Eggs Benedict

A perfectly poached egg is a beautiful thing. And when that egg is a fresh, home-raised egg, with thick shells, and sturdy yolks, it begs to be made into the perfect poached egg dish. Eggs Benedict.



Eggs Benedict is only difficult in timing the poached egg, the sauce and the back bacon to be all ready at the same time. But if you have three hands, or an assistant, it's a beautiful thing to start a spring morning with:

6 eggs
Hollandaise sauce
capers
back bacon (Canadian bacon)
3 English muffins
white wine vinegar
sea salt and pepper to season

Do the following things simultaneously:
1) Make the Hollandaise sauce.

2) Fry the back bacon in a pan over medium heat, flipping when a nice brown develops.



3) Bring a 3 inches of water in a pot to a boil. Add 1 tbsp white wine vinegar. Crack an egg into a coffee mug, and gently lower that egg into the boiling water. Repeat with the other eggs. Retrieve the eggs the moment the whites turn completely white. (2-3 minutes). Any longer, and you won't get beautiful, soft yolks.

4) Halve and toast the English muffins.

Ok. So now they're all ready at the same time. Place the bacon on top of the English muffin. Place the poached egg on top of the bacon. Season with salt and pepper. Drizzle on the Hollandaise sauce. And top with a few capers. No problem.



Serve. Delicious, perfect breakfast.

By Bbq Dude

Granola

Last week, Bbq Jr. asked us why we weren't spending enough time with him. What with towers of boxes in our home, we've been spending nearly all of our waken ghouls unpacking and organizing our home. Quick runs to the hardware store aside, it's been a busy week.

Thank goodness for Oma. My mum flew into town to visit, help unpack, and give our little guy some much needed attention and TLC. The house is now starting to look like a home again and less like a loading dock. And while Oma flies home today, she left us with a few homemade treats to enjoy. Like her home-baked granola:

1 lb butter
1 tbsp vanilla
2 cups honey
½ tsp salt
2 lb rolled oats
½ cups sesame seeds
1 cups chopped nuts
2 cups grape nuts
1 lb coconut
1 cups sunflower seeds

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F. Heat the butter and honey in a large pot over medium heat.



When it melts into a large, runny slurry, turn off the heat and add the vanilla. Mix well.

Mix in all of the dry ingredients. Oma likes to do it one



ingredient



at a time.



Spread a thin layer of granola on a cookie sheet.



Roast the granola for less than half an hour, until golden brown.



Remove from the oven, let cool. We place it in containers, open overnight (to dehydrate) and then cover them up the next morning.

This is one of my favourite things to have for breakfast (and it's the only granola that Mrs. Dude likes). And it tastes like my childhood.

Thanks for the granola, Mom.



By Bbq Dude

Happy Mother's Day

We celebrated with a batch of Québécois breakfast crêpes and some family time. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there.


By Bbq Dude

Sticky buns

Work has been nutty lately. I've got deadlines that would have made me faint only a couple years ago. I'm making genetic constructs in twelve days that would normally take two months. But I have a lot of help, including an amazing group of technicians that are spending their weekends busting their butts. How do you thank someone for spending their weekend in the lab?

With sticky buns, that's how. These sticky buns had research associates damn near weeping with happiness. Truly, I've never seen people react better to *anything* I've ever cooked. These come from the infamous Flour. You'll love 'em. Make a batch. Now.

It's based off of a brioche dough. The buttery-delicious-cakeish bread. For the dough:

2 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more if needed
2 ¼ cups bread flour
1 ½ packages active dry yeast or 1-ounce (28 grams) fresh cake yeast
¹⁄₃ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon kosher salt
½ cup cold water
5 eggs
1 ³⁄₈ cups softened, unsalted butter

Mix the flours, yeast, sugar, salt and water until wet. Add the eggs while mixing, one at a time.

Beat on low power for three to four minutes, until well-combined. Now add the butter, one small chunk at a time while beating. You want the butter to mix in well, so make sure it's good and soft before you use it.

Continue mixing the dough on low for ten minutes, until the dough is sticky and soft. You want it to pull away from the dough hook when you push your finger into it.

Put the dough into a bowl, and place in the fridge for at least six hours. This is partly to firm up the butter. Partly to get the yeast to ferment in the fridge, adding delicious flavours. Partly to allow the flour to hydrate. All of this is called "proofing". Tasty.



Meanwhile, make the goo:

1 ½ cup unsalted butter
3 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
²⁄₃ cup honey
²⁄₃ cup heavy cream
²⁄₃ cup water
½ tsp kosher salt

Melt the butter and the brown sugar over medium heat.



Continue stirring until melted and all combined.



Now add the cream, water, honey and salt.



Mix well. Set in the fridge to cool overnight with the proofing dough.

The next day, cut the dough into two halves. Roll out each chunk of dough into two 12" by 16" pieces.



Prepare the bun filling:

½ cup light brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 cup pecan halves, toasted and chopped

Toast the pecans in the oven. 400°F for about 10 minutes, until they start to give off a delicious smell. Let cool and chop them into small chunks. Mix the brown sugar, white sugar, cinnamon and half of the pecans. Sprinkle this mix over the rolled out dough.



