Scrambled duck eggs with green beans, red pepper, and fresh herbs

We bought an egg share with our CSA. This means that along with our weekly vegetables, we also get half a dozen mixed brown, blue, and spotted eggs. They're excellent -- obviously super-fresh, with bright orange yolks and full whites. A fried CSA egg is a thing of beauty, especially split over a piece of sourdough toast. But six eggs is just about as many as we can eat in a week, considering our overall low levels of breakfast-eating and baking. And then the CSA decided to give everyone a sample of half a dozen duck eggs.

Suddenly we had double the eggs, and the duck eggs were nearly double the size of the chicken eggs, so it was more like we had sixteen eggs than twelve. It was definitely time for a couple of hearty weekend scrambles. And why not get the full use out of the CSA by adding plenty of herbs and vegetables?

For our herbs, we used curly parsley and dill, both of which are excellent with egg. I think dill is seriously underused in general, and particularly when it comes to eggs. It's great raw in egg salad, and it's also great cooked into a scramble like this. I imagine that it's similar to the classic tarragon-and-egg combination. Try it!

Scrambled duck eggs with green beans, red pepper, and fresh herbs
serves 2

butter
2 scallions
large handful green beans (or zucchini, broccoli, etc)
1/2 red bell pepper
2-3 duck eggs (or sub 5-6 chicken eggs)
~3 tbsp each fresh dill and parsley (or basil, tarragon, chives, etc)
salt, pepper

Chop your scallion whites, setting the greens aside. Saute in butter in an appropriate egg pan over medium heat.

Wash, trim, and cut your green beans into bite-sized pieces. When your scallions have begun to soften, add the beans to the pan, along with a punch of salt. Continue to cook for another 2-3 minutes, stirring occasionally, while you dice your bell pepper. When the beans are mostly tender, add your peppers and cook for another 2-3 minutes to soften.

Crack your eggs into a bowl. Finely chop your scallion greens, parsley, and dill; add them to the eggs. Season with salt and plenty of pepper. Beat with a fork until frothy and well mixed.

When all of your vegetables are tender, add your egg mixture to the hot pan. Cook, stirring frequently, until your eggs are done to your liking.

Serve your finished eggs with a little more pepper or a few fronds of herbs scattered on top. A simple green salad is definitely welcome alongside. And if it happens to be dinnertime, or Sunday brunch, a glass of dry white wine would not go amiss.

Have you ever cooked with duck eggs?

Scrambled eggs with tarragon, parsley, potato, and onion

Wait, it's the holiday weekend? It's practically summer! What happened?

A lot of things happened. My ankle is still sprained, which means I've been hobbling around instead of standing up in the kitchen. I've been taking programming and computer history classes, which require a lot of brain and leave me wanting to sit around reading trashy novels in my spare time. And we're semi-suddenly going to London at the end of this week, due to someone having a required work trip. This gives us an excellent opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and take some vacation time. I intend to drink lots of coffee, eat British Indian food, and go to all the museums.

SO. That's my life right now. Anyway. Let's talk about food.

The other day I had some leftover potatoes and onions to use up, along with a bunch of fresh tarragon, so I made these delightful eggs.

Nigel Slater says that eggs and tarragon work well together, and I am happy to report that this is indeed the case. I'm especially happy because I don't really know what else to do with a package of tarragon. I think some further experimentation may be in order. But in the meantime, eggs work.

Scrambled eggs with tarragon, parsley, potato, and onion

butter
1/2 small onion
1 small cooked potato
2 eggs
leaves of 2 sprigs fresh tarragon
leaves of 2-3 sprigs fresh parsley
salt & pepper
toast to serve

Melt a pat of butter in an appropriate egg pan. Dice your onion, add it to the pan, and cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes, or until it starts to soften. (If you're using leftover cooked onion, you can just heat it up with the potato.)

Dice your potato and add that to the pan. Stir and continue to cook for another 2-3 minutes, or until hot through.

Crack your eggs into a small bowl. Chop your herbs and add them to the eggs, along with a good sprinkling of salt and pepper. Mix well with a fork.

If you want toast, now is the time to put it on.

Turn the heat down under your pan and add your egg mixture. Cook, stirring frequently with a spatula, until scrambled to your liking. I like to scramble on low heat; the residual heat in the pan will still keep things going fairly quickly.

Serve your finished eggs with nicely buttered toast. Have some coffee. Yay!

What do you make with tarragon? Seriously, I need some suggestions.

Also, did I mention that our first CSA box of the season is coming right before we fly across the world? There may be some hasty cooking and freezing happening.

Winter squash polenta with chipotle pinto beans

I've been thinking about the combination of squash and beans for a few weeks now. Black beans and sweet potato are a natural match in things like enchiladas and black bean-broccoli stuffed sweet potatoes, so why not try a variation with winter squash?

This is just a basic soft polenta with a big whack of delicious, vibrant winter squash puree added in. I still had some previously roasted CSA squash puree in the freezer, so this was the perfect way to finish it up. Of course, there are still two squash on our counter. Those need to get eaten soon too!

Polenta does take a bit of time to make, but it's such a delicious result that I think it's well worth it. The overall result is smooth and comforting, with a subtle sweetness (not to mention a BRIGHT ORANGENESS) from the squash and a hint of contrasting black pepper. And the combination with spicy beans? Yes. The experiment worked.

Wilted dark greens with garlic would be an excellent addition if you want more vegetables. Cilantro would be a great garnish here too.

Winter squash polenta

3 tbsp butter or olive oil
1/2 medium yellow onion
3 cups veg broth, water, or a mix
1 cup polenta and 1 cup water, combined
~2 cups winter squash puree
salt and pepper to taste

Melt your butter or oil in a 3-quart or bigger pan on medium heat while you dice your onion finely. Add the onion to the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, for about five minutes, or until nice and fragrant and translucent.

