A Fried Egg (and Fried Toast) for Friday

Fried eggs are a my comfort food. I find myself frying them up at all times of the day and night. After a long night out, I've been known to curl up in bed with a fried egg sandwich (on a plate, of course).

I found myself on my own at home for breakfast a few days ago and realized there was no rush or pressure to get out the door. I heated up my pan, good and hot and was about to fry my egg when a thought occurred to me. Fried toast would be really nice, too.

It seems odd, the idea of frying bread, without some kind of sweet French-toast style coating. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that fried bread was something I had eaten in Italy many years ago, and loved.

The year was 1989, a 19 year old me and Gran-Fran (pre the "Gran" days, still just "Fran") left NY and went to live in Italy for a month on a college language program. It was awesome.

We had fried bread one night, and vowed to make it ourselves one day. Well, we never managed to replicate that fried bread, and I'm not saying mine is an exact copy of it, but it turned out really tasty. The keys were to make the pan super hot, and use more olive oil than you normally might. And, wait for it....frozen bread. This was the first time I happened to have frozen bread, since the gluten-free kind I use (Udi's) is sold and stored in the freezer. Instead of toasting it, I decided to just throw it in the hot oil. It fried up just right, and quickly, too.

I'm going to explore making some kind of an egg wash to fry my next batch, since I think what we ate in Italy wasn't just plain old bread fried extra crispy. For now, though, I've found my new favorite breakfast.

Fried Eggs over Fried Toast

serves 1

Ingredients

• 1 piece of  frozen Bread (Udi's Gluten Free is my bread of choice)
• 1 Egg
• 3 Tbsps Olive Oil
• Salt to Taste
• 1/4 tsp Smoked Paprika

Method:

• Heat a small frying pan to super hot (I know this is not a technical term, but it's the most descriptive I can come up with).
• Add the olive oil and a sprinkle of salt.
• Put the frozen bread in the oil and cook for about 1 minute.
• Turn the bread over and cook for another 30 seconds, or until evenly browned.
• Put fried bread on a plate and set aside.
• Crack the egg into the super hot pan and cook until it's done to your liking. It took about 30 seconds for my egg to cook.
• Add the paprika.
• If you want an over-easy egg, flip it and cook for another 20 seconds.
• Remove the egg from the pan and place it on top of the fried bread.

Enjoy!

Super Bowl, Smuper Bowl...I Love Me Some Wings.

I'm a fan of sports, usually enjoy a good baseball game, and really did enjoy the World Cup while we were in Paris two years ago.

What I realize I love the the most about sporting events (and everything else) are the snacks and foods that go along with these events. My very favorite sports snack is the almighty chicken wing.

I embarked on my research about a week ago. In the past, I had thought you either fried the wings or boiled and then baked the wings. Many recipes online required flouring the wings, which I wasn't going to do due to the gluten-freeness of my diet. I decided to do what cooks used to do in the olden-times: I asked the butcher his advice.

There happens to be a very nice butcher shop in my neighborhood. I saw the wings in the butcher case but they didn't look like the kind I've gotten in restaurants.

So I asked the butcher two things:

1. Are the wings/drumsticks usually split in two before cooking?
2. Don't I need to boil the wings before I bake them?

And the butcher responded:

1. Yes, he said, and I can cut them into two for you.
2. No, don't even think of that! Just bake them in a hot oven and then roll them in the sauce.

After a bit more instruction from my butcher-best-friend, I was ready to tackle the sauce.

I wanted to make something the kids could eat, too, but after some consideration, decided that just this once I'd go for it and make a sauce the adults could love, and the kids could eat theirs plain. I remembered Gran-Fran making some awesome BBQ sauce back in the day, and based on this recollection, I knew I needed ketchup as my base. And something spicy, then something sweet. I added butter, too, which I can't recall if Gran-Fran would be thrilled by this or mortified that I used butter in something involving meat. (I'm sure we'll be getting a comment sometime soon from her weighing in on the matter.)

Then, I started thinking about a recipe I had seen on the craftzine website that served chicken wings on top of cupcakes. At first I thought it sounded not so good. But then, it got in my head, and I figured that maybe if I were to make a savory cornbread to put under the wings, it would offset the spicy sauce nicely. I used a gluten-free mix, with almond milk and added some chipotle powder, too.

And so, here it is, plain and simple, my first try at at making my very own chicken wings. They are really, really good, and worth the effort.

