Now that I’ve managed to poach an egg, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with it. Well, not really, but I did figure I could give it another try.
Making breakfast when you didn’t think of actually buying breakfast, is always a challenge. I got up and had a growling stomach. Never a good sign. Especially when you then realize that you need to buy groceries. Las week has been such a weird week, with multiple nights of working late and way too many obligations to fulfill. Thinking about weekend groceries during the week, was about the furthest thing from my mind.
But then I woke up on Saurday. And had a growling stomach.
L was still sleeping, which gave me time to figure out what to do about breakfast. Would I quickly jump in to some clothes and make a quick grocery run? Or would I wing it?
Wing it it was! I figured I always have ingredients to bake something myself. So why change out of my pj’s if I can just as easy whip up a batch of something to go in the oven.
I decided on making a new batch of biscuit mix. It’s basically bisquick without any additives, made at home, stored in the fridge and always at your disposal. You can actually alter the flour that goes in, so it becomes more to your taste. Whole wheat, plain flour, whatever you like. I like to always keep a container of the mix in my fridge, but recently I kept postponing. I needed a new batch of biscuit mix and I needed breakfast. So I solved both issues at once.
Now just plain biscuits with a little butter (or a little sugar too) are a very tasty breakfast to me. However, I figured I could mix it up a little. Make something resembling more of an actual full meal/breakfast/brunch. So in addition to the biscuits (which magically became cheese biscuits) I cooked some ham and poached an egg for each of us. Now the eggs I used were 2 days older again, so to make it into a pretty poached egg was harder even. But I succeeded in poaching two egg that were very edible. Tasty even!
Biscuit mix (partially whole grain)
- 1/4 cup of baking powder
- 4 cups of plain white flour
- 1 cup of whole grain flour
- 2 tbsp white sugar
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 cup lard
Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl, add the lard. Cut the lard through the dry ingredients using a pastry blender. Once fully mixed (no lard or dry ingredient lumps, the whole mix somewhat resembles breadcrumbs) place in the refrigerator in an airtight container. Use like you would use any store bought biscuit mix. (This mix makes awesome pancakes too, just add regular or buttermilk and an egg to make a pancake batter!)
Cheese biscuits
- biscuit mix
- milk
- grated cheese
Place as much biscuit mix as you need in a bowl, add some grated cheese (a 1:2 ratio cheese:biscuit mix is the maximum) to the bowl. Pour in some milk, a little at a time, mix well. Keep adding a little more milk if necessary. You want a very sticky soft, but not runny dough.
Using 2 spoons drop small amounts of dough on a cookie sheet. Bake in a pre-heated oven (about 190 degrees celsius) until they’re golden brown.
I taught my first sailing lesson of this season today. It was great fun, being on the water with the kids again. Even though they didn’t actually sail yet, just practiced how to gear up, where the wind comes from and how to get the boat straight again when it’s fallen over, it was still a lot of fun. Those kids are awesome, so energetic and enthusiastic. Love it!
It however meant that I wasn’t home ’til late. 10pm, which meant dinner had to be simple, easy and quick, or L had to jump in. Either was acceptable to me.
I still had a nice little ham in the fridge, waiting to be baked, so I left a page of instructions for L as to what heat and what time it needed and left. When I called to let him know I was on my way back, it was already in the oven long enough to be done by the time I’d finished the rest of the meal. Potatoes and cauliflower this time.
It was simple, easy food, which needs nor has a recipe. Potato pieces in the microwave and in the oven with the ham to brown. Cauliflower was steamed, then placed on a cookie sheet with some cheese and placed in the oven to melt.
All in all insanely simple, yet tasty.
Sometimes it’s great to just eat simple, easy food!
And yes I know, I should buy a new oven mitt, one without stains preferably!
I actually poached an egg today. I figured I’d give it a try, when making a salad. I’d tried before, a while ago, and felt like Julie, in Julie and Julia, before she actually managed to get one done. My eggs fell apart, just became a runny, gross mess. It wasn’t pretty, it didn’t make me happy, I felt like an utter poaching-failure!
But today, I poached an egg!
At first I thought it didn’t work yet again. And was willing to give up. Give up on poaching eggs forever. But then I realized that unless you use eggs that you’ve pretty much pulled out of the chicken, there’ll be some egg-white-fluff around the poached egg. Once I’d cut up the little bit of fluff, it did look like a REAL poached egg.
I was very proud of myself!
The end!
I found a new foodblog. It’s more than a foodblog, it’s an everything blog. And I love it. In the last weekend I’ve grown almost-addicted to this website.
In the last month or 2 since I’ve started this food-blog-project myself, I’ve actually gotten addicted to more than one blog, more than 2 too… I have some serious FBA, Food Blog Addiction.
L teases me with this. He teases me a lot. But I can handle it, as I have a secret ‘make-him-stop-teasing-weapon’. Or well, secret? It’s not that much of a secret. It’s mostly simple, easy, and works like a charm! I just threaten NOT to make the awesome recipes I’ve found. I’ll threaten not to alter recipes. I threaten to make him cook.
And when I do that all is well in the word again. L will stop teasing and I keep reading, blogging, cooking and baking. Life works out that way!
Last weekend, when browsing the community/recipe exchange part of that website I’ve found, I stumbled upon a recipe for baked French toast. Now I love French toast. Their eggy-cinnamony-goodness makes me very happy. I rarely make it, however. When I was a kid I made French toast all the time, but in the past 5 years, I doubt I’ve made it more than once.
When I saw the recipe, I immediately started craving my childhood favorite. I was completely okay with trying out a different version of it though. As long as it still contained eggs and cinnamon, I was fine with it. As long as it didn’t contain berries or something like that, I was even better with it! I don’t like fruit on my toast. I don’t like fruit with my anything, to be honest.
