Chickens + Time = Eggs! (An Herb Baked Egg Recipe)

You may remember from this post that we adopted day-old chicks back in March, and lo and behold, a miracle happens when they hit 5 or 6 months old: they start laying eggs!  Being the good foodies that we are, we're diligently trying new recipes with our fresh little backyard prizes.  (In retrospect, "fresh little backyard prizes" sound more like poop than eggs, but I'm sticking to it.  Although we certainly get our fair share of those other prizes, too.)

Our Americauna, Violet, the brown one in the picture, lays lovely green eggs... when she's actually laying.  Currently, though, she's going through her first molt, which means no eggs, a growing mass of feathers all over the yard and an extremely scrubby looking chicken. She also happens to be much feistier than her sister, Lily, our Black Australorp.  Let me tell you, it is not fun trying to convince an angry, half-naked chicken that there are better things to peck at than your bare toes.  Because, come on, toes look delicious, don't they?  All pink and plump and wriggly.  How could she resist?

Lily's eggs are large, brown and gorgeous, as you can see from the top picture.  It's almost a shame to cook with them, though once I discovered this Herb Baked Egg recipe from Strawberry Creek Inn, I quickly got over it.  Justin and I made a fair amount of modifications to this recipe, as I'm not a big fan of mustard and neither of us cares much for nutmeg in savory dishes, but the basics are the same: you line a ramekin with a delicious breakfast meat, add a layer of cheese and top it off with eggs and herbs.  The result is so much better than I imagined - we seriously made this two days in a row.  The addition of yogurt to the beaten eggs is just pure, creamy, yummy genius.

Herb Baked Eggs
adapted from Inn Cuisine
(makes 2 servings)

4 slices uncooked turkey bacon
3 large eggs
1/4 cup plain lowfat yogurt
1/2 cup shredded cheese of your choice (we used sharp cheddar and fresh parmesan)
2 teaspoons chopped fresh herbs (we grow basil, oregano and chives in our yard, so we used those)

1. Preheat oven to 375 F.  Grease two oval gratin dishes with vegetable spray.
2. Arrange two slices of uncooked turkey bacon across the bottom of each dish.  Separate 1/4 cup of the shredded cheese and divide evenly between the two dishes, sprinkling directly on top of the turkey bacon.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together eggs, yogurt, herbs and the remaining 1/4 cup cheese.  Pour this mixture into both gratin dishes, dividing evenly.
4. Bake in oven for 10-20 minutes, depending on how done you like your eggs.  I prefer the shorter end of the scale, when the eggs are set on the sides but a bit soft in the center.

As the wonderful blogger over at Inn Cuisine points out, this recipe is ripe for reinvention - you can sub in your choice of breakfast meats or veggies on the bottom layer, and suit the herbs and cheeses to your taste.  Consider yourself warned, though: this is a highly addictive recipe, one that will have you craving baked eggs every weekend, imaging their cheesy herbed goodness even as your eyes open in the morning.  And considering how completely easy this breakfast is, you'll probably be giving in to those cravings.

Banana Espresso Chocolate Chip Muffins

At six months pregnant, I am finally back to baking with a gusto.  In the throes of my first trimester, I couldn't eat anything - I subsisted mostly on apples and oatmeal, and even the smell of my prenatal vitamins made me want to run to the sink.  The saddest thing wasn't that I couldn't cook, or be in the kitchen, or even glance at the jar of tartar sauce on the top shelf of the refrigerator, but that morning sickness robbed me of my love for food.  It made me dread eating, something I didn't even think was possible.  So at the end of this second trimester, to be out of bed, back on my feet and conjuring up goodies like these muffins from the wonderful Baked: New Frontiers in Baking cookbook?  It's seriously the greatest feeling in the world.  That, and getting kicked by the little alien living in my abdomen.  That's pretty great, too.

What I loved best about this recipe was the intense banana flavor.  Four super ripe bananas for a little over a dozen muffins turns out a rich, bright taste that's only improved by the tiny bit of instant espresso powder and cup of chocolate chips.  If you're looking for an intensely espresso muffin, this isn't the recipe for you, but I think the teaspoon of grounds give the muffins a deepness that they wouldn't have had otherwise.  And, of course, you can't go wrong with chocolate chips.