Chicken Wings with Hot Sauce

Ingredients

For the Chicken Wings

• 2 lbs Chicken Wings, cut into wings and drumsticks
• Olive Oil for roasting

For the Sauce:

• 1/2 cup Hot sauce of your choice
• 1 cup of Ketchup
• 1/2 of a Lemon, jucied
• 3 Tbsps Butter, softened
• 4 cloves Garlic, chopped coarsely
• 1/2 Tsp Sesame Oil
• 1 Tbsp Honey
• Salt and Pepper to Taste

For the Cornbread:

• 1 box Gluten Free Pantry Yankee Cornbread mix (or any kind of cornbread mix you prefer)
• 1/4 cup Sugar
• 1-1/3 cups Almond Milk
• 1 Egg lightly beaten
• 6 Tbsps melted butter

And: 2 stalks of Green Onion, sliced thinly

Roast The Chicken

• Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
• Place the chicken in a roasting pan in one layer.
• Sprinkle with salt and a olive oil.
• Roast for 40 minutes or until the skin is browned.

Make The Sauce

• While the chicken is roasting, put all of the sauce ingredients in a pan and heat over low on the stove.
• You'll know when it's done when it sticks to the back of a wooden spoon and it has thickened.
• Remove the chicken from the oven and take it out of the pan.

Make The Cornbread

• Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl.
• Add in the eggs, almond milk and butter.
• Mix until all the dry ingredients are fully incorporated.
• Spread the mixture evenly in a baking pan.
• Bake for 20 minutes. (It cooks in a 425 degree oven, just like the chicken.)
• Remove, cool and cut up into serving sized pieces each large enough to hold a wing.

Time To Serve It Up

• Working in small batches, put a wing or two in the sauce, rolling them around to coat them thoroughly.
• Place a wing on top of a piece of the cornbread.
• Spoon a bit of sauce over the top of each wing and add some green onions.

Enjoy!

Green Beans Featured: DailyBuzz Healthy Living

Thanks, DailyBuzz Healthy Living for the shout-out!

My Green Beans recipe was featured on 1.25.12

Don't Eat The Unopened Clams!

I'm on some kind of a fish kick right now. It probably has to do with the amount of meat I consumed over the holidays. I've been craving fish and salads, so I'm going with it.

Just after my salade nicoise evening, I decided to make some clams served over a saffron rice. Just before I began to cook, I realized there was no saffron in the house. Gran Fran is always very innovative when it comes to missing ingredients. I thought for a minute, went through my spice cabinet and pulled out the smoky Spanish paprika I love.

Gran Fran uses anisette or vermouth in her saffron rice preparation, but again, I came up empty. A bottle of nice white wine with lots of fennel seed added to the pot, along with some clam juice and lemon juice, saved the day. My McGyver-type survival skills will do Gran Fran proud.

I've often watched her make clams, but I rarely do so myself. If memory serves, Gran Fran would flip out if more than just one or two of the clams she had steamed didn't open up when cooked. Her take on this, I think, was that all of the clams were tainted and maybe we shouldn't eat them because who knows what kind of disease one might get? Botulism? Salmonella? I'd like to point out right here and now that we all made it through, just by avoiding those unopened clams along the way.

But, her fears did come bubbling up within me when I prepared to cook these clams last night. What if I didn't cook them long enough? What about those diseases, or worse yet some unknown hazard came up? I tried to channel the other side of Gran Fran in the kitchen: the devil-may-care cook who throws ingredients in a pan with reckless abandon and comes up with wonderfully delicious dishes in the end.

It worked. The clams turned out great, it was fast and simple and the broth was really interesting with the extra hit of paprika in the end. The rice turned out well, too, though different in flavor than my beloved saffron rice, it was a hit. No one got sick, and the food was delicious.

Steamed Clams with Fennel and Red Rice

serves 4

Ingredients:

• 1 pound clams, cleaned and soaked in cold water
• 1 cup white wine
• 1/2 cup clam juice
• 2 tbsps lemon juice
• 1 tbsp dried fennel seeds
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic chopped roughly

Method:

• Put everything in a large pan and cover with a lid.
• Bring the mixture to a boil.
• Cook for 10 minutes.
• Lift the lid and check to see if all (or almost all) of the clams have opened up.
• If not, cover and cook for another two minutes.
• Serve over rice (see below).

