Rustic Breakfast

Hi everyone,

I had to stop myself from hipster trolling and adding "artisanal" into the title of this post. Everything in NYC these days is "artisanal," which really just means "someone made this" in 99% of the word's occurrences. Whether the following breakfast dish is artisanal or not, I'll leave to your judgment. My job here is to focus on the food, and hopefully make you want to try it out for yourself. It's really hard and takes a lot of practice (HAH).

It's been a long time since I talked about breakfast on my blog, but given that I'm a hungry morning person who needs a good breakfast, I think it's about time. I will say though, that as much as I love breakfast and eating in the morning, it's less for me about the breakfast foods than the fact that I can eat as soon as I wake up. When I was little and growing up with an amazing Puerto Rican mom who made amazing Puerto Rican food, my favorite breakfast was often last night's leftovers: pork chops, arroz y habichuelas, spicy spaghetti with Italian sausage, and more. So today's breakfast meal is not for the faint of gut. It's hearty, filling, and will definitely stick to your ribs in a very non-Chobani-and-granola kind of way. And it couldn't be more delicious. So behold, breakfast bread bowls:

A savory, cheesey, meaty, bready, delicious combination. What more do you need? THIS is the breakfast of champions! It's been over a year since I these, and I can't believe I've withheld them from y'all for so long! This is a great thing to make if you're having people overnight, or for a brunch gathering. You can prep several of the ingredients ahead of time so that you can just assemble in the morning--like a choose-your-own-adventure.

My college roommate and fellow eating enthusiast made this when we were going through the crazy week that was graduation. The dining halls were closed, and we decided to treat ourselves, so to speak. And what better way than this breakfast? (It was too early for wine.)

So, we took the T down to to the local Shaw's and picked up a few things the night before. You can use whatever you'd like in these bread bowls that you think will go well with bread and cheese and egg. So, EVERYTHING.

We chose:

2 small soup bowl bread rolls (they're roughly 6" in diameter)
Any green herb like basil or parsley for freshness
Eggs
Onions (any)
Parmesan cheese
Mushrooms

Being broke soon-to-be-graduates, we decided to skip tomatoes, though I would absolutely do some sliced cherry tomatoes if I did this again. She had frozen Italian meatballs in the freezer, so we decided to use those up, too. However, next time I make these I'm totally going to my local meat shop to get some handmade spicy Italian sausage. Yum!

39th & 9th

The actual making of these bowls takes a little bit of forethought, which naturally we thought about right before making. Recommended order is below:

1. Preheat your oven to 350° before you start.  
2. Cook up your onions, mushrooms, and meat (together in a pan is fine). Leave the mushrooms meat just cooked through so that they won't overcook in the oven.
3. Slice the tops off your bread bowls about 3/4 of the way up, then carve out with a spoon. The spare bread could make good croutons or be used in a bread pudding. Just don't carve too much bread, otherwise you won't have much to absorb the amazing mix of juices that will come out when baking.
4. Spread olive oil, salt, and pepper around the inside of the bread bowl.
5.  Assemble your bread bowl as a mix, not as layers. You don't want all the meat at the bottom, or all the onions at the top. Similarly, sprinkle cheese throughout.
6. Finish with a raw egg--it'll bake in the oven. Put it on top so that you can watch it to avoid overcooking.

  

Excavated bread

 This is generally how your bowl should look once it's assembled and ready for baking:

Then bake for 15-20 minutes, or until the egg is set up and your cheese has melted. As mentioned above, if you want to speed the prep, cook your onions, mushrooms, and meat the night before. That way, you can just assemble in the morning.

Et voilà! You have a tasty, tasty breakfast bread bowl! When we ate it, not only were we in food comas immediately after, but we at some point stopped eating the fillings and just started tearing into the bread bowl that had been soaked with all the delicious flavors of our fillings. Mmm-mmm-mmm. Happy eating!

 

Ambiguously artisanal, definitely delicious

Breakfast Sandwiches

Hello all,

I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of Harvard students are less than thrilled about their daily breakfast offerings. With the exception of freshmen who still get hot breakfast, in the upperclassman dining halls the food can be less than appetizing five days out of seven. It is an unchanging offering of cold hard boiled eggs, un-shelled warm hard boiled eggs, cold cuts, sandwich cheese, tomatoes, refried beans, hummus, bread stuffs, cream cheese, jam, jelly, butter, and margarine. Oatmeal or some variation thereof if you want it, and the ever-present cereals. Now if that were what we had to eat a few days out of the week, it might not be so bad. But really, who wants cold cuts and oatmeal every single morning? Especially when Harvard's reasoning for cutting hot breakfast is that it's poor with an endowment of just $35 billion. Yeah, right.

Since I like breakfast, I've gotten creative over the years. This year though, I think I've really hit the jackpot. I make a delicious breakfast sandwich every morning that is piping hot and delicious. It starts off like this:

The start of a very beautiful, very short relationship with a sandwich.

What is all of this? Well, here's an enumerated ingredients list:

2 slices of turkey (or ham)

2 slices of cheese

~3 tablespoons of refried beans 

Sriracha or Frank's or Tabasco to taste

2 slices of tomato

1 hardboiled egg sliced in your dhall's handy dandy egg slicer

1 english muffin or wheat thin, toasted

The first thing I do is mix hot sauce with refried beans. Coming from Texas I find the refried bean offering pretty bland, so I hit it with some hot sauce to make it taste better. While I'm doing this, I've got my bread toasting in the toaster until it's extra crispy (since it's going to go in the microwave I overdo it so that it resists sogginess). 

Next, I dry off the tomatoes with some napkins, because when I microwave the sandwich all the water just leaks out of the tomatoes and gets everything wet. Then, I pepper or salt the tomatoes and egg, depending on my mood. Sometimes I leave it plain.

To assemble:

Put the refried beans on one piece of the bread, then put a slice of cheese down followed by either ham or eggs, then tomatoes, then another slice of cheese, and then the other half of the bread.

Zap it in the microwave for about 35 seconds to get the cheese melted and everything heated up without un-crisping the bread. You can also patiently wait on the panini press if you so choose, which will keep crisping up your bread, but I usually don't have time for that in the mornings.

After that, you're all done! Voila! Your beautiful, delicious breakfast sandwich awaits you:

Take that, cold breakfast. Mmmmmm....

If you want a neater sandwich to eat, just leave out the egg and/or tomatoes to make it flatter and more stable.

Happy eating!