Banana Espresso Chocolate Chip Muffins
from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking
(makes 15)

4 mashed, very ripe medium-sized bananas
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup milk (recipe calls for whole milk, but I used skim without a problem)
1 large egg

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder (make sure you use instant, and not just regular espresso grounds!)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt

1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.  Line muffin pan with liners or spray with nonstick spray.
2. In a medium bowl, combine mashed bananas, sugar, brown sugar, melted butter, milk and egg.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, instant espresso powder, baking soda and salt.  Make a large indent in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour the wet ingredients into the well.  Stir until just combined, and fold in chocolate chips.
4. Fill liners about 3/4's full.  Bake in center of oven for 20-25 minutes, until cake tester comes out clean.
5. Cool muffin pan on cooling rack for 15 minutes, remove muffins from pan and let them finish cooling outside of the pan.

These muffins are beyond heavenly, and tasted even more banana-y the next morning.  They can be kept for up to two days, but let's be honest - are they really going to last that long without getting eaten?

Apricots!

It's weird to look up and realize that two months and more has gone since I wrote here, perhaps weirder still to think of why.

You guys, you probably know this already--if you know us even vaguely away from this blog, if you're even a friend of a Facebook friend of ours, I'm sure you've heard the news--Dana is pregnant!

If you're just joining us in this exciting and uproariously happy news, feel free to take this time to squee.  I completely understand and I'll wait.  Better?

Good.  Welcome.

As you might imagine, we have been sort of busy, with all our planning and taking portraits and letting slip the news to everyone who calls the house.  In addition to all that, we've begun haunting the baby care sections of every department store we enter, creeping through Target's aisles of onesies with tiny aloof doggies on the front and their racks of smiling octopus-covered blankets, surfing Etsy's many pages of unforgivably expensive cribs shaped like boats.  This keeps us busy.  Honestly, though I haven't been not posting here because of that.  No, it's not planning that keeps me away from the blog, it's something more insidious. See, Dana's about three months along in the pregnancy now, poised just at the exit ramp of her third month.  She's just slowing to make the corner into the reportedly shining, felicitous months of her second trimester with its inflated sense of well being, its reshuffling of organs, and as she makes this curve her wheels are just beginning to spin free of the constant nausea of her last months' morning sickness.  It's this nausea, this aversion to food in all its forms, which has been our dread enemy the last couple months and the reason for our silence.

Until this week, I don't know if I could name more than five dishes that I have even made these last months.  Quesadillas, occasionally, peanut butter sandwiches if the mood allows, even, once, a bit of pasta, but mainly I have been slicing apples, boiling potatoes, mixing oatmeal. Concocting, in short, the blandest food imaginable, and even then sometimes finding it nigh-impossible to coax Dana to eat it.

But oh, this week, the tides are turning.  Just as we reach the last breathless moments of apricot season (our backyard has smelled like bad fruit wine for weeks; one of our chickens scavenged the hearts from so many mushy fallen apricots that her nostrils became clogged with congealed fruit), as tomatoes start to glow red as blisters under the skirts of their vines, as the gargantuan zucchini plants are producing a generous basket of green intimidating phalluses every day, Dana is eating again!

I'll deal with the squash next time--the zucchini bread is finishing its sentence in the oven as I labor over this very paragraph but I think I can safely say it will be both delicious and lovely when paroled--and I have yet to figure out what to do when one daily has more tomatoes than sense, but today I wanted to talk to you about apricots.  A couple of long months ago (like two posts before this one), I mentioned that the weight of the unripe apricot crop was weighing down our tree. By now, the apricots have basically come and gone, the tree has sprung back up to full height and we are becoming blissfully reaccustomed to the lack of fruit flies in the house.

In the meantime, between my ravenous out of hand consumption and Dana's disinterest in even the smell of the things, I made a couple of recipes that were fairly successful.

My first foray into baked apricot goodness was a meh result.  Apricot turnovers with store bought puff pastry turned out a bit dense for my tastes, the filling (fresh apricots sliced and cooked down with lemon and lots of sugar) was more jam than fruit and an inadvisable egg wash on the pastry--while pretty--kept the puff pastry on a leash instead of, well, letting it puff.

Second was an apricot pie that I turned out for our 3rd Annual Fourth of July barbecue and Elmo roast at which, as always, we spent half the day filling an Elmo doll with jury rigged fireworks, and about 2 minutes of the evening watching it turn into flaring festive charcoal and singed plastic hair.