Add your water or broth and bring the pan to the boil. I used 2 cups of vegetable stock and 1 of plain water, which worked perfectly.

If you haven't mixed up your raw polenta and water, now is the time to do so. Give it a few good stirs to break up any lumps. Then gradually add your polenta and water mix to the pot, stirring each addition in well.

When all your polenta has been added, it's time to settle in for the long haul. Reduce the heat to low and cook, stirring frequently, for about 25 minutes. Many polenta recipes will have you stir for the entire cooking time, but I don't think this is necessary, especially if you are also cooking some tasty pinto beans at the same time. Just keep an eye on your polenta and stir it frequently.

Your polenta will be cooked when it's thick and is pulling away from the sides of the pan as you cook. Taste it to make sure. Then add your squash puree, season well with salt and pepper to taste (start with 1/2 tsp of each), stir it all up, and cook for another five minutes, or until hot through and tasty.

Chipotle pinto beans

butter or oil
1 yellow onion, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
cumin, oregano, salt to taste
~2 cups cooked pinto beans
2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, finely minced
adobo sauce to taste
green onion to garnish

This is more or less a non-mashed version of basic refried beans. Saute onion and garlic in oil or butter until softened. Season with cumin, oregano, and salt. Add pinto beans and a bit of their broth (if homemade) and cook, stirring, for five or ten minutes, until everything is hot through and the beans are at your preferred degree of dryness. Correct seasonings and take the pan off the heat. Finally, stir in your chipotles, plus a couple spoonfuls of the adobo sauce to taste. (Chop the rest of the can of chipotles in adobo and freeze in an ice cube tray for future applications.)

Serve your beans over a big scoop of polenta and garnish with chopped green onion. Oh man, it's so good.

I spread the leftover polenta evenly into a casserole dish, pressed some parchment paper over the top, and left it to solidify a bit overnight. The next morning, I fried up a couple of squares in a little butter, then topped them with a fried egg. Plain romaine on the side.

This was an excellent plan and I highly recommend that you try it, either with neat squares of polenta or a couple of rough handfuls shaped into patties. Runny egg yolk with crispy polenta is definitely worth a few minutes of effort.

How are you eating the last of your winter storage vegetables?

Eggs with butter-braised leeks and tomatoes

These eggs are yet more evidence that you can shove as many vegetables as you want into a meal. Who would have thought that a serving of simple scrambled eggs could hold a full leek and a tomato too? But they can, and they do, and you should try it. The results are phenomenal -- sweet and rich and bursting with leek and tomato flavor.

While these are super easy, they take a half hour or so to cook thanks to the slow collapse of the leeks and tomatoes. Don't worry, though! They are totally worth it. Just have them for a weekend breakfast or brunch instead of on a busy Monday morning.

Because scrambled eggs are so versatile, you can play around with this recipe as much as you like. In fact, you can play around with pretty much any recipe as much as you like, but let's just go with the egg logic here.

If you want to add cheese, I recommend something in the swiss/gruyere/emmenthaler category. Or go whole hog and whack in a slab of fontina or brie. It's all good.

If you want to add more vegetables, I think greens are an excellent choice. Wilt in some spinach or a couple handfuls of shredded cabbage (yes, cabbage -- it'll suck up the leek and tomato flavor beautifully) just before you add the eggs to the pan. Food can always use more greens!

And, of course, you could mix this up even further with some different herbs. I think adding a few branches of fresh thyme at the beginning of the braise would be really something. Just remember to pick out the woody stems before the egg stage.

Serves 2.

Eggs with butter-braised leeks and tomatoes

2 tbsp butter
2-3 leeks
2 medium tomatoes
optional dash of white wine or dry vermouth
4 eggs
salt, pepper
fresh parsley
hot toast to serve

Melt your butter in a skillet on medium heat.

Clean your leeks by splitting them longways in fourths, leaving the root end intact. Rinse well to remove any dirt. Leeks are grimy, so be thorough!

When your leeks are clean, cut them into inch-long pieces. Add your leeks to your melted butter and stir to coat. Season with a little salt and cook slowly, stirring occasionally, for about ten minutes. You want your leeks to collapse and get soft and lovely and buttery all over.

While you're waiting, wash your tomatoes and chop them up finely. I used fresh, but you could use a couple of skinned canned tomatoes here if you prefer.

Add your tomatoes to your braised leeks, stir, and raise the heat a touch. Cook for another five to ten minutes, or until your tomatoes have given off all their juice and are starting to look dry. Deglaze the pan with a splash of dry vermouth or wine if you like.

Crack your eggs into a bowl, season with salt and lots of pepper, and mix well. Add your eggs to your pan and cook until they reach your desired texture. Stir everything around frequently for a classic small-curd scrambled egg texture.

When your eggs are done, add a handful of chopped fresh parsley to the pan and stir it in.

Serve your eggs on pieces of hot buttered toast, with another handful of parsley scattered over the top. Drink coffee. Isn't it great?

What's your favorite way to get more vegetables into breakfast? (Perhaps in smoothie form? That certainly works.)

Migas with fresh summer corn

Migas! Migas are the best. Who doesn't love spicy scrambled eggs mixed with crispy corn tortillas? I ask you.

One of the best things about migas is how you can customize them with whatever veg you like. We've been concentrating on the all-powerful tomato, but that's not the only late summer vegetable still at its peak. How about the last of the fresh summer corn? How about an assortment of beautiful peppers? How about lots and lots of beautiful fresh cilantro -- or green onion, for those of you? YES.

I used farmer's market corn, a seriously gorgeous, heavy red bell pepper from our garden, and a shiny poblano and a big handful of cilantro from our CSA box. And what a delightful breakfast they made.

