Baked eggs

In the past week, I have

• hit two major deadlines at work, barely
  
• finished a final project for my graphic design class
• had our childcare provider in the hospital
• seen my checking account hit $9
• called the pediatrician on an early weekend morning about a scary vaccination reaction
  
• experienced our first two-year-old public meltdown while in line with a cart of fabric cut to order (stranger reaction was equal parts cold, cold judgement and the kind of sympathy that brings me to tears)
• had three diapers fail to contain my child's monster pees, each one while she was sleeping on MY bed
  
• caught puke in my hands

Yes, a shitload of screw you from the universe.

At least there were eggs. Baked with radish leaves and onion scapes and Parmesan and lots of butter and cream. With home-baked bread (yes, like the famous no-knead--with a more whole-grain modification of dough stored in the fridge). And potatoes fried in duck fat.

And we count our blessings.

It's hard to see when you're covered in puke or are trying to hold on to 27 pounds of screaming, scratching, squirming child while pulling out your debit card. Or when you are crossing $2 items off your grocery list. Or when you have heard "NOOO!!! Papa do it!" for the 200th time by 9 am. Gratitude can be slow in coming.

But our stuff, so far, has been nothing.

Nothing.

We realize how extraordinarily lucky we are right now. We consider it an obligation to appreciate the fresh eggs a coworker brings, the downy hair of a feverish toddler, the smell of jasmine on our patio. Beauty can be so fleeting.

And ohh, those eggs.

Baked eggs

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Set your ramekins on a cookie sheet--one for each egg, so do as many as you think you'll eat. (I eat one and the baby's leftovers; W. likes two.) Put a thin pat of butter and a splash of cream into each.

Add a bit of thinly sliced radish leaves. Break one egg into each dish. Sprinkle with thinly sliced onion or garlic scapes, grated Parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper.

Bake until whites are set and yolks are still runny, 10-15 minutes.

You will have to figure out the timing particular to your oven and your egg preferences. I'm a bit fussy about this. I hate runny whites and hard yolks. W. has been very patient with me and has found a sweet spot at about 13 minutes.

This is one of those recipes that can be endlessly varied. Just an egg and some butter and whatever bits of deliciousness you have lying around: spinach, proscuitto, tomatoes, feta...

Persimmon bread

I read a lot of food blogs, and in nearly every one, every winter, there is the rainy/snowy day, curl up on the couch under hand-knitted/quilted blankets with ridiculously cute dog/cat while drinking a mug of hot coffee/tea/hand-harvested stone-ground chocolate and eating assorted sweet breads/muffins/cookies/feats of sculptural bakery. And they claim to stay there all afternoon.

I'll admit it, I'm jealous. An entire afternoon! Time to layer mini cakes with home-canned jam. To knit scarfs that will be ready to sling around cold necks this winter, not next. To watch my children frolic in an adorably artistic pile on the vintage hardwood.

My afternoons are much more of the rush home from work and prevent the child from licking electrical cords variety. And if they weren't, I'd probably still skip the baking and head for the couch and the latest Michael Connelly mystery. (Which is where I've been the last week, for those who wondered.)

As for winter baking, I make endless versions of the following persimmon bread, break out the cream cheese, and call it good. Because this is one of those rare sweet baked things that can be totally over-stirred, it's easy to make with an enthusiastic toddler.

I pick persimmons from my parents' house at Christmastime, let them ripen into mush, whiz in the food processor, and freeze flat in Ziploc freezer bags. For this bread, pumpkin puree works great too, even better if that slightly astringent, squeaky persimmon flavor turns you off.

Persimmon Bread with Walnuts and Cranberries

1 cup white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 t. baking soda
3/4 t. cinnamon
1/4 t. ground cloves
1/4 t. ground nutmeg
1/4 t. ground ginger
1/4 t. salt

2 eggs
1/3 cup water
1 cup sugar
1 cup persimmon (or pumpkin) puree
1/2 canola oil
1 t. vanilla

1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup frozen cranberries (not defrosted)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly oil a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan.

Whisk together dry ingredients in one bowl. Whisk wet ingredients together in another, add to dry, and whisk until blended. Stir in walnuts and cranberries. Pour dough into prepared pan.

Bake in the middle of oven about 1 hour and 15 minutes, until it feels firm when you poke at the top with your finger and a toothpick or wooden skewer jabbed through the middle comes out clean. Cool completely.

Instead of walnuts and cranberries, try chocolate chips, pumpkin seeds, coconut, whatever you've got on hand. It's all tasty. The recipe also doubles easily, so you can snack on one loaf all week and freeze the other for later.

I can't decide

...whether our makeshift Christmas tree is clever or just a bit pitiful. But the baby is so delighted by her handprint ornaments and the fairy lights, it makes us feel like Christmas superstars.


I have a lot to say about being a parent, not all of it idyllic. But honestly, I think it's worth it just for the reminder of how amazing the world can be.

A string of lights, a potted plant, paper hands sprinkled with glitter. Beautiful.

A cheap advent calendar stuffed with so-so chocolate, a misshapen snowball cookie, a handmade fleece blanket. Magical.

Meat and mushrooms

I think I'm in love. We got our first week's half share from the CSA we joined: dried oyster mushrooms, arugula, blossoming basil, flowers, a pound of ground lamb, and over a pound of pork chops. In the future, squash, dark leafys, more lamb and pork, chicken, duck, turkey, and goat. The animals eat the byproducts of local tofu and biodynamic bread, and the mushrooms growing on the farm.