Steamed Red Rice

Ingredients:

• 1 cup white Basmati Rice
• 1 cup Water
• 1/3 cup Clam Juice
• 3 Tbsps Lemon Juice
• 3 Tbsps Butter
• 2 tsps Smoked Spanish Paprika
• 3 cloves Garlic chopped
• 2 tsps Fennel Seeds
• 1 Bay Leaf
• Salt and Pepper to Taste

Method:

• Put all ingredients except for the rice in a large pot that has a lid.
• Boil the mixture,then lower it to a simmer for 10 minutes.
• Add the rice.
• Return the pot to the boil.
• Stir once.
• Reduce the heat to low.
• Cover the pan and cook for 12 minutes.
• Turn off the heat and allow to stand for 6 to 8 more minutes until the rice is cooked through.
• Serve with the clams, using some of the broth the further flavor the rice.

Salade Nicoise: How-To: Another Cooking for One recipe

The salade nicoise has got to be the best salad ever. It involves only a handful of ingredients (two of which I've featured recently as make-ahead basics, here  and here).

When my daughter and I were in Paris, I ordered salade nicoise. What I got was not at all what I was accustomed to from our American version.

For one thing, there was rice in it. Yes, you read that right, rice. For another thing, the tuna tasted and looked odd, and overcooked. Lastly, there was some heavy dressing with a bit of cream in it. I won't judge the entire country on how this one brasserie made their Nicoise. Instead, I guess I'll just have to venture back over to France to find the perfect version.

In the meantime, I decided to try my hand at home making this lovely salad. Usually, there are boiled eggs included, but when I was almost finished making (and photographing) the salad, I realized I had forgotten to make them. To my surprise, I didn't miss the eggs at all.  I actually think I preferred it without the eggs, but you can go ahead and add them back in if you want to.

The key to my success was the freshness of the tuna steak. Of course, if you can't locate a tuna steak, you can use a can of best-quality (that's a Gran-Franism, the best quality thing) solid olive oil packed tuna fish. Drain some of the oil out, so that the flavor of the dressing will shine through.

I really enjoyed making this, especially since it was so simple and tasted so darned good.

Salade Nicoise

serves 1

Ingredients:

• A large handful of Salad Greens (I didn't measure, just grabbed as much as I thought I'd eat)
• 1 serving of cooked Green Beans (recipe here)
• 1 serving of Boiled Potatoes (recipe here)
• 1/4 pound Tuna Steak
• 4 Tbsps Olive Oil
• 2 Tbsps Red Wine Vinegar
• 1 tsp Mustard
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Method:

• Place the salad greens, green beans and potatoes on a plate. Set aside.
• Heat a heavy-bottomed non-reactive pan over high heat.
• Salt and pepper the tuna steak.
• Once the pan is good and hot, add a small amount of olive oil.
• Add the tuna steak to the super hot pan.
• Cook on first side for five minutes.
• Turn over the tuna steak and cook for another 3 minutes.
• Remove the tuna from the pan and let rest for a few minutes.
• Mix the olive oil, mustard, vinegar, salt and pepper for the dressing.
• Slice the tuna and place on top of the salad.
• Sprinkle the dressing over the top of the salad and enjoy!

Cooking for One: Potatoes Two Ways

The mighty potato.

It is starchy.

It is filling.

It can be sweet.

It can be saucy.

But it is always delicious.

I've been working on ways to create multiple sauces or preparations starting from a basic ingredient. The idea is to create the basic ingredient once, in bulk and then add different sauces, etc. throughout the week so that you don't get bored with the same leftovers over and over.

This is part of my exploration into Cooking for One (see

here

for my first installation). Once I have enough of these recipes worked out, I'll post a succinct compendium (that there is a $20 word), but for now, I'll link them all through the individual posts. Of course, they'll all be tagged Cooking for One, so if one needs to find them quickly, this key phrase can be put in my handy search box on the right hand side of this site.

But I digress.

Potatoes seem like a great base for many things. I've got two variations here: a light potato salad (light because there's not too much mayonnaise involved) and a pan fried potato with bacon. Both are great, and are based on a large pot of boiled potatoes. Stored in an airtight container, once they've been fully drained and cooled, the potatoes I made kept for a week.

All you need to do is boil up the potatoes and then create sauce variations when you are ready to serve them. Easy as pie.