I haven't tried making my migas vegan with crumbled tofu, but that could potentially work very well for those of you who don't do eggs. Tofu scrambles are excellent, and this is essentially a scramble with extras -- so experiment away! I bet the results will be delicious.

Amounts are for two servings, but you can very easily double or triple this if you prefer.

Migas with fresh summer corn

4 small corn tortillas
butter/oil
4 eggs
1/2 small onion
1 jalapeño or other hot pepper - adjust for your spice tolerance
1 poblano pepper
1/2 red bell pepper
1 ear fresh corn
cumin, oregano, salt, pepper
handful of fresh cilantro or green onion
hot sauce, sour cream, carrot pickle, curtido, etc. to serve

Start by cutting your corn tortillas in half and then into strips 1/2 inch wide. Toast them on both sides in a lightly oiled skillet over medium-high heat. Work in batches if necessary to avoid crowding. When your tortilla strips are nice and crunchy and starting to brown, remove them to a plate and set aside.

Crack your eggs into a mixing bowl and mix together with a fork. Dice up your onion, jalapeño, poblano, and bell pepper, and add them to the eggs.

Husk and de-silk your corn before cutting it off the cob. We've talked about how to do this many times; I like to simply put my ear of corn down on the cutting board, slice a slab of kernels off the side, rotate, and repeat until all the kernels are removed. Someday I need to do a photo tutorial of this, but today is not that day.

Add your corn to the egg mixture. Season with a scant few shakes of salt and plenty of pepper, cumin, and oregano. Stir everything together until well amalgamated.

Add a bit more butter or oil to your hot skillet before tipping in the eggs. Scramble over medium heat until the eggs are just a hair underdone for you. Then add in the reserved tortilla strips, stir, and cook for another minute or two, lowering the heat as needed. The eggs should be perfectly cooked and the tortillas should be warm through.

Serve your migas with a big handful of chopped cilantro or green onion on top. Garnish with whatever seems most appropriate to you -- hot sauce is the minimum at our house. Now eat it all in good health and good humor.

How are you eating the last of the summer corn?

Roasted beet salad with butter lettuce and sliced eggs

Salads are the best. Salads that fulfill the lunch quota for the day are even better.

This time I went for a contrast in temperature and texture as well as flavor. Beets and eggs still warm from cooking over cool, crunchy lettuce, covered with a tangy, herby vinaigrette? Perfect. I ate a plateful for lunch, had a sliced apple for dessert, and was thus well prepared for an afternoon's work. Yay!

For an added bonus, you can absolutely make 90% of this salad in advance. Roasted beets, hard-boiled eggs, and vinaigrette all keep quite well for a good week, so you can have a prep party and get all of them ready on a long, lazy weekend afternoon. A few days later, when you discover that you need to eat lunch immediately, you can assemble it on the spot and go.

I kept this salad super simple, with only three main ingredients, but you can absolutely up the fance factor if you so desire. A handful of toasted almonds or walnuts, some beautifully garlicky croutons, or a scattering of crumbled feta or goat cheese would all be excellent over hearty, earthy-sweet beets. Extra crunch and tang? Yes, please.

Roasted beet salad with butter lettuce and sliced eggs

2-3 small beets or 1 large
2 eggs
butter lettuce
salt & pepper
vinaigrette of your choice

To roast your beets: Preheat the oven to 400F while you scrub your beets under running water. Trim the stems, saving the leaves for the braised, stir-fried, or ensoupenated application of your choice.

Wrap the beets in foil, put them in a small casserole dish, and roast for about 45 to 60 minutes, or until tender to the point of a knife.

When your beets are done, give them a few minutes to cool, and then slip off the skins with your fingers. Slice into whatever size pieces you prefer.

To hard-boil your eggs: put your eggs in a small pot with a lid and cover them with water. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook, covered, for eight minutes for large eggs and nine for extra-large.

Immediately remove the pan from the heat, drain off the hot water, and cover your hot eggs with cold water and ice. When cool enough to handle, peel under running water. Slice.

To assemble your salad: Wash and spin dry your lettuce. Tear or chop it into bite-sized pieces.

Arrange your lettuce on a plate. Top with your beets and eggs. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and drizzle with vinaigrette. I did a simple oil-vinegar-dijon combination with some added parsley, but I think this herb vinaigrette would be good too. Even a squeeze of lemon would be good.

Beautiful and delicious.

What salads are you eating this spring?

Fresh corn and egg breakfast tacos with homemade carrot pickles

The breakfast taco is one of the finest things in life. This one is full of fresh summer corn, which I for one am cramming into my mouth as quickly and copiously as possible. Who doesn't want a cob's worth of corn piled into a taco and slathered with hot sauce? I certainly do.

I also took full advantage of my mixed carrot pickle stash for extra garnish action. Taqueria-style garnish in the comfort of your own home is so great, you guys.

Speaking of taqueria pickles, this weekend, while we were at Lake Tahoe for a family wedding, John and I ate at a little taqueria (Tacos Jalisco in Kings Beach) with huge vats of the most excellent pickles! There was a carrot pickle with HUGE chunks of carrot, and a cucumber and white onion pickle with chopped medium-hot pepper, and they were so good. I think a taqueria-style cucumber pickle experiment is in order sometime soon.

Fresh corn and egg breakfast tacos with homemade carrot pickles

butter
half an onion
several cloves of garlic
hot peppers to taste
2 ears corn
4 eggs
cumin, oregano, salt, pepper
lots of corn tortillas
mixed carrot pickles
greens or shredded cabbage to garnish
hot sauce of your choice

Saute chopped onion in butter to soften. Add smashed & minced garlic and as much hot pepper as you desire. I used a jalapeno out of our garden, for double trouble. (Speaking of jalapenos, our crop may be making a pickle or hot sauce appearance sometime soon...maybe in a batch of Sue's green tabasco?)

