood lawyers. The recipe wasn't even all that complicated -- it's just a vegetable quiche, for heaven's sake! But you know how it goes -- you put together what you know will be a tasty seasonal post, take a million photos, and then fall behind on photo editing and the recipe loses timeliness. So I'm making up for lost time, giving this long-overdue, crusty post about building the perfect quiche its long overdue spotlight.

Happy First Birthday, Year-Old Quiche Photos! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Mixed Plate: Eggs-actly the Book You've Been Waiting For

There's a Sriracha-themed cookbook, there's likely more than one bacon cookbook, so it was only a matter of time before someone not only did an all-egg cookbook, but one that took advantage of the meme-riff on Portlandia's "Put a Bird on it" skit. I give you, Lara Ferroni's "Put an Egg On It."

Pasta carbonara "nests" inspired by Lara Ferroni's new book - Photo by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: Eating Easter and the Sacrilicious Mushroom Log

I realize Easter Sunday was yesterday, but since this isn't a particularly traditional Easter meal, I'm posting it on a non-traditional day. I wasn't raised in a particular faith, just your typical Godless Heathen Asian Household. But we did dye eggs for Easter, which was something I really enjoyed. Even that acrid, sour smell that permeated the house as you'd drop the PAAS dye tablets into coffee mugs full of heated vinegar -- I'd dye those eggs like a boss, to get them as saturated with as much color as possible, knowing we'd be cursed with rainbow-hued egg salad sandwiches for a week. I don't dye eggs anymore, but I continue to hold eggs in high regard, since they are a pretty magical and wonderful food. So Happy Belated Easter -- let's Put an Egg On It!

Happy Easter - put an egg (or two) on it - Photo by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: Welcome to Egg-Thunderdome, Extra Bacon Please

"Two men enter. One man leaves." So sayeth the law of Thunderdome, a post-apocalyptic view of a savage future ruled by Tina Turner in a wicked chain mail evening gown with Aqua Net hair up to the heavens. And there's Mel "Mad Max" Gibson running around somewhere in all this, but when it comes to Thunderdome, it's all about Aunty Entity and her rag-tag band of pure crazytown. Dystopia met suburbia a few weeks ago when I made breakfast for a friend and created Egg Thunderdome, where many were sacrified in the almighty name of Breakfast. We don't need another hero, we just want some freakin' poached eggs.

Two eggs enter, one and a half left! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I had promised a homemade breakfast for a friend and she was good enough to make the trek out to Middle of Nowheresville Duvall. She was game to have anything, which meant a MacGyver-like meal of whatever the CSA box had delivered that week. I made a crazy vegetable hash of onions, rainbow chard, mushrooms and spinach. Not particularly inspired, but we both love our veggies and they were delicious with a roasted pepper sauce and some eggs. One notable ingredient I'd never worked with before were sunchokes, aka Jerusalem artichokes. They're funny little root vegetables, apparenty related to the daisy -- the plants bloom with a flower that looks just like a yellow daisy. They look like a cross between ginger and potatoes, stubby little root-knots that need a really good scrub to get the dirt off, and they can be eaten raw or cooked. The flavor is similar to an artichoke, sort of mossy and fresh, but with a root vegetable texture. I've had them sliced thin and fried, made into sunchoke chips, which are wonderful snacks. I didn't have any potatoes, so I used the sunchokes the way you would the typical tuber, cleaned, diced and pan-seared. They were mixed in with the vegetable hash and softened. In this mix, their flavor wasn't particularly pronounced, but I didn't have many sunchokes to work with. If I wind up with more than a handful, I'd definitely want to try something else, like maybe shredding them, forming into pancakes and frying them up. I think the artichoke flavor would be more noticeable and they would taste perfect with a lemon-herb aioli. But we'll save that thought for another meal -- Thunderdome waits for no one.