The pie was a wonderful thing, juicy and sweet and so apricoty that it was something like picking and eating fruit fresh from the tree.  Only in a pie, and awesome.  I'll post the recipe down below this just in case you have any apricots hanging around.  You could definitely do worse than tossing a few cups of them toward a nice pie.

The third thing I made from the apricots, and probably the best, was this apricot sorbet from Annie's Eats.  This... I have no words.  It was absolutely tremendous.  This is just one more indication that I need to pick up David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop sooner rather than later.  Although, come to think of it, maybe I shouldn't be surrounded by beautiful delicious ice cream constantly.  Eh, who am I kidding.  I should definitely be surrounded by it.

Fresh Apricot Pie
(slightly adapted from this about.com page)

• 1 cup sugar
• 4 tablespoons flour
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• pastry for double crust 9-inch pie
• 3 cups fresh apricot halves
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon butter, cut in small pieces

Line a 9 inch pie pan with half (or one sheet if you're using the refrigerated stuff) of the pie crust.  Toss the apricot halves with sugar, flour, and nutmeg mixture then pile into the prepared crust.  Sprinkle evenly with the lemon juice and then dot with the Tbsp of butter.

Cover with top crust, trim and flute edges and make several small slits in top to vent.

Bake at 425° for 25 to 35 minutes or until the pie is bubbling wonderful amazing syrup from its vents and the edges of the crust you weren't quite as careful sealing.

 So, there you have it, a few apricot options if you haven't passed through the season entirely.

And, also, I'm going to try to write here a bit more than I have been.  I've been neglecting all you hungry folks for too long.

Moosewood Macaroni & Cheese

I've talked up Moosewood often enough here that you might suspect I'm a shill for the restaurant, nothing better than a marketeer for their prodigious line of stylish reasonably-priced cookbooks available now for the low low price of... etcetera, etcetera.  The truth is, yeah, I loved the restaurant more than I hated it, and I have been nothing but happy with the food I've produced from the Moosewood cookbooks.  Since we've been trying out vegetarianism (we've been saying veggie-curious half seriously) the last month or so, we've been paging through the cookbooks even more than usual.  But after what happened last week, I'm starting to think maybe all my praise has been based on something transient, something distressingly more like good luck than good design, something like happenstance.  You guys, last week we made something from New Classics so abysmal, so abhorrently distasteful I am about to be forced to paraphrase myself, to reuse a line I first used to describe the crime against nature that was Tater-Tot Nachos served in the wilds of the midwest.  Are you ready for this?

It was so awful, I want to make it again just to take a picture of myself throwing it away.

It started out almost as innocently as a meal can start: we wanted macaroni and cheese for dinner.  Here's a useful rule of thumb: when the majority of the ingredients are included in the dish's name, the difficulty of execution is somewhere between poking yourself in the face and sitting in a folding chair.  Seriously, it's like cooking at a first grade level.  You put pasta in water, you add cheese.  Done.  Next. Meal.  In this way, we were bolstered.

The cookbook set us up well, too: to add some protein to your cheesy pasta, simply blend some tofu into this dish's cheese sauce, your kids will never suspect the extra nutrition!  And you know what, they probably wouldn't, either, because there is no way they're getting far enough into this dish to detect the subtle flavor of tofu.  Instead, the first and most egregious misstep was one rather obviously incongruous ingredient the addition of which they fail to even mention in the text: along with the cheese and tofu going into the sauce, you add raw diced onions and prepared mustard.  2 huge Tablespoons of prepared mustard.  In our defense, we questioned it when we were putting everything together, but ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we'd never been steered wrong by these books.  Where others have failed so spectacularly, Moosewood has held strong, had won the sort of trust necessary to even make us add an ingredient we knew we shouldn't.

After combination but before baking, the dish was the color and consistency of deviled eggs and had a smell akin to mayonnaise late in the process of turning.  Yet on and on we pressed, turning away our noses and hoping that all this would somehow magically transform into deliciousness in the oven. It took literally an hour and a half of baking (twice as long as indicated because the middle remained stubbornly cold) before we could dig into the finished product.  Once we chipped our way through the dry, insanely breadcrumby crust--yet another misstep, if a forgivable one--the interior just looked and smelled wrong.  The kind of thing you would send back if served it in a restaurant.  Instead of lessening in baking, the smell had intensified, building up to a stink that became more and more hideous as it permeated the room.  If we had turned back then and ordered a pizza, we might have been spared some measure of queasiness, but by then it was probably 9pm, we were completely famished and held still to our faith in the source.  So in spite of the evidence before us, we spooned it into bowls.