Continue to cook while you husk an ear or two of corn and slice the kernels off the cobs. As I've mentioned before, I find it easiest to just lay the ear down horizontally and cut down the side, then rotate and repeat. I should probably get some pictures of that one of these days.

Add your corn to your pan of veg. Cook, stirring occasionally, for a few minutes. While you're waiting for the corn to cook, crack your eggs into a bowl, season them with cumin, oregano, salt, and pepper, and mix well with a fork.

Add your eggs to the pan and scramble everything together. Cook until the eggs are done to your liking.

Shovel your finished eggs into a bunch of corn tortillas charred briefly on both sides over the gas flame. If you don't have a gas stove, it's fine to warm them in a pan. Top your tacos with carrot pickles, greens, and hot sauce. If you want any other add-ons, like avocado or cilantro, go for it.

Fold your tacos up and eat them with alacrity. Cafe con leche is the best accompaniment.

What are your favorite fillings for breakfast tacos?

Perfect picnic egg salad

We're always talking about food at our house. What's your favorite sandwich? What are your top 5 beers? If you could open a diner, what would it be called, and what would the menu look like? And, of course, what is your perfect picnic menu?

Perfect picnic fare has a few qualifications. It tastes great cold. It's classic and uncomplicated. It's easy to transport. It can ideally be eaten with your hands, although we make limited exceptions for salads. And it's appropriate to the height of picnic season.

With all that in mind, we think the ideal picnic sandwich crown belongs to egg salad. It's tangy yet creamy, full of finely chopped crispy vegetables and big chunks of rich egg, seasoned liberally with fresh herbs, and stuffed between slices of toasted rye or sourdough: yes.

A good egg salad requires good hard-boiled eggs, so let's start there.

There are lots of different ways to boil eggs. The most common method involves boiling eggs for ten full minutes. This usually results in a hard-boiled egg with a rubbery yolk and a ring of greenish oxidation around the yolk: not good. To make a perfect hard-boiled egg, you need to cook your eggs for less than ten minutes. Eight minutes will produce an egg that looks like this one: solid, creamy-textured white with a yolk that's fully cooked on the outside, but still a bit damp in the middle. In an egg salad, the white will be more tender and delicious, while the yolk will mix more smoothly with the classic mayo & mustard dressing. It's an ideal situation.

Perfect hard-boiled eggs

Put your eggs, cold from the refrigerator, in a pot. Cover with cold water. Put the pot on the stove and bring it to a boil. When the water starts to boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, cover, and start timing.

Take your pot off the heat at the eight minute mark for large eggs. If you're using extra large, you can push it to nine minutes. Immediately drain off the hot water and run your eggs under the cold tap. I like to cool down the whole pan under the faucet, turning to get all the metal in contact with the cold water. Then, either in your cooled pot or a separate bowl, cover your eggs in cold water and add a handful of ice cubes.

Let your eggs chill until they're cool enough to peel. Then whack them all over with the back of a spoon and peel them, starting with the wider end. I like to peel eggs under a thin stream of cold water; this way, the water gets behind the membrane and helps loosen it a bit.

Voila: a perfect hard-boiled egg.

Combine this with a few radishes and some chopped fresh dill, and you have the makings of one of the best salads ever.

Dill and radishes are seriously the power combination for egg salad. Maybe you've always eaten your egg salad with celery as the crunchy veg component. That's all well and good--and you can absolutely add minced celery as well--but radishes, in my opinion, are even better. They're crunchy and spicy and add a beautiful touch of dark pink to the salad.

And dill! Dill is one of the most underused herbs ever, and it goes so perfectly with egg and mustard. It is, of course, totally fine to use parsley if that's what floats your boat, but you should absolutely try dill. It's the best cool counterpoint to spicy radish and rich egg.

Perfect picnic egg salad for two

4 hard-boiled eggs
2-3 radishes
1/4 bunch fresh dill/other herbs of your choice
2 scallions
1-2 tbsp mayonnaise
2 tsp dijon mustard
salt, pepper
rye or sourdough bread

Chop your eggs into pleasing chunks. Finely mince your radishes. Strip the dill fronds from their stems and chop them up. Trim a couple scallions and slice them into thin rounds.

Combine all your eggs and vegetables in a large mixing bowl. Add mayonnaise and mustard and mix, smashing with a fork to blend the egg yolks with the dressing. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Spread your egg salad onto slices of toasted rye or sourdough bread. Other bread is also okay, of course, but the flavor and aroma of both rye and sourdough are hard to beat. It's also pretty delicious to spread your egg salad on cucumber slices if you want more vegetables, or for a big plate of appetizers. It's all good.

Now eat it! We had our egg salad sandwiches open-faced, with a side of cucumber shallot salad. Super delicious and refreshing on a summer afternoon.

We actually ended up eating everything at home, I'm sorry to say. It was just too blindingly sunny outside, and we are cloud-loving midwesterners, even after eight years of living in California. Fortunately, picnic food tastes just as good inside as out.

Next up: that cucumber shallot salad! Hooray!

Fried egg tacos

So my new camera has a learning curve. That's ok. I'll just have to play with it and see what happens.

In the meantime, have some tacos.

This was my breakfast this past Saturday morning, when I needed lots of protein to smack into my bloodstream as immediately as possible. It's a good thing eggs take less than 5 minutes from start to finish.

Fried egg tacos

corn tortillas
butter
eggs
optional cilantro or green onion
hot sauce of your choice
salt & pepper

Heat a small frying pan over medium-high heat. Have the lid handy.

While you're waiting for your pan to heat, use a pair of tongs to sear your tortillas for about 30 seconds on either side, working directly over a second gas jet. This obviously assumes you have a gas stove. If you don't, just use the frying pan. You want your tortillas to be flexible and fragrant with a bit of char from the flame.

Put your warm tortillas on a plate and cover them with a clean tea towel to keep warm.