Breakfast hash with CSA goodness and sunchokes - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Stuff got Real when I was trying some different methods to poach eggs. I know poaching eggs isn't difficult, it's a basic cooking method everyone should probably know, and while I've done it in the traditional low simmering water with vinegar, my poached eggs always look like a righteous mess. I've tried steaming eggs in oiled ramekins, letting indirect heat do the poaching -- this works, but you get oddly perfect shaped egg-pucks, since they form to the shape of the little bowls they cooked in. I've tried methods using the microwave, but that feels like Egg Deer Hunter -- sometimes it's fine, but sometimes it's a catastrophic mess, and that's stressful.

The low-heat, slow cooking method of sous vide has of course been all the rage these last few years, and for good reason, you get some really tender results from low temperature cooking. I looked at an old copy of Lucky Peach, the magazine put out by Momofuku's resident food-wizard, David Chang. He had this lovely article about slow-poached eggs. He described cooking the eggs in their shells using indirect heat, either a funky balancing act using double bowls in simmering water, or a steam basket. I tried the steam basket method but to Chang's point, he said it's hard to control the heat of the water on the stove -- you need really consistent low heat, like 60-65 degrees, which is crazy-low. My burners kept on their lowest setting, even using the steam basket, still overcooked the eggs for the most part. This is where Thunderdome came in -- several eggs entered the metal realm of battle, and very few made it to the breakfast plate. Not that the overcooked eggs were thrown out -- it just meant we had a bunch of soft-boiled eggs for the week.

This was by no means a failure. We still enjoyed oddly-cooked eggs over our breakfast hash, the meal was toasted with some lovely bubbles. I went for a straight-up raw egg yolk over my hash because I'm gangstah that way and it looked pretty for the photo. Despite the less-than-perfect results, it still got me thinking of other ways to slow-poach eggs in the shell without having a sous vide cooker. Heaven knows I don't need another gadget in an already overstuffed kitchen. I'm thinking of doing this again using a crock pot set to low, filled with water and a steamer basket set inside with some eggs. The worst that happens is I wind up with more soft-boiled eggs, but if it works, I'll definitely post the results. Consider Egg Thunderdome a work in progress!

Celebrating Egg Thunderdome in style, with classy bubbles - Photos by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: My Dinner With Cthulhu

It starts out simple enough, a basic craving for a basic dish... sear up some steak, fry a few eggs, an ad hoc hash of whatever vegetables are around... and then it gets weird. Downright Lovecraftian. And before you know it, a humble breakfast-for-dinner meal has a science fiction Chimera of your worst nightmares showing up on your plate, a culmination of humanity's anxious energy, a fear of the unknown... Hold fast, kids, you're Cookin' with Cthulhu.

Baked eggs with hash, before a mythological beast crashes the meal - Photo by Wasabi Prime

The desire to make steak, eggs and hash wasn't some culinary ritual to call up H.P. Lovecraft's creature of the eponymous story, Call of Cthulhu. It just sort of  happened on a quick plating of leftovers, and I'm saving that photo for last because it's freaky-deaky, and I don't want it to ruin the telling of a genuinely tasty breakfast hash. Honestly, who wants some skeevy tentacle-faced winged leviathan muscling-in on your quiet meal at home? I'm pretty sure he wouldn't say "please" when asking for seconds. He'd just pulverize your sanity and leave you an empty husk of a human being while he threw on extra dashes of Sriracha on your serving of Brinner. He'd probably watch all your DVR-ed episodes of Glee and just delete everything before you saw them. He'd even drink all the OJ and just leave one swallow in the carton before slinking off back to R'lyeh like a total d-bag. Thanks for nothing, Cthulhu.

