An Omelet from Austin

While I was in Austin a week ago we ate at a little place called The Magnolia Cafe, where their slogan is "Open 24 hours a day 8 days a week." Awesome place. Had one of the best omelets I have ever had, filled with pico de gallo, jack cheese, and avocados. Soooo good.

So, here is my best recreation of this fantastic omelet:

Scramble two or three eggs with a tablespoon of milk. Heat a small pan over medium-high heat. Melt a pat of butter in the pan, then pour in the eggs. Move the pan and eggs around over the heat until almost cooked through. Add pico, chopped avocado, and cheese, then flip half of the eggs over to cover the mixture. Cook for about 30 seconds more, then turn out onto a plate. Enjoy.

So, the question still remains - how do you make pico de gallo? And for some of you, what is pico de gallo?

Pico de gallo is a fresh salsa made from tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and jalapenos. I can eat it by the spoonful (or tortilla chip.)

Pico de Gallo
5 roma tomatoes, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 bunch of cilantro, chopped
1 jalapeno pepper, minced
3-5 tbsp lemon juice or lime juice
salt to taste.

Since the size is different with tomatoes and onions, try to get twice as much tomato as onion in your bowl. The above measurements are only a guideline.

Mix all ingrendients in a bowl, let sit for at least 15 minutes before serving. Once you have added the lemon juice and salt the tomatoes will start to break down a little bit. Serve with tortilla chips, or in any way you would serve salsa.

As a side note - I make a big batch of this whenever I feel a cold coming on... The heat from the jalapeno and the vitamin c from the onion and tomato burn the cold right out of my system. However, you end up with some pretty terrible onion breath as a side effect.

My Favorite Breakfast Tacos

My dear friend Liz and I used to eat these almost every weekend. Usually we would serve them with Liz’s red chile on top (a red chili pepper based sauce – the recipe is below.) Since I am a nursing mom, and my baby doesn’t appreciate it when I eat super hot food, I just use a couple of drops of Tabasco on top instead. I heartily endorse the red chile, though! It’s good also as an enchildada sauce if you tone it down with some tomato sauce, too.

Anna and Liz’s Breakfast tacos
(makes 4 tacos, enough for two party girls the morning after a night of clubbing in Vegas)

1 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, sliced thin
4 eggs
4 corn tortillas
1/3-1/2 c shredded sharp cheddar cheese
Liz’s red chile (recipe below)


Fry the onion in butter until almost burnt over medium heat. Cook your eggs over hard (pop the yolk and let it cook, then flip it over and cook the other side.) Heat corn tortillas directly on the burner if you have a gas stove or a glass topped electric stove. If you have an older electric with the coils, use a pan or you’ll make a huge mess. Top each tortilla with an egg, some onions, cheese, and chile.


Liz’s Red Chile
1 bag dried red chilies (in the Mexican food section of the grocery store)
Water
Garlic, oregano, salt to taste.


Pull the stems off the dried chilies. Shake out the seeds and remove as much membrane as possible. Rehydrate the chilies in enough water to cover them by simmering on the stove, or let soak overnight. Put the rehydrated chilies in the blender, blend with the water from rehydrating until smooth. Add the spices and salt to taste. Pour mixture in a saucepan and simmer over low/medium low heat until reduced to desired thickness. Taste, and correct seasoning. Add tomato sauce to cut the heat if desired.

Stuffed French Toast

Stuffed French toast is a decadent breakfast, and it’s very easy to make. The first time I ever heard of stuffed French toast was at the Skillet Café in Las Vegas. Everything on the menu there is good. If you make a trip to Vegas and want some good old fashioned diner food, look up the Skillet Café. The Skillet Café made their stuffed French toast with cream cheese and fruit preserves, but I make mine with cream cheese and dried fruit.

Stuffed French Toast

For each piece of French toast you will need:
2 slices of French bread or Texas toast
1 tbsp cream cheese
1 tbsp dried cranberries -or- 1 chopped dried apricot and 1 tsp chopped pecans
1 egg beaten with 1 tbsp milk
Butter for sauteeing

Spread the cream cheese on one of the slices of bread, cover with the dried fruit, and or nuts. Use the other piece of bread to make a sandwich. Dip the sandwich in the egg and milk mixture, and then fry it in a hot pan with melted butter. Turn when golden brown, and then brown the other side. Serve with maple syrup.