The farmer? Young, cute (not that that matters, of course), and completely passionate about food, especially, our favorite, lamb. Recipes in the first newsletter include lamb and spinach meatballs baked in cream of mushroom soup made from the dried mushrooms above. It sounds good, but I'm thinking kofte. We'll see.

The pork chops, however, are destined for the garlic lemongrass marinade we have in the freezer and a quick turn on the grill. The picture below is the same, eaten last weekend, made with some Niman Ranch pork from Trader Joe's and served with udon noodles, carrots, and red peppers with peanut sauce. (Did you know you can get fresh udon from Costco? I didn't. We refreshed it in boiling water for a couple seconds and had nearly instant udon.) We cut thick chops in half horizontally to make thinner cuts--it was easy to do after popping the chops in the freezer about a half hour.

The peanut sauce and marinade for this meal were made ahead, so it came together in about 10 minutes, not counting the family time in the backyard around the grill. And that doesn't count really--just an excuse to be outside drinking gin and tonics and eating watermelon just one more time before the rain descends on Northern California and our thoughts turn towards stews and braises and next week's meats...

Flatiron steaks smack of summer

It's that time of year when we suddenly realize, "Crap, summer is almost over and we've hardly grilled!"

So we are making the most of the still warm evenings by breaking out the charcoal. W. and I are tiresomely opinionated about our grilling—no lighter fluid, no gas, mesquite charcoal or real wood only. Quick and dirty, herbs and olive oil and lots of salt.

We are fortunate enough to live where you can pick up two very big flatiron steaks--grass fed, organic, and still marbled--for $12 at the farmer's market. W. sliced tomatoes from the garden and made dinner rolls from scratch, so this truly was the poor man's barbecue, done oh so well.

W. rubbed the steaks with salt, pepper, and fresh marjoram, thyme, and rosemary, then set them out to come to room temperature. The baby played in the sprinkler while the steaks grilled over hot coals, about three minutes a side, then were sprinkled with olive oil. I came home from work ravenous and devoured the last of summer.

Cross rib roast

Operation freezer cleanout is in effect. We've got 3 spring chickens on order from the farm down the hill, and a half a pig and a lamb on the way later in the year. And a freezer full of odds and ends: leftover pound cake from the baby's first birthday, saved for the fancy trifle that I'll never get around to making; a few cubes of enchilada sauce, not enough to use for anything much; bread ends; smoothie fruit...

And a cross rib roast, the final piece of meat of a grass-fed, organic beef sampler pack from one of our local heroes. I loved the idea of a selection of roasts and marinating and grilling steaks, but the actual cooking was painful and protracted.

I used to be a vegetarian, until one day the smell of bacon-y goodness lured me back to meat. I'm still picky--and we save up for meat in bulk from farms we've visited. And beef still tastes a little too "beefy" to me most of the time. So I stewed, making amazing winter dishes with onions and red wine and served with thick noodles, until I came to the roasting cuts. What the hell do I do with London broil? Bottom round? Cross rib?

There was some greyness, some toughness, some regrettable stringiness. I started to wonder whether beef was worth it. Whether grass fed was at fault. Until I Googled "cross rib" and found Jim H. and the simplest recipe ever.

I put the roast in a bowl with a generous amount of soy, sesame oil, mustard powder, chopped garlic, chopped ginger, salt, and pepper. We stuck it in the fridge for two days, turning when we remembered. Then into pan for browning and a 200-degree oven. It did take about 2 hours--through bathtime and the grownups' cocktail hour--and we took it out when the meat thermometer read 130 degrees.

I let it rest about 30 minutes while I roasted chunks of potatoes, sweet potatoes, and onions with rosemary and olive oil, and boiled some red wine and a chunk of butter down in the pan for a sauce. The meat was ruby red inside, rich and soft and minerally. The way beef is supposed to cook up, I imagine.
W., who has happily and enthusiastically eaten countless veggies and pasta for the past 10 years, said it was the best thing we'd ever made. (I vigorously defended lamb loin chops and homemade gnocchi, a pre-child special-occasion thing. But 15 minutes of actually work for "the best"? I'll take it.)

We cooked a 5-pound roast, which sounded like too much. But the baby loved the well-done edge pieces the next day, and W. ate thin slices in sandwiches with mustard and horseradish sauce. I cut the rest into strips and warmed it with sliced onion and red bell peppers that had been slightly blackened in a dry cast iron. A little squeeze of lime and into a warm tortilla with salsa, cilantro, and sour cream--fajitas. Really good. So simple.

Cup of trouble

Our coffee has been a bit posh lately. We've been using beans from Trouble--we just got back from visiting my sister and brother-in-law in SF's Outer Sunset. And for us, a trip to the city means coffee, good coffee. If we can bring a bit of the city back to the sticks with us, so much the better.

W. has decided to switch to the French press, now that we're taking the coffee all seriously and such. A Sunday morning while the baby was napping, he followed, precisely, the incredibly anal instructions for press pot coffee at home given by Stumptown. "Aggressive pouring" and timer and all.

We poured a little cream in, and goddamn if that wasn't the best coffee we've ever made. And now we've ruined it--a standard drip pot early on a weekday morning is just not the same.

Was it worth it, opening Pandora's bag of Trouble? The washing of the French press, the finicky timing, the slight sludge at the bottom on the cup, the sudden pressing need for a burr grinder? One more thing to fuss over in the morning?

It just might have been...

(We've downsized the weekend breakfast to include frozen chocolate croissants from Trader Joe's to allow for the coffee.)

*Cool Photoshop brushes courtesy of Jelena Jovovic.