Breakfast: How Not to Be Boring

Breakfast can be the most repetitive meal of the day for the average American with minor cooking skills. A lot of us who don't have the luxury of eating out every day get stuck with the same foods over and over like cereal, bacon and eggs, sausage, toast, bagels, english muffins, and other reasonable breakfast-y type foods. Sometimes having scrambled eggs is the best thing in the world, but other times it just gets boring really fast.

I went out searching for interesting ways to cook eggs because eggs are delicious and keep me full throughout the day better than hot or cold cereal. I finally stumbled across little mini omelets baked in a muffin tin from Nerd Fitness and decided to try them.

Two eggs, a batch of diced up onions, and three slices of bacon later I had these lovely little egg cakes wrapped in bacon. Of course, I didn't stop there and had two slices of toast with butter and some Strawberry/Cocoa fruit spread that I got from our local Farmer's Market.

This filled me up all day! I didn't even have much of a lunch or dinner just because I wasn't hungry. I had a little chicken wrap for my lunch and some crackers as my home from work snack along with lots of water, but I really wasn't hungry. Best of all, it was really easy to do. The hardest part of making the meal was figuring out how long to cook the eggs for in the oven because it was my first time baking eggs.

The moral of this little story is to wake up earlier in the morning to prepare and bake these eggs for your family. They are delicious, easy to make, and the pay off is fantastic! I just have to remember I said that so I'll wake up earlier on Sunday and prepare these little things again for my entire family. They will love them.

The Phenomenon of Mug Cakes

Moistest Very Vanilla Mug Cake from Table for Two

Remember that one fateful day on the internet when you got really bored and started getting interested in cooking because your roommate could cook better than you?

I remember that day well. I have such a massive sweet tooth and I was looking for quick cakes and cookies. I stumbled upon the mug cake. It was quick and easy to make if you measured everything right. And it made the perfect amount for one person so you didn't have to share.

Then time passed and I forgot about the humble little mug cake. I had moved on to bigger cakes and fiddling with perfecting the proper cup of tea. Then cookies came out to play with a brief but still lingering interest in velvet cakes. Then the savory side of cooking called to me and the mug cake was all but forgotten. A novelty in a bookstore when you turned to your mom and scoffed that somebody actually published an entire cookbook on how to make different mug cakes.

Oh, sweet little tasty mug cake, forgive me in my arrogance. I see now that you are something special. Something to be written down in every family cookbook just waiting to be played with and perfected in each passing generation. Small enough to have big disasters with and big enough to satisfy a sweet craving especially made for one or two people. And the perfect way to make a cake without an oven as long as you have a microwave.

I bet you would be the perfect venue for finally figuring out my perfect red velvet cake.

Culinary Temper-tantrum

Have you ever had one of those weeks where there is just nothing good in the house to eat? I have been living that nightmare for the past two weeks now. We had food in the house, but none of it was appealing. Everyone in the house would walk in during dinner time, look into the fridge, sigh, and leave without eating anything. Nobody wanted to try to figure out what to cook and that caused us to eat out or just nibble on whatever we could find.

While I do enjoy the occasional Big Mac, I got frustrated feeling like there was just nothing to eat. So, I did the only logical thing that I could think of. Have a temper-tantrum.

Instead of jumping up and down or yelling at my parents that they weren't cooking anything good, I decided to fix something that would appeal to me. After all, I am old enough that I have free range of all of the "dangerous" kitchen appliances. I found one serving of pasta hidden in the cabinet and decided that would go good with a sauce and some onions.

 I prepared the pasta according to the directions on the packet and chopped up an onion. Then I cooked the onions in a small pot with some butter until they were nice and tender. When the pasta was done, I drained it. Then I threw the pasta in with the onion and added another dab of butter, about 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese, and two tablespoons almond milk. Since I didn't rinse the pasta, the starch from the pasta mixed with the cheese, onion, butter, and almond milk to make a nice Alfredo sauce type coating.

It tasted fantastic!