Melt a pat of butter in your hot pan. Crack in your eggs, one at a time. Give them maybe 30 seconds to begin to set up in the hot butter. Then carefully pour a trickle of water into your pan and slap on the lid. I just use the teapot for this.

Let cook for 1-2 minutes, swirling the pan occasionally. The water will steam the top of the egg, eliminating any uncooked white around the perimeter of the yolk. When the egg is done, the yolk should be just veiled and the white around its edge should be just solid to the tip of the spatula.

Top each tortilla with an egg, a bit of chopped cilantro or green onion (mine is under the eggs), some hot sauce, and a sprinkle of salt and pepper.

I like to break the yolks with a fork before I eat these tacos. This makes them easier to eat and lets you get some yolky goodness in every bite.

Have coffee. Feel better.

What do you eat for an instant protein infusion?

Potato green bean vinaigrette, deviled eggs, & fresh summer tomato

Swiftiest of Meals
w/ ref to A. E. Housman.

Swiftiest of meals, the salad now
holds all the veg I will allow;
potatoes, beans, and mayonnaise
softly sate my tongue's malaise.

Now in my kitchen's steamy den
lunchtime will soon come again.
Take from the fridge a loaf of bread,
an egg, a pear, and I am fed.

And since I love to eat my fill
I'll mix the dressing, fire the grill,
and set the table fork by knife
to serve my tastes for all my life.



This summer I seem to have forgotten about potatoes until just recently. Why? Potatoes are great, especially in summer salad form. So are hard-boiled eggs. So are fresh summer tomatoes, although no one has forgotten about those.

This combination would clearly make the most optimal picnic ever. Let's eat it!

Potato green bean salad with oregano vinaigrette

For the salad:
boiling potatoes
green beans

For the dressing:
red wine vinegar
dijon mustard
fresh oregano leaves
garlic or shallot
salt, pepper
olive oil

Start by bringing a large pot of water to a boil. While it's heating, scrub and chop your potatoes into more or less bite-sized chunks. When the water boils, add your potatoes, slap on the pan lid, and let cook for about a half hour, or until tender. (If you're making deviled eggs too, you can totally put the raw eggs on to boil with the potatoes and just fish them out when the time is up. I do this practically every time.)

While your potatoes are cooking, wash and trim your green beans. You want a roughly equal amount of potatoes and beans. Cut them into inch-long pieces and set them aside.

Next, make your dressing. In a small bowl or measuring cup, mix a tablespoon of dijon mustard with a roughly equal amount of red wine vinegar. Add about eight or ten leaves of fresh oregano, finely chopped, and a clove of crushed and chopped garlic. Salt and pepper to taste. Now whisk with a fork while slowly pouring in a stream of olive oil. You'll want maybe 1/4 cup of oil total per tablespoon of vinegar. This makes enough dressing for about two large potatoes' worth of salad.

If you don't have access to fresh oregano, it's fine to substitute chopped parsley, basil, or whatever other soft green herb you like. However, fresh oregano is AWESOME, so I strongly recommend that you try it.

When your potatoes are almost cooked, it's time to cook your green beans. You can either steam them over the potato pot, or just add them to the water and cook them with the potatoes. If you care about things like "shocking your green beans to keep them bright green," I'd recommend steaming. Otherwise, go ahead and throw them in the boiling water. Either way, the beans take about three to four minutes to cook through.

When both your beans and potatoes are cooked, drain them completely (you can always stick the potatoes back in the pan over heat for a second if they seem overly wet) and put them into a bowl of your choice. Immediately pour the dressing over, stirring to mix well.

Voila! A beautiful salad!

Deviled eggs

eggs
mayonnaise
dijon mustard
scallion greens
salt, pepper, paprika

These are totally standard deviled eggs. Sometimes you just want the classics, right?

Start by hard-boiling your eggs. Put your raw eggs in a pot, cover them with water, and put the whole shebang on the stove. Bring the pan to a boil, and reduce the heat to a simmer. Let your eggs simmer for eight minutes. When the time is up, immediately take the eggs out of the hot pan, run them under cold water, and put them in a bowl of ice and cold water to stop the cooking. Let the eggs sit for at least ten minutes, adding more cold water if needed.

When cool, peel your eggs, cut them in half, and remove the yolks to a bowl. If you've timed your eggs perfectly, there should be just a little dimple of dampness at the center of the yolk, and certainly no grey-green oxidized business around its edge.

Mix your yolks with a large spoonful of mayonnaise, a small spoonful of mustard, and chopped scallion greens, salt, pepper, and paprika to taste. The proportions of these are entirely up to you. Want your eggs creamier? Add more mayo. Want them spicier? Add more mustard.

Scoop your yolk mixture gently into your egg halves. Garnish if you like. A sprinkle of paprika is pretty traditional here, but some chopped herbs or maybe a slice of green olive also work.

Hooray! Deviled eggs!

Tomato

1 good summer tomato
knife
salt

Cut up tomato. Sprinkle with salt. Eat.

Perfect! It's tomato!


(Also, if you have leftover potato salad and deviled eggs, guess what you can do for lunch the next day? Cut up your eggs, mix them into your potato salad, and have a completely delicious mess. Yes! I know you guys can't possibly have any leftover tomato.)

Egg salad in butter lettuce boats

The main themes of this weekend were heat and hunger. We really needed a full meal, but we also needed to keep our house as cool as possible. Egg salad seemed like the perfect solution.

Clearly, there are hundreds of egg salad variations out there. My main requirement is that there be plenty of dill and a good amount of mustard for a spicy kick. Seriously, dill is by far the best herb ever with eggs. If you haven't tried it, you are definitely in for a treat.