Dana, to her credit, made it maybe three bites in before she gave up; I am ashamed to admit that in my hunger and desperation, I somehow managed to polish off most of my bowl before pushing it bodily across the table.  Reader, let me put you there with us.  Below the crisp, nearly wooden crust, the texture was somewhere in the neighborhood of leftover egg salad, lukewarm and paste-like toward the center, molten and fluid along the edges.  The smell was some kind of heavy mustard and sulfur dried on the counter.  It tasted like culinary death, like holding sulfrous clotted ash in our mouths on a dare, only the dare was simply a late dinner of what should have been comfort food. The taste was overwhelmingly the bitterness of uncooked onions, unctuous and nauseating. There was mustard on the tongue, too, of course.  There was mustard besieging us on every side at that point, its presence inescapable within the four walls of the house, even after disposing of the leftovers, even after brushing--nay, scouring--our teeth, it remained.  That night as I slept, I swear to God that I could dream of nothing but the pervasive presence of mustard and onions.  This is how deeply we were failed.

I have to confess that I still find myself a little mystified by the level of fail here.  I'm still not clear on how a simple dish went so hellishly wrong.  I mean, even Trader Joe's makes their microwaveable macaroni and cheese a winner, how could something so much more work intensive be so far off the mark?  While we didn't get a picture of me throwing the remains of this ill fated adventure away, we got this:

 Why did you have to make Dana so sad, Moosewood?  Why, oh why, have you betrayed us?

On the recipe

I love recipes.

Yeah, I'm man enough to admit it, right up in front of all of you gathered here today.  Okay, okay, I know I've talked before about how difficult it can be for me to follow a recipe to the letter, but whenever I cook I do pretty much invariably have something in front of me.  See, I love everything about recipes.  The precise seemingly logical measurements, the linear directions, the sense that, like a map, if you follow their lines precisely, you will always get where you intend to go.  This is really satisfying, and it speaks to the age we live in, too.  You probably know this but if you study any art long enough you'll hear reiterations of the idea that everything has been done, everything thought, everything said and heard.  We humans have been here on Earth doing stuff long enough that we don't really have anything new to offer, just the same old things, hopefully combined in some new way that, immediately after you do it, becomes just one more thing that's also not new.  So when it comes to cooking, it's not much of a stretch to say that everything you're thinking of throwing together in a pan, someone else has made it first.  And if you look deep enough on google, they've probably blogged about it too.

Think too hard on the implications of this concept and it'll drive you absolutely mad, but once it wiggles its way inside you you kind of have to learn to live with it.  Me, I like to imagine that this concept of reiteration is one of the cornerstones of modern civilization, that it's comforting to be living in the shadow of history, and recipes for me just reinforce this.  When I cook from a recipe, I'm just consciously reiterating a previous meal, attaching myself to a newer form of someone else's experience with a dish, when I then blog about the recipe, I'm constructing the underlying associations that society depends on.  I am not saying that this is my motivation all the time, but sometimes, sure, I'm doing it to do it so that it will be redone.

As you might imagine from this, I cook from recipes quite a bit.  But more and more I find that my developing sense of how things work in the kitchen leads me away from whatever recipe my laptop screen is open to and toward the cupboard, or the fridge.  I guess, despite all my tangled beliefs about the power of the recipe, all my reliance on the formula, I'm finally learning to cook.  I'm sure that there are a million names for this realization, for this act of breaking through the recipe, but the one that keeps running through my head tonight is this: I'm cooking freehand. 

Tonight, as Dana ailed on the couch tending a fever as sudden and furious as a sunspot, I had the idea that I'd make her a soup.  It was only after I'd diced the aromatics and started digging veggies from the crisper that I realized I was going about this differently than usual.  I hadn't hit up tastespotting, hadn't dug through the food-stained catalog of printed out recipes we keep in a binder near the stove, hadn't even really referenced the recipes I've followed so many times I have them by heart.  I just wanted soup so I put together soup.  I tasted broth, and I frowned at vegetables like normal but I was doing something much more interesting than usual.

Ultimately, the soup turned out all right, good for what it was but still a little unbalanced with flavors, and perhaps that is one of the things that turns me off of cooking freehand, the sense that if something doesn't turn out quite right, it's not the fault of the recipe, it's my fault.  There's no scapegoat.