This would be a really nice meal to make for my family on a larger scale. It is quick and easy, but I would make a few minor changes. I would pick up a can of white kidney beans, drain them, and throw them in when I put the pasta in with the onion. I would lay off the extra butter since I cooked the onions in butter. And I would take the extra time to caramelize the onions. Fix that and put it on a table with a salad and you can convince your family that you do know how to cook.

Egg Nests

Taken with Instagram

“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way” ― Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

A while ago I stumbled across a recipe for egg nests. Being the curious person that I am, I followed the recipe to the letter and made an egg for my brother and me. If you remember having eggs in a basket when you were little, this is almost exactly like that. Only instead of using bread for your basket, you whip up the egg whites to create the basket. Since this recipe came from an old french children's cookbook originally, I don't think very many people know about it.  My mindset is if a child could do it, then I can do it. And I know that if I can do it, then other people can do it. I am still a beginner cook after all.

Step 1: Preheat oven to 450. Separate egg yolk and whip egg whites

In my opinion, the hardest part to do is the very first step. You have to separate the egg yolk from the egg white. This requires some hand-eye coordination to do and some patience. As you can see, I separated the egg well, but I wasn't very careful putting the egg yolk in a separate container. It broke and I had a little puddle of yolk instead of a whole yolk like I did the first time.

Whipping the egg isn't very difficult. The difficult part is knowing when to stop. You basically stop when the egg whites get nice and fluffy and you get stiff peaks hanging off of your beaters when you pull them out. It is fun watching the liquid whites turn into clouds. It is also the same technique that you use to make the meringue on top of the lemon meringue pies. I hope to make one of those one day since whipping the egg whites up into clouds is so easy.

Step 2: Fold in 1/4 cup of cheese and put on foil lined baking tray

The second part is where I decided to experiment a little this time. The recipe calls for Parmesan cheese and salt to keep the egg whites a pretty white. I didn't have any Parmesan on hand, so I decided to put in some cheddar cheese. I also ground up some rosemary and a little bit of sage go fold into the egg whites too. It doesn't make it look as pretty, but it was tasty.

The part you have to remember about this step is that you have to press a deep hole in the middle of your cloud. This will let you have an indent to put your yolk in so it won't slide out. The deeper you make this indentation, the more obvious it will be when you go to put the yolk in. The tin foil makes for very easy clean up later. You won't have to clean the baking tray because the egg won't even touch it. If it does stick, it will be on the tin foil. My mom keeps the non-stick tin foil in the house, so I didn't have any trouble with sticking at all.

Step 3: Bake for 3 minutes, pour in yolk, bake for 3 more minutes

The baking step actually takes place in two separate steps. First you bake just the egg whites for three minutes. Then you have to slide the tray out of the oven and carefully pour in the egg yolk.Then you cook the egg whites again with the yolk for another three minutes to get a light browning on the egg whites and to bake the egg yolk.

If you accidentally break the yolk like I did, it will still fit in the egg basket you have made. It will just cook up a little bit harder and won't be as runny as it would be if the entire yolk was in tact. You might want to experiment breaking the yolk on purpose if you are one of the people that doesn't like runny yolks. You could also bake the egg whites until browned and then scramble the egg yolk and put it in the egg white basket. That could also be a very yummy variation if you don't like runny yolks.

There are probably several other ways to take the basic recipe and make it your own. I do recommend following the recipe I linked to one time before branching out and trying different variations. That way you know what it is "supposed" to taste like. I think it tastes like a savory meringue with a very silky yolk.

Of course, half of the fun with cooking is experimenting and you won't learn anything new if you don't try. The one thing that I took away from making the egg nest for the second time is that the taste of sage covers up the taste of rosemary. I probably won't be using those two spices together again. I wouldn't have learned that if I didn't try it in the first place.

Can I Make a Boring Stir-Fry?

leftover pork and vegetable stir fry

“...no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.” ― Julia Child, My Life in France

Once you have been in college without knowing how to cook and all you can make is mac 'n cheese or ramen, you gain a whole new appreciation for the simple stir-fry. This is a dish that simply does not get old because you can make it so many different ways. It can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be and it can hold a variety of different flavors. Best of all, depending on how you make it, it can be perfect for calorie counters.

