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Showing posts with label eggs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eggs. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Pickled Eggs



When I was young, I always remember there being a huge glass jar of pickled eggs in my grandmother's pantry.  She always made the kind that were pickled in a combination of beet juice and vinegar, so they were always red.  However; there are many varieties of pickled eggs and a variety of colors too.  There's no hard-and-fast rules on how you have to prepare pickled eggs, just some simple basics.  You can modify the basics to suit your individual taste. 

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Some people like their pickled eggs bland, and some people like them with a little pizzazz.  If you are really creative, you might even be able to make marbelized pickled eggs with a little food dye trickery.  This won't be quite as easy as doing it with hardboiled eggs in the shell, but if you use a little ingenuity, I'm sure it can be done.


Like all recipes, most pickled egg recipes have been passed down through the generations and modified to suit the tastes of the individuals who prepared them.  A pickled egg that tastes good to me, might not be the same pickled egg that tastes good to you, so here I'm going to try to present just a few basic ideas that you can use as a starting point, and if you choose to expand on them and/or modify them, I'd love to hear about your resuts and you can request to have your recipe posted here on my blog, by leaving a message in the comments sections.  I will give you instructions on how to submit your recipe for review.  If you submit a recipe of your own, you can add two links in text of your own choosing (no spam/porn).  We hope you enjoy these recipes and will share them with your social networking contacts.

Of course, to start, you need to hard-boil some eggs.  If you don't know how to hard-boil and egg, you can get the book "How to Cook Eggs."

  So, today we started an pickled egg experiment (2/26/2013) and we'll see how the test run turns out.  We started out with a small jar and only one peeled hard-boiled egg.  Placed the egg in the jar and covered up to half way with apple cider vinegar, that covered the egg the rest of the way with water, and added about 2 tablespoons of cumin powder.  We're going to leave this sit in the fridge for a few days and then give it a taste test.  

The variety of possibilities for pickled hard-boiled eggs is rarely only limited by the number of herbs, spices, etc you can combine with vinegar and water.  If the mix is too acidic, you can also add a little bit of sugar or sweetener to soften up the acidity a little bit.

After this egg comes out, we'll report back on our findings and perhaps make adjustments as deemed necessary to make the recipe more palatable.  When we've achieved success, then it will be on to bigger and greater things, so stay tuned for further developments.




Saturday, February 2, 2013

A Brief History of Eggs Benedict


"Eggs Benedict is a dish that consists of two halves of an English muffin, topped with ham or baconpoached eggs, and Hollandaise sauce" Quoted from WikiPedia

"English: Smoked salmon eggs Benedict with a baby spinach salad as served by The Butler and the Chef Bistro at 155A South Park Street in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, California, USA. According to their onlinemenu as viewed on 2009-08-11, they serve their eggs Benedicts with ham, smoked salmon, or as vegetarian. "Two organic poached eggs with your choice of Niman Ranch ham, smoked salmon, or tomatoes, basil & herbs covered with fresh-made hollandaise sauce. Served on toasted organic olive bread with an organic baby spinach salade". From WikiPedia

"There are conflicting accounts as to the origin of Eggs Benedict, including:
  • In an interview recorded in the "Talk of the Town" column of The New Yorker in 1942, the year before his death,[1] Lemuel Benedict, a retired Wall Street stock broker, claimed that he had wandered into the Waldorf Hotel in 1894 and, hoping to find a cure for his morning hangover, ordered "buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and a hooker of hollandaise." Oscar Tschirky, the famed maître d'hôtel, was so impressed with the dish that he put it on the breakfast and luncheon menus but substituted ham for the bacon and a toasted English muffin for the toast.[2]
  • Craig Claiborne, in September 1967, wrote a column in The New York Times Magazineabout a letter he had received from Edward P. Montgomery, an American then residing in France. In it, Montgomery related that the dish was created by Commodore E. C. Benedict, a banker and yachtsman, who died in 1920 at the age of 86. Montgomery also included a recipe for eggs Benedict, stating that the recipe had been given to him by his mother, who had received it from her brother, who was a friend of the Commodore.[3]
  • Mabel C. Butler of Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts in a November 1967 letter printed inThe New York Times Magazine responded to Montgomery's claim by correcting that the "true story, well known to the relations of Mrs. Le Grand Benedict", of whom she was one, was:
Mr. and Mrs. Benedict, when they lived in New York around the turn of the twentieth century, dined every Saturday at Delmonico's. One day Mrs. Benedict said to themaitre d'hotel, "Haven't you anything new or different to suggest?" On his reply that he would like to hear something from her, she suggested poached eggs on toasted English muffins with a thin slice of ham, hollandaise sauce and a truffle on top.[4]