Anyway, the soup's not the important thing (though it was very pretty) it was just a dish that got me thinking.  So now I'm curious: what's the breakdown on this issue like in the general population?

So this is a quick sort of poll, a post that needs responses from you.

When you cook, do you dig out recipes and follow their instructions or do you cook freehand, gripping like mad to experience and--if you're a science-minded cook-- the ratios of what goes with what?  Okay, why?

Busted Belly Benefit

In case you didn't hear, our dear dear friend Alex Solla has run into some pretty serious medical problems for the better part of a year.  In fact, his last few months have been repeatedly punctuated by the sort of medical emergencies most people don't recover from.  This has left him with a stack of medical bills and physically unable to pursue the pottery from which he earns his living.  You can read the nitty-gritty of Alex's last few months here if you've got a strong stomach and you're so inclined but I just wanted to post to say this:

If you're anywhere in the Ithaca area this Sunday at around 6pm, you should stop by the Rongo in Trumansburg to support someone awesome who needs--and deserves--a hand.  Plus there'll be "two awesome live bands playing and a fantastic auction of art, fine crafts, and lots of fun stuff from local wineries and bed and breakfasts," so you'll be able to grab some wicked stuff. 

Meet our Chickens

About a month ago, Dana and I, buoyed by countless facebook albums of other peoples' newly-purchased tiny chicks strutting in deep green grass, broke down and made arrangements to adopt some of our own.

We picked out two, a black one and a brown one, an Ostralorp and an Americauna respectively, and set them up in a big cardboard box in our garage with a heatlamp (repurposed from my photo lighting equipment, actually), a feeder, and water dish.  We named the black one Lily and the brown Violet.  They were just little peepers when we brought them home, small enough for both to make the move from the feed store in the sort of brown paper bag you send your kids' lunch in, and not yet heavy enough to even crinkle the bag's bottom.

But, as you're probably aware if you've ever raised any sort of animal, they grow so fast.  Provided food, water, heat, and space, they've probably quadrupled in size in the last month.  Since we've raised them and thereby handled them presumably every day of their short lives, they're essentially pets.  Pets as likely to poop on you as perch, sure, but pets nonetheless.  The cardboard box they'd been swimming in in late March is much too tight a fit now, Lily can look over the side and meet our eyes when she cranes her neck.  Unsurprisingly, she manages this as often as she can.

The soft fuzz they were covered in their first week has slowly given way to glossy feathers, leaving only their heads patchy and balding where the fuzz has ebbed.  Then last night, when I went to check on them, Violet's head had suddenly bloomed with a strong coat of ginger feathers, seemingly from nowhere.  It's just so startling to see something grow before your eyes.  I feel like I'm caught in a time lapse video somehow, the world spinning like a child's globe, flowers blooming from seed.

Since they'll have far outgrown their box by the end of this week, we've been working on setting up a coop for them to transfer to.  It's down to only finishing touches at this point: the wire is on and stretched taut, but the door is still missing, they've got a box to roost in but no roosts.
This is to say that while I haven't been writing about food on the blog--a whole month has slipped away, somehow--we've still been busily approaching this idea of homestead which brought us out here in the first place.  I feel with our transition into gardening and raising our own birds this year--expect egg recipes galore when the girls start laying around September--we've crossed some line in food that I hadn't really conceptualized.  We're going from consumers, perpetual supermarket shoppers, and amateur gourmets (props) to cultivators of earth.

We've built the chicken coop in a sheltered cement island nestled under the apple tree in our backyard, bordered on one side by riotously growing tomato plants, tangles of berry vines, and a solitary jalapeno bush.  Our apricot tree a little further away is dense with underripe green fruit, its branches drooping like a willow's nearly to the lawn.

Along one the side of the house, tulips are dancing a slow masquerade, and the waxen leaves of strawberry plants shelter small red fruits as vibrant as songs, on the other side grape vines bolstered by the suddenly torrential spring rains wind like a breeze through the slats of a fence.  Nearby our little lemon sapling pushes up, up toward the sunlight pushing back.

It is April here, and the air is hot or cold day to day with little pattern.  We let the chickens perch on our fingers while we lay in the grass, we sow wildflower seeds in the good earth, the sky builds--fraying white along the edges--toward the inexorable heat of the summer to come.