Meanwhile, pour the chilled goo into two 9"x13" baking pans (I use Pyrex). Sprinkle in the remaining pecans, half in each pan.



Roll both of the flattened-out doughs up into tight cylinders. Chop each cylinder into 8 pieces.



Plant 8 buns into each pan, equally spaced out.



Cover with a cloth towel, and allow to rise in a warm place for two hours, until doubled in volume.



Bake for 30-45 minutes at 350°F, until golden-brown and delicious-looking.



Let cool a few minutes. Scoop out the buns, flip over and serve with a bit of goop drizzled over top.



The reactions to this sticky buns were positively ecstatic. Sweet, delicious and high-calorie happiness. Fabulous.

By Bbq Dude

French toast

Happy Mother's Day.  Who wants to stand in line for a restaurant on the morning of Mother's Day?  It's much nicer to let Mom sleep in and treat her when she gets up.

For Mother's Day today, Bbq Jr. and I made Mrs. Dude some breakfast.  Homemade french toast made from homemade bread.  Homemade chokecherry syrup (thanks Mom!) and home-cured, home-smoked bacon.  Yum.

From the old version of The Joy of Cooking:

2 eggs
½ tsp salt
1 cup milk
½ tsp vanilla

Beat the eggs lightly.  Add salt, milk and vanilla.  Mix well.  Quickly dredge the slices of bread through the batter, and fry in butter over medium heat until nicely browned.  Sprinkle with confectioner's sugar.  Serve (with real maple syrup, or homemade chokecherry syrup).

Flaky scones

Two years ago we took a vacation outside of Québec City in Canada. We stayed in a lovely little condo with our very good friends from Baltimore. Although our plan was to split the cooking, they did almost all of it. Who can complain? She's a great cook. One morning, I came up the stairs, and these beautiful scones were coming out of the oven. How could this not become part of our repertoire?

This recipe comes from The Bread Bible, my favourite bread book:

1 cup unsalted butter, cold

4 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

½ cup sugar

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

2 cups heavy cream

1 cup currants

Chop up the butter into chunks and freeze for 10-15 minutes. You want them to be firm, but not rock hard. Meanwhile, put a pizza stone into your oven, and fire up the oven to 400°F. Sift the dry ingredients together, then crush the frozen butter into lumps into the dry ingredients. I use my hands, and flatten the butter into the butter into little pancakes that are as thin as I can get them without warming them up with my fingers.

Add the cream, mix until all ingredients are wet. Then mix in the currants, or, if you have no currants available, try chopped dried cranberries or dried blueberries (blueberries are crazy expensive, though).

Mix.

Dump the dough onto a dry, floured surface, and flatten into a roughly 10 x 12 inch rectangle with a rolling pin.

Fold in half.

And roll again.

What you're trying to do is create multiple layers here. Each time you fold over and roll it, you're doubling the layers.

Repeat the folding and rolling multiple times. The book calls for 3 times, I do it more like 8. But the critical part is that the dough not warm up. It needs to be cold, and the butter needs to not melt. Roll out one final time, and cut the dough lengthwise down the middle.

Divide each half into triangles, and transfer to a *non-greased* cookie sheet. If you grease it, it'll spread when you cook it. There's enough butter in there, it won't stick. For frack sake, don't butter the cookie sheet.

Toss it into the oven on the pre-heated pizza stone. Bake the scones 15 - 20 minutes, until they've browned slightly around the edges.

Pull out of the oven, and serve. The recipe I have calls for cooling, etc, but really, these things smell good, they taste good, and when you tear them apart screaming hot, they are DELICIOUS. (It's really hard to go wrong with butter and cream). They flake apart, and look at those layers coming apart in that photo. Tasty. This is one of my favourite breakfasts. Serve with chai.

Blueberry buttermilk pancakes

Taking pictures of food inside is hard. Especially the less featureful food, like a pancake. So that pancake might not look like a million bucks, but it was delicious. Trust me.

My mother's recipe for buttermilk pancakes is the base here. She's big on healthfood, so in her recipe the whole-wheat flour is 50:50 with the all-purpose. Experimentation has taught me that 50:50 is too dry, but that less than 1/4:3/4 is too insubstantial. This recipe is perfect.

¼ cup whole wheat flour

¾ cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 egg

blueberries

Mix dry ingredients. As with any baking powder recipe, you want to have the liquid/solid contact to be as brief as possible. Then beat the egg, and slowly add the oil to the egg. This is an emulsion, so you want to suspend the oil in the egg. Add the buttermilk slowly to the egg mixture. EMULSION!!!

Add the liquids to the solids, and mix gently, until the point that your batter is thick with lumps in it. You don't want to mix out the lumps, because that will destroy the leavening power of the baking powder.

Ladle out the batter into a medium-hot pan, and toss a few blueberries into the pancake. This is important. If you mix the blueberries into the batter prior to frying, you'll break them, and have a purple batter with mushed blueberries in it. It's prettier if you add the berries to the batter after you start cooking. YUM!