Egg salad with radish and dill

eggs
radishes
green onion
cucumber
fresh dill
mayo
dijon mustard
salt, pepper
lettuce leaves

Hard-boil eggs by your method of choice. Since it was on the verge of too hot in our house, I used the "let the eggs sit there" method--I put my eggs in a pot, covered them with water, threw on the pot's lid, brought everything to a boil, turned off the heat, and let the whole shebang sit for ten minutes. When the time was up, I poured off the water and covered the finished eggs in cold water. Voila--perfectly hard-boiled eggs with less heat suffusing the kitchen!

Assemble your egg salad. The proportions are up to you and your tastes. I used six eggs, four French breakfast radishes, one green onion, an entire 8-inch Armenian cucumber, maybe 1/3 cup of mayo, and a good tablespoon of mustard, plus as much dill as I could stand to chop--probably 1/3 of a standard bunch. Simply chop everything up, mix it all together in a large bowl, and check for seasonings.

When you're ready to eat, core a head of butter lettuce and separate the leaves. Wash and dry well. Try not to just eat all the lettuce leaves out of the sink by yourself, ok?

Serve your egg salad and lettuce boats with a couple spoons, and let everyone stuff individual leaves with as much salad as they like. If you have kids, you should probably make the boats yourself, to avoid massive egg salad drips--but otherwise, I think it's the most fun to just hang out and make your food as you eat it.

Fresh, perfect lettuce is clearly an ideal boat for egg salad, but you can use all kinds of other vegetables as well. Red, orange, or yellow pepper wedges taste great with creamy egg salad; radish or daikon slices provide a spicy contrast, while cucumber slices create a more neutral background; darker greens like chard or collard leaves can create a full, intense, and iron-rich wrap. It's all good.

Eat with a pitcher of iced tea or a bottle of chilled rosé, and a couple bowls of whatever fruit is freshest. Hooray! Summer!

Eggs Jeannette with sugar snap pea and radish salad

We've been watching Jacques Pepin's newest PBS show for the past few months, getting more and more excited about making all the delicious things.

Jacques Pepin is far more worth watching than practically any other chef currently on the air. He is very clearly invested in not just cooking, but teaching people how to cook. His food is simple and changes with what he has on hand, and he lets his audience know that that's fine. In fact, that's one of his signature lines. The whole message is that food and cooking should not be this overly hyped, worrisome, and fetishized thing, with methods requiring such terms as "best" and "perfect," but a normal, joyful activity you do every day with your family. Damn straight.

So for dinner I made Eggs Jeannette. These are more or less a variation on deviled eggs: hard-boiled eggs stuffed with a yolk-based mixture. However, the comparison fades when you whack all the stuffed eggs into a pan of hot oil and sear them off until the filling has turned brown. You finish by enveloping the eggs in a rich dijon and egg yolk vinaigrette.

I made these pretty much as-is from the show tie-in cookbook, Essential Pepin. The main thing I changed was to use yogurt instead of milk to thin and enrich the filling (see the aforementioned problem with milk dying a swift and glorious death in our refrigerator).

Eggs Jeannette

4 eggs
plain yogurt or milk
a couple garlic cloves
parsley
salt, pepper
dijon mustard
red wine vinegar
water
olive oil
chives or parsley for garnish

Start by hard-boiling four eggs. We thought this was plenty for the two of us as a main course; you can clearly make more if you want to. It's also fine to boil the eggs a day or two in advance. They're just hard-boiled eggs. What's the worst that could happen?

Everyone has their own method of hard-boiling eggs. Mine goes like this: put your eggs in an adequate saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring the whole business to a boil. When the water boils, reduce the heat to a fast simmer (lid on) and start timing. Cook for eight minutes before immediately removing the pan from the heat. Pour out the hot water and run the entire pan under cold water--outside as well as inside--to stop any residual heat conduction and entirely halt the cooking process. Then fill the pan--eggs still inside--2/3 with cold water, add a couple handfuls of ice cubes, and let the eggs cool. This produces perfectly done hard-boiled eggs, with a beautifully set white and a yolk with a bare dimple of dampness at the center, every time.

To assemble the eggs, cut each one in half and gently remove the hardened yolks, being careful not to rip the whites. Mix the yolks with chopped parsley, finely minced garlic, and salt and pepper to taste, as well as a tablespoon or two of yogurt or milk. You can totally play this by ear with no problem. If you want to chop and add other vegetables to the yolk mix, that's obviously a good idea--I might try finely chopped mushrooms or spinach in the future.

Fill each egg half with a spoonful of yolk mixture, leveled off so it's flush with the white, and set aside. You should have a couple spoonfuls of yolk mixture left over. Using a fork, mix this with a spoonful of dijon mustard, another spoonful of red wine vinegar, salt and pepper to taste, a little water, and about 1/4 cup olive oil to make a creamy egg-based vinaigrette.

Heat a frying pan on medium-high and swiftly sear your eggs in a little oil, flat side down, until the yolk mixture has just turned golden brown around the edges. This should take maybe two minutes, depending on your stove. Deposit eggs on plates, add a generous amount of dressing--a traditional French chef would "nap" the eggs by serving them cut side down and totally covering them with sauce--and garnish as desired. Voila!


Obviously, a dish of eggs with an egg-based vinaigrette requires a highly contrasting fresh vegetable of some kind. I had some of the first sugar snap peas of the year plus a bunch of radishes. Clearly it was time for a raw pea and radish salad.

Sugar snap pea and radish salad

sugar snap peas
radishes
lemon zest and juice
red wine vinegar
chives
salt, pepper
olive oil

Wash your peas and radishes. The proportion here is up to you; I used about two or three times the volume of peas as radishes.

To prep the peas, snap the stem ends and pull them down across the shorter side of the pod to string. This lets you avoid any stringy fibrous business in your teeth later on. Then cut the pea pods into two or three reasonably sized pieces. Top and tail your radishes and cut them into the thinnest possible slices. If you want to add any other vegetables, go ahead and wash and chop them too. Put all your vegetables into a reasonably sized bowl.