The Trick to Great Hashbrowns

My first job as a cook was at The Hitchin’ Post Café in Dayton, Wyoming. Looking back, I think it was one of my favorite jobs of all time… I was in high school and worked with a great bunch of people – I was learning a lot about food, and I was doing something I enjoyed for money! I took it all for granted back then – I thought all jobs were like that. Oh, how wrong I was.

A picture of some of the staff at the Hitchin' Post at Prom in 1990

I learned a lot at that place. The first lesson I learned about food was how to make crispy hashbrowns from real potatoes. Before this lesson, every time I would attempt hashbrowns I would end up with a grey gooey mass at the bottom of my pan – the polar opposite of the crispy brown bits of heaven I wanted to serve up next to my eggs in the morning.

But there is a trick to making any fried potato become crisp… (this goes for French fries, too.) The potatoes need to be pre-cooked in order to get the crispiness out of them. For hashbrowns the best bet is to use leftover baked potatoes, or just boil whole potatoes and then cut them up or shred them when they are cooled.

These are my husband’s absolute favorite food when mixed with bacon and cheese. Feel free to add what you like – they are good with sour cream on top, too!

Hashbrowns
5 potatoes, washed and cooked whole (boiled and cooled)
1 medium onion, chopped
½ green pepper, chopped
4-5 tbsp olive oil

Heat a skillet at medium high heat. Add the oil, and then the vegetables. Turn occasionally and cook until brown. Turn them only every 5 minutes or more so they get a nice brown crust. Cook until they reach the desired doneness.

A Week of Breakfasts After a Week of No Blogs

I have to offer a quick apology for my lack of blog entries in the past week – things got a little busy with a baby who wouldn’t take naps and a trip to Austin, Texas to visit my brother Seth with my Momma. My trip to Austin has inspired me by the food we ate while we were there, so I am back to blogging with a lot of fresh ideas.

…I love weekend breakfasts – you know, the kind you make when you have had enough sleep and you have enough time to actually cook. Back in my partying single days I would take a shortcut with my roommate, Jojo and head to the IHOP down the street for breakfast. Every Saturday she would wake me up by jumping on my bed and chanting “IHOP SATURDAY!!!” over and over until I finally got up and got dressed.

Now that I have a baby it’s a little different. I am usually awake a lot earlier, and it’s usually a baby who wakes me up – and she is not chanting “IHOP SATURDAY!” But I still make an effort to have a nice breakfast once a week. And since my daughter makes sure I am awake earlier than everyone else, I have plenty of time to make breakfast while my daughter watches from her high chair.

So, prepare for a week of breakfast recipes!

Below is the best recipe I have found for cinnamon roll dough. Use either bread flour or the added gluten to get the nice chewy texture right. All purpose flour will make a very cakey roll.

I love to knead dough as a stress reliever, but who actually has the time to knead dough by hand once you have kids? Personally, I don’t. Sure, my arm muscles don’t get the workout they used to when I was a baker, but I don’t need to arm wrestle anyone anymore. Solution – use a bread machine to make the dough, and then bake it yourself. I used to hate bread machines, but my opinion has recently changed… I don’t use my bread machine to bake bread, but I do use it for the dough application.

Cinnamon Rolls
(makes about a dozen rolls)

1 egg plus enough hot water to make one cup
¼ c oil
1/3 c sugar
1 tsp salt
3 ½ c bread flour (or 3 ½ c all purpose flour plus 1 ½ tbsp gluten)
1 ½ tsp yeast
½ c softened butter
½ c sugar
¼ c cinnamon (or more)
¾ c chopped pecans
¼ c melted butter
½ c brown sugar
½ c white sugar

Add all ingredients to the bread machine, set it on the dough setting and let it run. Once the dough is done, roll it out into a rectangle. Spread it with ½ cup of softened butter, sprinkle with ½ c white sugar and ¼ c cinnamon. Roll it up into a roll and cut into 1 inch rolls.

In an oblong cake pan melt ¼ c butter – cover this with the remaining sugars and the chopped pecans. Place the rolls on top of this mixture. Let rise until double in size. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Turn the pan upside down to release the rolls.