However, there will come a time where you can just get in a rut with stir-fry. You will become comfortable using certain things in certain places. When the last five you made ended up having the same base of onion while having the second main ingredient as rice, you might be stuck in a rut. That was where I was a few days ago. I wasn't sure how to go about changing my stir-fry into something just as tasty as the ones I have made and still have a good flavor. So, I turned to the internet for some inspiration.

My favorite base to use in a stir-fry is onion, but it never crossed my mind that there might be more than one way to cook an onion. I would normally grease my pan up with some Pam and then throw the onion in with some green bell pepper and cook them until the onion was translucent. With the help of Simply Recipes, I figured out how to caramelize an onion. I always thought that caramelizing was an advanced cooking technique, but that post made it simple to understand just how it was done.

For lunch that day I prepared all of the ingredients I wanted with some minor changes. I used a whole onion because I knew that the onion would cook down during the caramelizing process. I kept my green bell pepper because I wasn't tired of it yet. I left out the rice and put in some leftover green beans and a carrot. Then I threw in a handful of sliced almonds with the leftover cooked pork. Finally I used low sodium soy sauce with ground mustard instead of my usual orange ginger stir-fry sauce. I also used olive oil to start the stir-fry.

Best of all, the entire plate was a reasonable 582 calories*. The only reason the calorie count was so high was because of the olive oil to start the process out with and the pork has a higher calorie count than the rest of the veggies combined. But when I compare that amount to the dinner I had that day (McDonalds) I would say that 582 calories is much better than 900 calories. (and that isn't even including the drink I had!)

It was just the right amount and filled me up for the rest of the day until dinner. I consider that a very tasty and interesting success.

*calorie counts according to myfitnesspal.com

Why I Love Herbs

 “Until I discovered cooking, I was never really interested in anything.” - Julia Child

 I love to eat, but I was never interested in learning how to cook. It was too slow for me and I was much happier reading to take time and ask my mom or dad to show me how to make something more complicated than a bowl of cold cereal. I was also taught that something that took time wasn't really worth doing when there was more important things that I could have been doing. So I never learned how to cook.

This isn't to say that my mom and dad were bad cooks. Everything that they learned to do came from one amazing woman, my grandmother. They are good cooks, but when I was little they were so busy that every other day was one fast meal after another. It was a treat for holidays when they slowed down enough to cook extravagant meals or when my mom slowed down enough to bake a cake or a loaf of bread.

A few months ago I was having problems with pain whenever I ate anything that contained meat or a lot of fat. I was at college and my first instinct was to change my diet and just not eat the things that would make me hurt. This resulted in me going vegan for a few months until we figured out that it wasn't any weird sudden allergy to food, but it was my gallbladder causing me the trouble. During this time I got interested in cooking.

I started out small. stir-fries became my best friend during my stint as a vegan. After a while, my pile of veggies became less and less appetizing because they started to taste the same no matter if I used soy sauce or another type of stir-fry sauce. That was when I had to admit to myself that I really didn't know how to cook.

Fast-forward to now and my problem with my gallbladder is gone (thanks to my wonderful doctor and surgeon), but my desire to learn how to cook is still the same. I remembered that my parents have a spice rack and I discovered it in a big way. I have started to make savory pancakes with thyme, nutmeg, and allspice. Garlic is not the only herb that I throw into my stir-fries any longer. Now they are packed with mustard and basil if I want to up the heat or with rosemary and lemon if I want to play up the sweeter flavors. Sage makes an excellent punch in scrambled eggs or even on a plain fried egg along with a little fresh ground black peppercorn.

Herbs and spices have made exploring cooking fun and interesting.What most people don't realize is that using herbs does not mean "spicy", it just means more flavor. People need to open up their minds and their spice cabinets and just see what one new herb can do.