Next, make your dressing. I just mixed up a standard red wine vinaigrette with fresh lemon juice and zest. So. Start by peeling a strip or two of zest off a quarter of a lemon and cutting it into thin julienne. Then, in a small bowl or measuring cup, mix the lemon's juice and its zest, a teaspoon of red wine vinegar, several good grinds of salt and pepper, and a handful of chopped chives. Add about 1/4 cup of olive oil in a thin stream while mixing the whole business with your fork. Taste and correct any seasonings.

Toss your vegetables with as much dressing as you like, and serve.

While we just ate our salad as-is, it would be really great on a bed of greens. In fact, everything in this meal would be great on a bed of greens. Spinach, arugula, or a mesclun mix would all be good combinations.

Note the multiple vinaigrettes in one meal. This may seem ridiculous on first glance, but we didn't think so. In fact, since the two dressings were so different--one heavy, mustardy, and eggy, and the other light and lemony--they actually balanced each other out pretty well. Of course, the massive amount of fresh raw vegetables didn't hurt either.

Breakfast; lunch

Breakfast:

Two eggs beaten with a big spoonful of cottage cheese, and scrambled with sautéed red onion, red pepper, and parsley. Salt and pepper at the table.

Lunch:

Chicken & sun-dried tomato sausage cut into pieces, browned in a dab of olive oil, and mixed with chopped green beans and red pepper for the last few minutes of cooking.

This sort of thing perfectly illustrates why to own a decent frying pan: with it, you can make these two totally different meals (not to mention hundreds of others) in under ten minutes apiece. Who says you need time to cook?

Salads with things on them

The salad with things on top heads the list of great dinners at our house. Our most common variation is the Ol' Reliable: a massive amount of greens topped with seared marinated tempeh. But what happens when you don't have any tempeh, or are in the mood for something else? Well. What other things could you put on top of your greens?

If you eat meat, you could have a green salad with chunk tuna (as in a salade Niçoise) or a tuna salad. I would go for either a traditional tuna salad or a more Waldorfy variation with apple or pear, toasted pecans, celery, and what have you. A tuna vinaigrette with capers would be great too. If tuna is not your thing, you could sear off a couple thinly sliced or pounded pieces of chicken or beef with a little garlic, slice them up, squeeze on a little lemon juice, and serve them on top of your salad. But if you want to keep everything vegetarian, it's a good plan to go for a chickpea salad, a white bean vinaigrette, or a liberal application of egg.

While it's certainly possible (and delicious) to make a big green salad with simple chopped eggs, it's substantially more interesting to transform those eggs into something more. This time, I made egg salad.

Butter lettuce with egg salad

Hard boil as many eggs as you want to eat. Ice them, whack them all over with the back of a spoon, and peel them. Rinse and chop; mix with a large spoonful of mayo, a smaller spoonful of dijon mustard, some finely chopped red onion, chopped chives or dill, and a spoonful of capers if you like that kind of thing. Season with salt and pepper. We put a little Tapatio hot sauce in this particular batch; I was skeptical at first, but it turned out to be a great choice. Slightly spicy egg salad? Yes, please.

For your greens, core, wash, dry, and tear up a head of butter lettuce. If you want to use other salad greens, go right ahead; this works with nearly any kind of green. I might even deliberately choose a more bitter lettuce like endive, for a high contrast against the super-creamy egg.

When you're ready to assemble everything into one glorious plate of deliciousness, arrange a few handfuls of lettuce on your plate, and add some finely chopped red onion and any other chopped vegetables you'd like. Dress with vinaigrette (or oil and lemon) if you so desire; we had ours dry.

Now grab a fork, sit down, and eat.

I especially like this style of dinner because you don't just get full--you also feel great after you eat it. In the land of super-salted, oiled, and stomach-weighting dinners, this is a rare and precious commodity.

Breakfast burrito!

Oh no, I'm going to miss my April deadline! Uh, look, here's a breakfast burrito!

Sauté red onion in butter and olive oil (yes! both!); add sliced jalapeño, halved cherry tomatoes, and bits of whatever leftover bell pepper you have lying around in your crisper. Season with cumin, ground chipotle, and salt. Throw in lots of chopped zucchini or other summer squash and cook until tender. Turn heat down to medium; add eggs; scramble. Pile the finished business into warm tortillas, cover with chopped cilantro, take steam-ridden pictures, and eat swiftly.

EGGS

So I got some eggs and immediately felt better. Eggs are clearly the best of all possible ideas, especially when you cook them at home. I'm not particularly into restaurant eggs for a few reasons.

1. Everyone cooks eggs to their own preference/in a particular style. So if you happen to be at a French restaurant, for instance, a poached egg is going to be totally runny and albuminical throughout not just the yolk but also the white. GROSS. That degree of runniness actually gives me an upset stomach. If you cook at home, you control the egg.

2. Eggs must be eaten as absolutely hot as possible. Now, ok, taking pictures for foodblog does not exactly encourage this, but at least I know my eggs haven't been sitting at the pass for five minutes before I get them.

That said, I will totally eat a diner egg. I just like my own eggs better. I got a dozen at the Lebanese market and hand-picked another six brown eggs at the farmer's market and felt excellent about my prospects.

First: FRIED EGGS ON TOAST.

I always cook fried eggs with the steam method, which should be no surprise to anyone who's been hanging around here for any length of time. Heat pan on medium-high; melt butter; crack in egg; let set for maybe 30 seconds; add splash of water; slap on lid; shake pan to get water under the egg; let steam until done to your preference. I make my whites solid and my yolks liquid, for maximal toast absorption. You can start toasting bread before you ever put the egg in the pan.

Next, scrambled egg with onion, tomato, corn cut off the cob, and hot pepper.