Ree’s (the Pioneer Woman, from that website) recipe didn’t contain any nonsense I didn’t want. It consisted purely of the standard, basic, awesome ingredients. The recipe combined them a little differently though. With a crunchy crumby almost struessel like crust. Yummmmm.
Now for once again, I didn’t stick to any of her measurements. I’m a daredevil that way! Also, I didn’t have all the ingredients in the amounts she wanted. Or her preferred kind of bread. But that was okay. French toast is forgiving; you can use whatever kind of bread you prefer (or at least I think so); you can make however much you want. The only requirement in my book is good quality cinnamon. I did have that!
So Saturday night, when we wanted to go to bed, I remembered I still needed to prepare the dish. So I quickly prepared, combined, mixed and blended. I popped everything in the fridge, to be baked the next morning. It took about 35 minutes to bake. And it was awesome! I doubt I’ll ever make simple slices of French toast again! (And if you’d ever read this, Ree, you’re awesome!!!)
Baked French toast (recipe could feed 4, but we did finish it off as well, just ’cause it’s so good!)
- Nice, heavy bread (I used about 1/4 to 1/3 of a heavy whole/multigrain dark bread)
- 3 eggs
- some milk
- cinnamon
- butter
- dark brown sugar
- plain white flour
- white sugar
Tear the bread into pieces. You cut cut them too, in nice squares, but what’s the fun in that? Place the bread in a casserole dish.
In a bowl, beat the eggs with milk (splash by splash, so you can make sure it doesn’t get too thin, the egg needs to still be able to set!), some white sugar and a little bit of cinnamon. Pour the egg mixture over the bread, and place the dish in the refrigerator.
Cut some cold, hard butter into thinnish slices, and place them in a clean bowl. The amount of butter will determine the amount of crispy crust, which is the essential part of this casserole, so you better use slightly more than you think you need. Add some plain white flour. A little less than you think you need, you can always add more, same goes with the dark brown sugar (about the same amount of sugar as flour). Add a good amount of cinnamon and a little bit of ‘speculaaskruiden’ (a Dutch spice mix containing cinnamon, nutmeg and some other spices. if you don’t have it, just add a pinch of nutmeg).
With a pastry cutter, cut the ingredients to mix them. Make sure they mix well, if it looks too big and lumpy, add some more flour and brown sugar and keep going until it’s like course sand.
Once the butter, sugar and flour is mixed well, put it in a ziplock baggie in the fridge.
The next morning, as soon as you wake up, start your oven, set it to 190 degrees celsius. As soon as it’s heated, take your casserole from the fridge, pour your sugar/butter mixture over the casserole, pat it down a bit. Place it in the oven for about 35 minutes. (If you like it more bread puddingy 30 minutes will be enough, if you like it crispier, 40 minutes would be better).
Scoop the baked french toast on a plate.
Eat it.
Go back for seconds.
Eat it.
Sit on the couch refusing to move for several hours.
Decide to have another bite.
Find out that it’s still very tasty cold, it’s like cake, bready cake, but cake.
Empty the casserole.
Postpone dinner ’til 10.
Sometimes all you want is a salad. Especially when you’ve found wonderful tasty fresh veggies and a nice piece of feta cheese. Okay, so I admit, I also grilled some steaks and made gratin dauphinoise, but really, it was mostly about the salad! Even though I have an incredible sweet tooth, the taste of fresh vegetables with good quality oil just does the trick every time!
I have stopped buying ready made dressings. I plain and simple just do not like them anymore. Partially because of all the additives that don’t do anything for the taste, or just fake a taste. Partially because it’s a waste of money. Mostly, though, it’s because my home-made salad dressings are just as easy as squeezing a bottle, but taste a million times better!
I have no specific recipes for dressings. I always just try and combine some things. 8 out of 10 times it’ll just be good quality olive oil, pink himalayan or sea salt and fresh ground pepper. Sometimes I add some garlic or herbs to this. And usually, I don’t even make the dressing separately, but just sprinkle or pour the ingredients into the salad bowl and mix the dressing by tossing the salad.
Other favorites include the same, but adding balsamic or white wine vinegar to the mix, or a little squeeze of lemon juice. Sometimes I replace the plain olive oil with flavored oil. And once in a while I mix it up a bit…
A spinach salad with bacon, vinegar a little oil and some sugar. Just cook the bacon so it’ll release it’s fat and use that as a base. The taste? Awesome!
A very basic salad of plain iceberg lettuce and tomato becomes wonderful if you add a fresh made honey-mustard dressing. Just good honey, good mustard and a drizzle of good olive oil. And again, you can mix it up by using a different kind of honey, mustard, oil, or by adding some fresh herbs.
It’s all so simple, really. Why would you want to spend money to buy something synthetic when it’s so easy to make yourself. Good mayo, some oil or buttermilk and blue cheese? Fresh blue cheese dressing! Buttermilk, mayo and Mt. Elbert spice mix? Fresh ranch dressing! Yoghurt, garlic, parsley and mayo usually make a creamy garlic sauce, but if you substitute the yoghurt for oil, use a little less mayo maybe add some salt and pepper, you’ve got yourself an awesome garlic dressing. And for my taco salads, really, just mixing sour cream and salsa might look awful, but it tastes wonderful!
So this weekend, we ate lots of salads. And I kept it simple. The brightly colored, tasty veggies really didn’t need many extra flavors. So I went with the classic. Just oil, pepper, salt and a tiny little bit of pressed garlic (which was left from the potato dish). And we loved it!
The steak and potatoes were very good as well! (Entrecote and gratin dauphinoise)
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