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

In the Land of Milk and Honey

Hello all! As I write this post I'm currently in the big Starbucks in Harvard Square, feeling eminently cool and snooty, hahah. It's a nice environment if you like white noise around you when you work. I decided to treat myself to coffee since I'm having a relaxed day, and since I successfully managed to end my coffee addiction about two weeks ago. It may seem a little contradictory to treat myself to coffee as a reward for ending addiction to it, but it works for me!

On to the food. Last night my beautiful friend Caitlin and I got "Becky Home Ec-y" (great phrase, thanks Caitlin) and made these Pear and Almond Upside Down Cakes from Baking Bites, a blog I've been following since high school. Really great stuff! And these little "cakelets," as BB calls them, are extraordinary:

 "If we were in the land of milk and honey, these would grow on bushes there."

They're REALLY that good.

There is no way to fully convey to you, dear Eater, how delicious these are. They are magical. Perfect. Succulent. Decadent. Amazing. They are one of the greatest sweets I have ever eaten.  If there was such a thing as a dessert for a brunch party (or really any darned time of day) these would be ideal. Truly, they are a marvel. And so, so, so easy to make! Here's the recipe, with a few edits of my own:

Upside Down Pear and Almond Cakes

Makes 8 cakes

2 tbsp butter, cold and cut into 8 small pieces

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 whole large pear (or two small pears)

1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup almond meal (finely ground almonds/almond flour)* 

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/8 tsp salt

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp almond extract (optional)**

2 tbsp butter, melted and cooled

*I substituted all purpose flour, so I essentially used 1 cup of flour.

**Because I didn't use almond meal I added in 1/2 tsp of almond extract, not just 1/4 tsp.

I will note that we doubled the batter and got 12, not 16 cakes, but this is because we overfilled the cups. Only fill them halfway; they rise a lot and you'll want flat bottoms. See the steps for more detail on this.

Steps:


1. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Line a muffin tin with 8 paper liners (If you don't have them, like me, your cakes will be just fine but you'll lose some of the brown sugar/butter topping. Next time I will be making them with the liners because that stuff is delicious). Place one small piece of butter into each muffin cup. Top each cup with 1 1/2 teaspoons of brown sugar. Place pan in oven for 3 minutes, just until butter melts. Sugar will not be fully melted. Allow pan to cool for a few minutes before proceeding.

3. Taking care to slice around the core of the pear, cut pear into very thin slices no more than 1/8-inch thick.
Lay about 3 slices of pear across the bottom of each muffin cup (enough to cover the base, but it's absolutely fine if you they go up the sides), on top of the butter and brown sugar layer. Set aside while you make cake batter.

4. In a large bowl, combine flour, almond meal, sugar, baking powder and salt and whisk until well-combined. Add in eggs, vanilla extract and almond extract and whisk until batter is smooth. Add in melted butter and whisk until butter has been completely incorporated. Props to Caitlin for reminding me to double this second use of butter, otherwise they wouldn't have been as moist or yummy!

5. Divide batter evenly into prepared muffin cups on top of the of pear layer. Only fill the cups halfway as they rise a lot (you want flat bottoms because they're upside down cakes--you can see in the picture that we overfilled the cups because they do not lay flat and we only got 12 out of the mix, not 16).

6. Bake for 19-22 minutes, until the cakes spring back when lightly touched (they'll be a light yellow color) and a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Brown sugar may be bubbling slightly around the edges of the cake.

So close to heaven you can almost taste the sunlight and the clouds...

7. Take cakes out of the muffin pan and allow to cool on a wire rack in their paper liners. If you do not have liners, just run a knife around the edges of the cupcake to dislodge them. Cakes can be served fresh out of the oven or at room temperature. Invert cakes onto a plate and remove paper to serve.

Et voilà! There you have DELICIOUSAMAZINGZOMGGGGGGG...drool...cakes! Best served piping hot and gooey on top!

If you told me I could never eat anything but these for the rest of my life, I might actually be okay with it. 

Happy eating!!

P.S. I WILL be making these in mini form for the Master's open house in Mather this Thursday. Come 'n get it, y'all!

Celebrating with Food!

So to celebrate Christmas and the end of term, I cooked my boyfriend some food last Sunday: spaghetti carbonara and brownies!

Since they're both so easy to make, I'm just going to post pictures and recipes. This also likely to be my last post before the 25th, so Merry Christmas, y'all!


Spaghetti Carbonara:

This recipe is a bit Martha Stewart, a bit of my boyfriend's French host mom's recipe, and a bit of my own tastes:

Spaghetti Carbonara

1 pound spaghetti

8 ounces (8 slices) bacon, cut 1 inch thick crosswise (if you're ritzy you can substitute pancetta)

Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

3 large eggs* at room temperature

3/4 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano** cheese, plus more for serving

1/2 cup half-and-half at room temperature

2-4 cloves of garlic (optional)

1 handful chopped parsley (optional)

*Straight from an Italian and tested by my boyfriend's host mom, it's best when there are n-1 eggs, n being the number of people eating. However, I follow this rule starting at 3 people; for 2 people I add 2 eggs, 3 if I don't have half-and-half. 

**Gruyere is yummy, a bit more flavorful, and may melt more easily. I've done both and I like the Gruyere more, but negligibly. I wouldn't substitute any other Parmesan cheese for the Pargmigiano Reggiano. 

1. Set a large pot of water to boil (for pasta) and salt generously. 

2. Mince the garlic.

2. In a large skillet, cook bacon over medium heat (with the minced garlic cloves if you add them), stirring occasionally, until the bacon is crisp, 8 to 12 minutes; transfer to a paper towel-lined plate.

3. When the pot is boiling, add pasta and cook until al dente, according to package instructions.

4. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, whisk together eggs, Parmesan, and half-and-half. Set aside.

5. Drain pasta, leaving some water clinging to it. Working quickly, add hot pasta to egg mixture. 

6. Add bacon and some of the grease if you desire; season with salt and pepper, and toss all to combine (heat from pasta will cook eggs). 

7. Serve immediately, sprinkled with additional Parmesan cheese (and the chopped parsley if you have it).

Next up, Rose's (my roommate) world-famous brownies!

I follow the recipe exactly, and they are super easy to make. Just don't forget to grease/Pam the pan!

Brownie Recipe #2

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, melted

1 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4 eggs

1 cup flour

1 cup cocoa powder

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray 13x9 inch baking pan.

2. Mix together the butter, sugars, and vanilla. Beat in the eggs. Combine the dry ingredients, gradually stir into the wet mixture until well blended. Spread the batter evenly into the prepared pan.

3. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes

And then, just because it's totally brilliant--Rose's Christmas present to me! It has the in/appropriate name of a "Screwnicorn" because it's a corkscrew in the shape of a unicorn (I collect unicorns!):

Happy Eating!

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!