Brinner done right - with steak and bad-ass hash - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I just wanted to make a Bad-Ass Breakfast Hash. Yes, that's a thing. It's a delicious thing. The CSA had a lot to do with it, providing a bevvy of veggies to play with, but I found a nice combination of produce that makes for a delicious and colorful hash. I like to start building the perfect Bad-Ass Breakfast Hash with the perfect bad-ass base, which is of course: Bacon. A couple of slices rendered in a large pan on a burner set to medium-low. Get all that delicious swiny fat pulled out, it's liquid cooking gold. Remove the crispy slices and set aside, they'll get thrown back in later if you don't just eat them as you cook, which is totally understandable if you do. Toss in some diced red potatoes with the skin still on, let them get a nice browning with the bacon fat. Start building flavor with diced onions and let them sweat and slowly caramelize. The next vegetables are as much for color as they are for flavor -- bell peppers (red and yellow are best, as they're sweeter) and the chopped stalks of rainbow chard. You'll throw in the green leaves of the chard later, but the stalks are edible, they need extra cook time to get tender, and their color stays for the most part. It kind of reminds me of cooking rhubarb; you don't keep the intense color, but it won't brown, instead mellowing to a pastel color. I get a lot of crap for cooking Brown Food, and while there's some brown/neutral tones in this hash, the peppers and chard keep it pretty. Adding the chopped greens of the chard towards the end, just to wilt, keeps the hash  looking fresh. A nice addition for keeping the flavor bright is finely-chopped preserved lemon rind -- I know, not a super common ingredient, but if you feel the hankering to jar up some excess lemon with a ton of salt, just check out the We Can Portlandia That post about pickling everything. I have to say, I'm addicted to the use of preserved lemon rind. I don't always have fresh citrus to zest, but a jar of salted lemons is mightily convenient for these UnRecipe MacGyver meals that  often come together with little planning or grocery shopping.

The hash that makes you hollaback fo' more - Photos by Wasabi Prime

You can't have steak and eggs without steak, of course. I used a flank steak. It's one of my favorite cuts, just because it's got a nice flavor and there's never a doubt over which direction the grain of the meat goes. As long as you're slicing across the lines of the grain, you will not get a tough bite. Getting a nice sear in a pan, ideally in the rendered bacon fat, is a good start. You just want to cook it rare and it will continue to steam a little, wrapped in foil, resting while the hash is getting cooked. You could skip the steak altogether, just going with eggs and bad-ass breakfast hash, but I had a hankering for red meat. When the hash was done, I sliced up the end cuts of the flank and tossed that into the hash, just because I could.The center rare part of the steak was saved for thin slices to go with the finished eggs and hash. I cracked eggs into ramekins of hash, baked in the oven. It's kind of like a mix between poached and fried eggs; still runny but sunny-side up with the yolk staring at you. If there's any crisps of bacon left, sprinkle as a garnish.

Sunny, runny egg yolk, is there nothing better in the world? - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Despite all the Lovecraft pre-func on this post, it really wasn't until we had Brinner leftovers of steak, eggs and bad-ass breakfast hash that Cthulhu made an appearance. A lame attempt at being artsy, fanning out the reheated steak slices before topping everything with a couple of fried eggs had us staring right into the Face of Madness, before it was devoured by the Mouth of Madness. Such is the pitfall of our love of putting eggs on... well, everything. Call it Cthulhu, call it Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama, call it whatever you like. We just started into its terrifyingly mad sunny-side-up face and devoured the devourer of souls because dang, we were hungry.

Let's be honest, if this were the first photo, you'd have stopped reading the post - Food photo by Wasabi Prime





UnRecipe: Put a Bird's Egg On It

The Portlandia "Put a Bird On It" meme has certainly seen a lot of mileage, but I'd like to start a new, more delicious meme of Put a Bird's Egg On It. Seriously. It just makes food better. See...?

If you liked it then you shoulda put an egg on it - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Truthfully, I welcome any excuse to make pasta carbonara. I rather like saying "pasta carbonara" because it sounds far superior to "eggs n' bacon with noodles." Italians do scrappy leftovers with style, si? I actually made this heaping dish of happiness a while back, using some farm fresh eggs with ridiculously bright yellow yolks. If you ever have the opportunity to get a hold of fresh eggs, do so -- you'll notice the richness of the flavor and just the look of the yolks are eye-popping. Sunshine-yellow, creamy yolk-y goodness. Not that you can't enjoy this dish with grocery store eggs, but yowza, that color. Too pretty, right?