Boiled Potatoes

serves plenty, portion out to one-person servings as you see fit

Ingredients:

• 1 to 2 lbs Yellow New Potatoes
• Salt to taste

Method:

• Fill a large non-reactive pan (I had to use it sometime...) with water, leaving enough room for the potatoes to fit comfortably, while being covered by the water.
• Chop each potato into 6 to 8 even pieces.
• Boil potatoes for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until you can put a fork through them, and the skin has turned translucent.
• Drain potatoes, let cool and portion

Potato Salad

Ingredients:

• 1 portion Boiled Potatoes (see above for recipe)
• 1/4 cup Red Wine Vinegar
• 1/4 cup Mayonnaise
• 2 Tbsps Mustard (I used Sweet/Hot)
• 1 Spring fresh Tarragon (you can use 1/4 tsp dried instead)
• Salt and Black Pepper to taste

Method:

• Mix the vinegar, mayonnaise and mustard together. It should be thin enough to pour once it's all mixed up.
• In a small bowl, pour the dressing over the potatoes.
• Using a fork, coat the potatoes with the dressing, pressing down with the fork to roughly break up the potatoes.
• Finish with a sprinkling of tarragon, salt and black pepper.

Bacon Fried Potatoes

Ingredients:

• 3/4 pound bacon, cooked and broken up into small pieces
• 1 portion Boiled Potatoes (see above)
• Olive Oil for cooking

Method:

• Turn the oven on to broil.
• Heat a large non-reactive pan over high heat.
• When it's hot, coat the bottom of the pan with olive oil. If you have bacon grease on hand, you can use a little of that here, too.
• Add bacon pieces, cooking for 3 minutes.
• Put potatoes in with the bacon, stirring to coat them with oil.
• Cook for 10 minutes.
• Move the pan to the broiler.
• Cook for 5 minutes, then stir the potatoes, getting all the crunchy bits from the bottom of the pant scraped up.
• Put the pan back in the broiler for another 5 minutes.
• Remove and serve!

Vegetables

vegetables from the ferry building

Quagliariello

I got a bunch of really nice gifts for my birthday, many of which had to do with cooking.

Two are featured here: a lovely stuffed quail and a beautiful Le Creuset skillet.

The quail is incredibly fitting, as you are about to learn. The friend who gave me the tiny bird to roast knew some of my family history, and that my daughter's middle name is Quaglia (a shortened version of Quagliariello). She also gave me a gift certificate for a lovely speciality butcher shop here in SF, Olivier's, which I cannot wait to cash in.

I asked Joe (my Dad) to recount the story one more time of the history of his family's name. Here is his story, which I felt I couldn't do a better job of paraphrasing so included the whole epic story.

Well, it all started during the Holy Roman Empire. My ancestors were poor peasants who tilled the land not two miles from Caesar's Palace. (Not that one.)

A couple of thousand years later, my paternal grandfather decided to tear himself away from the rocky, dry land he was tilling, and he arrived in Brooklyn around 1900. He got a job working in a shoe factory, which turned out to be demanding and ill-paying, but still better than the land-tilling ever would, so he decided to stay.

His name was Thomas Quagliariello, the last name being Italian for "little quail." Starting with the day he spent at Ellis Island, he was aware that his last name didn't sound American. So he decided to follow the course taken by his cousin, a locally well-known boxer.

This cousin had a cigar-smoking manager who ruled that, for poster purposes, the boxer need a name shorter than Quagliariello. The manager smoked only light cigars, which were identified on the side of their box by the Spanish word "claro," which, in different contexts can mean, "mild" (for cigars), "clear" (for weather), or "I understand" (as in "It's clear").

So Pasquale Quagliariello became boxer Patsy Claro, and my grandfather, believing this was an American name (even though it sounded Italian), followed suit. Years later, my father and two of his half-brothers did the same, while the other brothers either retained their original name or shortened it to Quaglia. 

And that's the story.

So as you can see, my friend hit the nail on the head with her gift, which was delicious as well.

Stuffed Roasted Quail

each bird serves 1 person

• Order pre-stuffed birds from your local butcher, if you can get them.

You can stuff your own bird, but I believe it would be very hard, based on the tiny nature of these birds and the tiny bones you'd have to remove. If you are going to stuff it yourself get some nice sausage, roasted chestnuts and some raisins or sultanas. I can't really advise you how to stuff the actual bird, but check

this link

out, it may be helpful.

Method:

• Preheat oven to 450 degrees
• Put a small amount of olive oil in a heavy bottomed pan. Make sure the pan is big enough to allow space between multiple birds.
• Lightly salt the bird and put it in the pan.
• Roast the bird(s) for 10 minutes.
• Remove from the oven and let sit for 5 minutes.
• Drain the fat from the pan and serve up the bird(s).