Once the rolls are in the pan you can put the pan in the refrigerator covered in plastic wrap and then bring it out an hour before you want to bake the rolls. This works really well if you want to do all the work the day before.

Another Foray into Gardening

Maybe I should put a new subheading about how this blog is also about gardening... but then again, gardening is all about food for me, and it is spring. And technically the article I am so excited about is in the dining and wine section of The New York Times... so it's still about food.

THIS is what I am so excited about. The Obamas are planting A VEGETABLE GARDEN on the White House Lawn... not only for the tasty goodness of something fresh from the garden, but to encourage the whole country to eat locally grown food, and to show their own daughters where their food comes from, something I am a bit passionate about. In my opinion, everyone should be aware of how their food comes about, be it vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, or fowl.

I had the luxury (luxury?) of growing up in the country, of being a part of raising my own food. Besides just the vegetable garden and some fruit trees, we had goats, chickens, pigs, geese, ducks, and rabbits. And as my cousin Brianna says (her facebook page is where I swiped this article) I believe animals can be friends and food (not that I would eat my cat - I would have to be pretty hungry for that to happen... and I have a feeling she'd be pretty tough... just kidding, my cat is safe.) Anyway, I have a certain respect for my food and what it took to get it on my plate. And it makes my food taste better. I want to pass that respect on to my daughter, so that she can understand and respect the life of the thing she is eating, whether it is meat or plant.

The Native Americans believe that all life is connected, that we should show respect for the earth and the way it provides for us. This is the respect I am talking about teaching my child, and something that I believe allows me to prepare my food well. I heard one chef describe it as "respecting the ingredients." I try my best to respect my food, and to show my love through whatever I prepare.

The article is well worth the read. And so is any work you put into a garden... and if you can't garden, take the time to find a farmer's market in your area.

Heirloom Tomato Bruschetta
1 large baguette, sliced
1 clove garlic
4 heirloom tomatoes (use good ones, please! The grocery store variety will just taste like water. I like to use a variety of colors - yellow, red, green, purple.)
1-2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil
salt to taste

Toast the sliced bread in the oven for about 5 minutes at 200 degrees, or throw them on the grill to get them toasted. Cut the garlic clove in half and then rub it on the bread slices - it will kind of grate itself on the hard bread. Cut up the tomatoes into small chunks. Dress with the balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and salt. Serve on the bread slices.

By the way, the White House chef is the one overseeing the garden, so I think I'm pretty safe in adding this to the blog.

My Mother, Queen of Substitutions

That's a picture of my Momma and me as a baby. Isn't she beautiful? She still is today... in fact, if you know any nice single men, let me know.

I learned to cook from my mom and my dad, but mostly from my dear Momma... which is funny, because I don't think she likes to cook all that much. But she let me play with the pots and pans on the floor when I was very little, and she made sure we all ate together as a family when dinner time came around every night. She managed to feed a family of six plus any stray neighborhood kids on a shoestring budget. The kids I went to school with were always kind of amazed we ate together around a table every night without turning on the T.V.

I have a lot of memories of my mom in the kitchen - she used to grind her own flour with a grinder that clamped on to the kitchen table, and I remember she had a hand grinder for coffee beans. When we would go to the grocery store she would let me have one coffee bean from the bulk containers so that I could smell it. Maybe that's why I love coffee so much - I associate it with my mother.

She also taught me substitutions for recipes when I would try to cook something and we were out of an ingredient... Mayonnaise can be substituted for egg; allspice for cinnamon, nutmeg, or cloves (I think Momma actually thought that allspice was made from "all spices" but it's not. I learned that a few years back and was actually quite amazed that it was a spice in and of itself.) I think all of "substituting" had a pretty big influence on my cooking - I can make something out of a bunch of nothings... oatmeal for breadcrumbs, yogurt for sour cream, lemon juice and milk for buttermilk... even coffee creamer for powdered milk.

Here's the most recent thing she taught me to make. It's good, and I wouldn't make any substitutions:

Turkey Wraps

Tortillas (or rice wraps)
Turkey
cream cheese
cucumber slices
alfalfa sprouts
cranberry sauce

Just wrap everything in a tortilla and eat it. Simple enough.