[edit]Variations

  • Eggs Atlantic or Eggs Hemingway (also known as Eggs Royale and Eggs Montreal in New Zealand) substitutes salmon (orsmoked salmon) for the ham. This is a common variation found in AustraliaNew Zealand and Canada. This is also known as "Eggs Benjamin" in a few restaurants in Canada.
  • Huevos Benedictos substitutes either sliced avocado or Mexican chorizo for the ham, and is topped with both a salsa (such assalsa roja or salsa brava ) and hollandaise sauce.
  • Eggs Sardou is a complex dish from Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans which originally replaced the English muffin and ham with artichoke bottoms topped with crossed anchovy fillets, and then, atop the egg and its hollandaise sauce was a dollop of chopped ham and a slice of truffle.[15][16][17] A more widespread version of the dish starts with a base of creamed spinach, substitutes artichoke bottoms for the English muffin, and eliminates the ham.[12][18][19] For more background see the article.
  • Campfire Benedict replaces the English muffin, ham and hollandaise sauce with cornbread, bacon and barbecue baked beans. The poached eggs are replaced with eggs fried to choice.
  • Eggs Chaucer founded at Tiny Tim's Tearoom in Canterbury UK adds portobello mushrooms and replaces the Hollandaise sauce with a homemade rarebit.
  • Eggs John Scott replaces the Hollandaise sauce with HP Sauce.
  • Oscar Benedict, also known as Eggs Oscar, replaces the ham with asparagus and lump crab meat.
  • Russian Easter Benedict replaces the Hollandaise sauce with a lemon juice and mustard flavored Béchamel Sauce, and is topped with black caviar.
  • Eggs Chesapeake substitutes Crab cake for the ham" Quoted from WikiPedia

Easy Cheesy Scrambled Eggs


My mother and grandmother used to make scrambled eggs on Sunday mornings for breakfast, but they always used to add milk into the scrambled egg mixture.  I never really liked that much, and I asked them why they did it.  My grandmother told me that during the Great Depression , people did things to make their food stretch further and this is one of the things that they did.  I guess this also explained why my grandmother always had 52 bars of soap in the bathroom closet.  She told me that during the depression, soap was hard to get, so whenever she found it on sale, she bought as much of it as she could afford.  I'm guessing some of those bars of soap in her bathroom closet were still there from 1929.

Easy Cheesy Scrambled Eggs 

Photo by Ramon FVelasquez (Onions and scrambled eggs)

Crack 3 eggs and put into a bowl
Mix eggs well with a fork, whisk, or egg beater
In a 9" non-stick frying pan (I recommend Circulon Contempo Cookware) melt about 1 tbsp. of butter.
Have 2 slices of white American cheese ready, each slice cut in half.  (You can use orange American cheese or Swiss cheese if you prefer)
Add eggs to frying pan and cook over medium heat until eggs are no longer liquid.
Turn heat off and slice finished eggs into quarters with a spatula.
Add one slice of cheese to each quarter and allow to melt.
Remove cheesy scrambled eggs with spatula, put on plates and serve.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Onions can be added to this recipe also either sauteed or raw, depending on your personal preference.
This is a basic recipe for two people, if you modify it, you may need a larger frying pan 



Rhubarb Custard Pie

That's right, I said if you can make it with eggs, we'll try to find a place for it here (ie that means it just has to contain eggs, it doesn't mean that eggs have to be the main ingredient).  Therefore, there will be some variety here. I found this recipe in a notebook that my mother kept, and I do not know where the recipe originated.  I assume it was passed down to her from my grandmother, but I do not know where it originated from prior to that
.
Photo by Dieter Weber

Rhubarb Custard Pie

1 cup rhubarb chunks
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
2 tbsp oleo
3 tbsp fluor
2 egg yolks beaten
2 egg whites beaten stiff

Put rhubarb in pie shell
Combine egg yolks, sugar, oleo, flour, and milk.
Fold in egg whites.
Pour over rhubarb and bake 400 degrees F for about 45 minutes.