eggs

Let’s Get Saucy! In Which Our Heroine Joins a Cookbook Swap

This past week has been pretty hectic. At school, we’ve moved past eggs and breakfast and onto roasting, which meant producing full roasted dinners two nights in a row. At work, we’re setting goals for the rest of the year and settling into new ownership. On a more personal note, I helped my Little Sister (I’ve been a Big Sister with Big Brothers/Big Sisters for three years this month!) and her family move into their very own apartment, after a really tough year of moving around from family guest rooms to hotels. I couldn’t be prouder of them, and it was such an amazing and humbling experience to be part of their special day.

And here in the blogosphere, I got to take part in my very first ever cookbook swap! I participated in the Food Blogger Cookbook Swap, hosted by Alyssa of www.EverydayMaven.com and Faith of www.anediblemosaic.com. I sent a cookbook to a food blogger and someone sent me a cookbook, too!

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I think I kinda hit the cookbook jackpot. I received Faith’s cookbook, “An Edible Mosaic: Middle Eastern Fare with Extraordinary Flair.”

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I’ve always been a big fan of Middle Eastern food, but my experience has pretty much been limited to what I can get in restaurants. This book breaks down the components, the vocabulary, and the cooking methods of Middle Eastern food so beautifully, I feel silly for ever being intimidated by the idea of trying to cook it at home.

It was really hard to choose a recipe to cook for this post. All of them looked so colorful and sounded so delicious. I finally settled on Eggs Poached in Spicy Tomato Sauce. This cookbook does a really good job of walking you through all the pieces of the puzzle before diving into the recipes that put the whole picture together for you, but if you’re still just a little bit unsure this particular recipe uses ingredients most of us have heard of and are probably familiar with.

Equipment:
Medium sized skillet with a lid
Cutting board and knife
Can opener
Spoon for stirring
Measuring spoons and cups
Mis en place bowls (if you do all your prep first)

Ingredients (I cut the amounts in half because I was cooking just for me, but I’m giving you the full amounts here):
2 T olive oil
1 green bell pepper, de-seeded and diced
1 small onion, diced
1 small hot green chili pepper (I used a jalapeno), minced
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tomatoes, diced
4 large eggs
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp ground paprika
1/4 tsp ground red pepper (cayenne)
1/8 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 T tomato paste
1/2 C water
Fresh parsley, chopped for garnish

As usual, I recommend that you get all your mis en place together first. (The fact that you can see my sink in this picture means you all now know exactly how small my kitchen is.)

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Heat the oil in your skillet over medium heat. Add the bell pepper and the onion and sweat them until they’re soft.

Add the jalapeno, garlic, salt and diced tomato and cook for about 2 minutes, then add all the spices stir them in. Cook everything for about another minute.

Add the water and the tomato paste and stir them into the cooked veggies to combine. Bring the heat up to boiling, then back down to a simmer and cover. Let the sauce cook for about 10 minutes. Faith recommends taking the lid off of the pan for the last minute or so to let the sauce thicken up.

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Use the back of your spoon to make four little indentations in the sauce. Crack one egg into each little dent, and then put the cover back on and let it them cook for about 5 minutes for a runny yolk, and maybe another minute or so longer for medium set.

Garnish with the parsley, and serve!

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What I really loved about this recipe (aside from the fact that I’ll use any excuse to eat a runny yolked egg on my food) is the blend of spices and the little bite from the chili pepper in the sauce. They just brought so much flavor to the party! This recipe was also super quick to put together, so if you wanted to add a little excitement to breakfast, this would be the way to do it.

There were 39 other bloggers who participated in this year’s swap. We’ve all written about the cookbooks we received, and it’s been a lot of fun learning about everyone through their posts about this swap. Go check them out!
A Baker’s House
An Edible Mosaic
avocado bravado
Blue Kale Road
Blueberries And Blessings
Cheap Recipe Blog
Confessions of a Culinary Diva
Create Amazing Meals
Cucina Kristina
Culinary Adventures with Camilla
Cupcake Project
Dinner is Served 1972
Done With Corn
Eats Well With Others
Everyday Maven
Flour Me With Love 
From My Sweet Heart 
girlichef 
Great Food 360° 
Healthy. Delicious. 
Je Mange la Ville 
Karen’s Kitchen Stories 
Kitchen Treaty 
Olive and Herb
OnTheMove-In The Galley 
Our Best Bites 
Paleo Gone Sassy
poet in the pantry 
Rhubarb and Honey 
Rocky Mountain Cooking
Shikha la mode 
Shockingly Delicious
Sifting Focus 
Spiceroots
Spoonful of Flavor 
Tara’s Multicultural Table 
The Not So Exciting Adventures of a Dabbler 
The Suburban Soapbox 
The Whole Family’s Food 

An Egg-cellent Adventure

Just get used to punny titles, folks. I sincerely cannot help myself.

It’s been awhile since I performed any true kitchen experiments, and it was starting to get a little sad around here. The part of my brain that thinks about food (most of it) craves excitement (don’t think for a second I didn’t want to say “egg-citement” just then) and adventure was crying out for the thrills and chills of an “I dunno what’s gonna happen here, but let’s do it anyway!” moment.

Enter, this little gem from Hard Corps Foodie. It’s instructions on how to salt cure an egg yolk. I’d never heard of such a thing, and then once I did, it seemed like they were showing up everywhere. They’re being grated over salads, and pasta dishes, and all sorts of things.

What are they? Well, it’s pretty much like it sounds. You basically bury egg yolks in a salt-sugar mix, let them hang out for a few days until the salt pulls out most of the moisture, then hang them to dry somewhere cool for another week. You can play around with the ratios, and even add other spices into the mix to further manipulate the flavor of the final product.

I was dying of curiosity, so I set out to cure my own egg yolks last Saturday. I’ve just started the “hanging” phase today, but I thought I’d show you what it looks like so far, and I’ll give you an update in a week or so when they’re ready to use, and then, you know, use them, because what’s the point, otherwise?

I actually used a mixture of about 30% sugar, 55% sea salt, and 15% hickory smoked sea salt.

I just cracked a couple of eggs, dumped the whites and gently plopped the yolks into the cure.

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Then I buried them as well as I could, put the lid on, and stuck the container in the back of my fridge and pretty much ignored them until this afternoon.

When I took them out of the cure and rinsed them with cold water, this is what they looked like.

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So, yanno… like dehydrated yellow things. Kinda shaped funny, but that’s probably because the burying process was a little tricker than I had anticipated. I wanted to make sure they were both closer to the center and not touching the sides of the container, and that took a little manipulating. I can’t imaging being a funny shape would impact the taste at all. It was a lot weirder to me that I could actually hold this crazy dehydrated egg yolk under cold running water without it just totally falling apart.

And now, as I mentioned, we’re just at the hanging up stage.

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I’ve read that you can cure yolks in pretty much anything salty… like miso and even soy sauce, so if these work out I will definitely become obsessed with doing this all the time, just to see what it tastes like.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m super impatient sometimes… I really hate waiting for the good part, so I’m trying to slow myself down during experiments like this and think of all of it as the good part, so I can really notice what’s happening along the way instead of just being so fixated on the final goal. That’s another thing my food obsessed brain needs– reminders that the process should get just as much attention as the end result.  It’s all about eggs-periences, right? (Sorry. I couldn’t resist!)