I was going to add black beans to this one, but it was too late for the leftover container in our fridge. So we just had to make do with all the other delicious vegetable content. Oh no, fresh corn and heirloom tomatoes from the farmer's market! HA.

Since scrambled eggs with various additions were clearly a great idea, I went ahead and made even more.

This time I chopped up some red onion, green beans, and a sliver of red pepper, cooked them quickly in butter, and broke an egg over the top. After a vigorous scrambling, a grind of salt and pepper, and a handful of chopped dill, they were perfect. I warmed up some tiny exciting Lebanese market pita, cut them in half, and stuffed them with the egg-vegetable business.

This one was the best iteration yet. I mean, dill in egg salad is a given, right? It is for me, and should be for you. I'd never tried it with scrambled egg before, though. Clearly, I have been missing out for years and years.

Perfect breakfast: greens, sriracha, egg

Still, I can live without knowing how to make perfect tofu, at least for now, because I do know how to make this.

Wilted greens, sriracha, fried egg.

olive oil
cabbage and chard/other greens
salt
sriracha sauce
egg (butter optional)

Shred the greens while you warm a little olive oil in a pan appropriate for egg frying. For me, this is a tiny 8-inch nonstick dude; I shredded a huge chunk of green cabbage and a few leaves of chard to fill it to bursting. A finer shred is better here. Add your greens to the pan, along with a pinch of salt. Stir it up and let it cook until the greens are reduced to about half their initial volume. You can also add a bit of water and slap the lid on for steamed greens.

Add sriracha to taste; if you add it nearer the beginning, it will get sweeter and some of the pepper oil will evaporate, but if you add it at the end, it will stay hot and pungent. You can also add some sesame seeds or slivered almonds, if you feel like it.

Make sure the sauce is well mixed in and the leaves are sufficiently wilted, then tip everything out into a bowl.

If the pan doesn't have enough residual oil to fry an egg, add a little bit of butter. Fry your egg, using the steam method. It's just like steaming greens: turn the heat to medium-high, add a little water, and slap the lid on. Leave it for a few minutes before you check the white for required levels of firmness. Since this method makes the heat suffuse the pan, you can get perfectly uniform, solid whites every single time. Knowing this method has totally transformed how I eat eggs. Not kidding.


Ok! When the egg is done, slide it immediately onto your greens. Break the yolk and mix the egg pieces with the greens. Wilted spicy cabbage coated with liquid yolk is one of the finest things.

Eat it all as hot and fast as possible. Do not wait. You remember this is an egg.

Perfect breakfast

We got jumbo eggs at the farmer's market a couple weeks ago. Normally this would never happen. Our eggs are large, i.e. small. This time I got jumbo, though, and they are seriously awesome, with huge yellow unbelievable yolks.

Breakfast: fried egg, romaine with vinaigrette, sourdough toast with butter, red grapefruit juice in an old fashioned glass and an entire yellow tomato.

Breakfast breakfast

Oh man. I have been having some awesome breakfasts lately.

Sourdough toast with butter, four minute egg, green beans with garlic, assam tea. Green beans are the best breakfast food ever. I want them right now. Four minute eggs are also great if you have any inclination at all toward a runny yolk mashed into toast. Double energy absorption bomb!

I finally told myself to suck it up and peeled a bowlful of the ever-increasing supply of peaches. Now I feel a little dumb for not doing it before. This is three peaches and one apricot and I totally ate it all.

Another egg, this one fried using the steam trick. Garlic herb toast, redleaf lettuce with good vinaigrette, green tea. I totally broke the egg yolk, folded the business over and had a fried egg sandwich.

This one was the best, though. I woke up yesterday with a serious need for bagel. Ok. So I went to the bagel shop and got a sesame bagel, although without the creamy creamy cheesy cheesy creamy cheese. No! Instead I also went to the grocery store, where, among other things, I got an actual brick of cream cheese. When I got home I whipped out a bunch of dill that had been slowly expiring in our refrigerator. I cut out all the good dill fronds, minced them up, and mashed them into a big whack of cream cheese. Then I toasted my bagel and covered it with as much cheese as possible. Voila: bagel of herbal awesome!

It also helps that it totally looks like a big smiley one-eyed monster. I'm just saying.

Salad salad

Sometimes you just have to bow to the massive vegetable supremacy of the CSA box and make a damn salad.

A Salad.

egg
green beans
lettuce
radishes
parsley
salt, pepper
vinaigrette
(anything else you want)

First, do the cooking part of the salad.

Hard boil an egg per person. To do this, put your eggs in a pot of cold water. Make sure the water is high enough to cover your eggs. Put the pan on the heat, bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, and cook for about 9 minutes. When the time is up, whip the eggs immediately out of the hot water and into an ice water bath, i.e. a bowl filled with cold water and ice. Let them sit and cool while you prep the rest of the salad.

Wash a big handful of green beans and cut them into pieces. Blanch or steam in boiling water for about two or three minutes. I just threw mine in the pot with the eggs at the end of cooking; it's fine. When your beans are done, immediately run them under cold water as well; this stops the cooking and sets their bright green color.

Ok, cooking part over.

Wash, dry, and chop up the lettuce; mine was redleaf. I think there might be some frisee in there too, but I can't see any under the piles of green beans. Any reasonable salady lettuce is clearly fine. Distribute your lettuce into bowls and dress with a little bit of vinaigrette.

Wash, trim, and slice a radish or two; add the slices to your salads. Throw a handful of green beans on top. Peel your eggs by whacking them soundly all over with the back of a spoon, then starting at the wide end and getting under the membrane. If you have issues, try running them under cold water to get off any little bits of peel. Quarter them and add them to each salad. Chop up some fresh parsley and scatter it over the top.

Vinaigrette, salt, pepper.

Eat it all.