As you can tell, I'm all over the place on these posts in terms of when dishes were made -- the eggs were originally from Once in a Blue Moon Farm, out on Orcas Island, when we made our late spring trek out there. Even as hard-boiled eggs, they were delicious, enjoyed with some cured meat and fresh bread from the local bakery. Not that it's news to anyone, but the simplest high-quality ingredients can be all you need for a really good meal. And it doesn't need a lot of prep time. In the case of hard boiled eggs with some meat and cheese, the most amount of time spent is getting the water to boil, and that's plenty of time to slice up some things and pour yourself a glass of wine. You'll be on glass number two by the time the eggs are done.

Thanks for the nomz, chickens - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Another simple, but tried-and-true meal of enjoyment is, of course, Brinner. Breakfast for Dinner, as coined by the TV show, Scrubs. Maybe this term existed before, but no one relished it quite like the character Turk, who would celebrate with glee when his girl would make it. Maybe it's a guy thing. Or maybe it's the fact that there's a reason breakfast is the one meal that diners and greasy spoon restaurants serve it at all hours -- it just tastes really good. I had made a skillet hash of cubed ham, sweet potatoes, onions and whatever else we had in the crisper, cooked some bacon in the oven, and served it all up with fried eggs on top. All around 6pm on a Sunday night. It's kind of a lazy night. You know you have to go to work the next day and for most people, breakfast is really celebrated on the weekends, since you actually have the luxury of time to either make it or go out for a nice sit-down meal. So having fried eggs with hash for dinner is a nice way of saying, break the rules and enjoy the simple things. All thanks to putting a bird's egg on it.

Sunday Brinner - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Mixed Plate: Have a Holly Jolly Holiday Madhouse

Tis the season for holiday stress. Can you believe it's all descending upon us already? We all have those days where you feel like Chuck Heston, stranded on a planet that has inexplicably been overrun by sentient, British-accented apes, only to realize, OM Freakin' G, it's our own planet, and oh hey... is that Malcom McDowell under all that fake fur? But hey, it happens to the best of us, even C-dawg with his giant toothy grin and love of firearms. I don't have a grand finale set against a long, dystopic lonely beach with Lady Liberty's arm sticking up from the sand like a giant popsicle stick. Instead, I will deal with the pressures of a marathon holiday schedule the best way I know how -- pasta. And lots of it.

Take THAT, Salmonella - I ain't afraid of no food poisoning - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I didn't make the pasta from scratch. And this isn't a meal for anyone else but myself because these days, I'm very much on-the-go and dinner is often the only break in the day I can enjoy. So this becomes the cure for busy, stressful days, maning I want to do as little work as possible and reap the greatest returns in the smallest amount of time. It's the American Way, dammit. I don't really know why carbohydrate dishes inexplicably become that go-to dish to provide instant relief, they just do it. Like magic! And it doesn't even matter why a day was bad/busy/stressful, only that it wasn't anything serious, nobody died, the itching and burning will subside, and multiple arrests do not equal multiple convictions. Tomorrow, after all, is another day, as Miss Scarlett would say.

For many, pasta-nirvana is an ooey-gooey plate of macaroni and cheese (that's coming up!). Which I'd heartily agree if I wasn't the one making it, as it can take more than a few steps, and I needed comfort -- stat. My go-to pasta 911 dish that helps me crawl into my Hobbiton happy place after bad mojo is a basic pasta carbonara. Pasta, bacon, shreds of parmesan, lots of pepper, and a big ol' fat raw egg on top. Salmonella threat be damned, I'm not letting a food scare rain on my pity parade.

Pasta: heeere I come to save the daaaaaaaay! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

If that bad day inevitably multiplies into a bad week, made sure to follow with the same course of medical attention: pasta, cheese, a bit of booze, repeat as necessary. At the time, I had the added benefit of an issue of InStyle magazine arriving in the mail, so a rapid recovery was assured, especially with glasses of bubbly on hand. As comic book antihero Hellboy would say, "I want hot noodles." The wisdom of the damned spoke true, so I got my hot noodles, tossed with homemade pesto and a raw egg for richness. This combination of comfort food with a new magazine full of pretty, shiny pictures seemed to quiet the demons in one's head and fight back the nefarious deeds of a day gone wrong. And despite the x-number of days till Xmas, I'm shutting my brain off just so I don't have to think about the massive to-do list that's looming over my head right now. Happy place, happy place, happy place...