Flip the pancake when you see about 45 seconds after you see bubbles forming in the top of the batter. Delcioso! The pancake will spend less time on the second side than on the first. It's already quite hot, so flip it, cook it a bit more, then toss it onto a plate.

Serve with REAL maple syrup. Trust a Canadian. You really want the real stuff.

It'll be delicious.

Ostrich egg

San Diego has the world's most fantasticest zoo. And the associated Wild Animal Park is crazy good fun for kids of all ages. Rhinos. Elephants. Ostriches. All in something that vaguely resembles their home environement.

Our 3-year old son *loves* the animal park. I am... ambivalent. But I acquired more enthusiasm for it on our most recent trip when we passed not one, but two stands on the way out to the Wild Animal Park that sells ostrich eggs and ostrich meat. HURRAY for ostrich eggs.

They're fracking huge. And they sell for $25 each (though to be fair, they also sell the shells for $20, which says that the contents of said egg are really only worth about $5).

Well you know that I had to have one. So I forked out $25 a brought one home (shown above next to a chicken egg).

I didn't know what to do with my new ostrich egg. I mean, really? How do you showcase the ostrichy flavour? Scrambled eggs, I guess. I cracked it into a bowl with the chicken egg for scale. The yolk is HUGE. HUGE.

And thick. To beat that egg yolk took some serious work. It was almost pastish. Clearly a thicker egg yolk than chicken eggs.

Well, I scrambled that bad boy, and poured it into the pan.

I gently fried the egg with butter and salt. We really wanted to be able to taste

Look at how fluffy the ostrich egg became. Light and fluffy. Much more so than a chicken egg. It was truly striking how different the texture was from a traditional chicken egg.

Served with homemade bacon... delicious! While the flavour wasn't all that different from a chicken egg, the texture was marvelous. I wish I had made omelets. The fluffiness was perfect.

I froze the leftover liquid egg mix in 2 ice cube trays, and will use them as chicken eggs in the future. One ostrich egg is a damn lot of egg. And I have a beautiful ostrich eggshell leftover on on the shelf in my kitchen. Win win win!

Crêpes

Cooking in other peoples' homes is always exciting. You don't know how their stove handles. You don't know where they keep the sugar, or the vanilla. And most excitingly, you don't know how often they replace stuff.

I was recently visiting my in-laws for the 4th of July, and did some of the cooking there. For breakfast, one morning, I thought I would make pancakes. Quick, easy, yummy. I mixed up a simple pancake batter, and was surprised by the consistency of it. Generally, my pancake batters are like a thick soup with lumps in it. This was more of a runny soup with lumps in it. But I normally make buttermilk pancakes, so I chalked it up to that. I fired up the stove, and got a pan screaming hot, and poured a ladelful of batter into the pan. It still looked like runny soup with lumps. I tossed a couple of blueberries into the batter, but I wasn't hopeful. This wasn't going to end well. The pancake didn't rise. And didn't rise. And didn't rise. I flipped it. It was wafer thing, and the blueberries were holding it up on the other side. My first thought? The baking powder must have gotten a bit old. I picked it up and looked underneath:

Best Before Jan 2003

Oh. Well, crêpes don't require baking powder. Let's make crêpes instead.

I lived in a French-language dorm when I was a college student. It was in the very small francophone region of Edmonton, Canada. Every Sunday morning, several of the Catholic francophone girls there would make breakfast, and they would often offer to serve breakfast to anyone who was up. This recipe for crêpes came from one of these girls. It was one of the first things I knew how to cook. In those days, she said do 1 recipe/person you're serving. Now that I'm not 19 anymore, that seems like craziness. We'll make 2 x of this recipe for 2 adults and a famished 3-year old, and still have plenty of leftovers.

1 ½ cups flour

2ish cups milk

1 tsp vanilla

1 egg

Beat egg. Add milk. Pour a small amount of this into the flour and mix into a paste (you don't want lumps in the final batter). Now mix in the rest of the milk/egg mixture. Add vanilla.

Get a pan medium-hot. Melt some butter in there. Pour in a ladleful of batter into the pan, it'll be pretty runny.

Cook for about a minute, until the liquid batter turns mostly solid. It'll look a little more cooked than this:

The center will still be a tiny bit liquidish, but the outside will be solid. Then flip with a spatula. Cook for another minute or so, then pick up the crêpe with the spatula, and start another one. Once you get comfortable with this, you can get a couple pans going simultaneously, and be ploughing through these pretty quickly.

Don't worry if the first one looks messed up - even the francophone girls who taught me how to make these gave the first crêpe "à Dieu".

Serve these with fruit, whipping cream, icing sugar for dusting and *real* maple syrup - these are francophone Canadian, after all - you wouldn't sully them with that crappy fake syrup, would you? We tend to put bowls of fruit in the middle of the table, and let people roll their own.

For pure decadence, eat these outside on a beautiful summer morning. Yum.