Here is my text-message recipe for dutch baby, our go-to weekend breakfast. The recipe is identical to that of Yorkshire Pudding. Serve with maple syrup, or else lemon juice mixed with powdered sugar to make a lemon glaze! Oh and bacon or duck bacon.
I have been remiss in posting, despite having learned many useful things in the last few months. Here is one:
When making waffles or pancakes, you do much better to separate the whites from the yolks of the eggs and beat the whites separately till they are stiff (or close). Make the batter with the yolks and then fold the beaten egg whites into the batter. Fluffy, light waffles!
One thing I am interested in is whether you could replace all rising agents with this technique. After all, how did they make pancakes before there was easily available double-acting baking powder?
G-ma2005 (otherwise known as Grandma Jan) came by a few weeks ago and taught me the ancient secrets of meatloaf. I very slightly modified it into this ridiculously simple recipe:
Mix equal volumes of ground beef and crushed saltine crackers, plus a significant amount of chopped onions, plenty of salt and pepper, and enough eggs to make it stick together (roughly 1/2 lb meat, one egg, one onion, and half a sleeve
of crackers). Form this into a loaf an put it into a 375 F (190 C) oven.
After about 10 min, pull out the loaf and cover it with a mixture of ketchup, brown sugar, and worchestershire, mixed to your liking (comparable quantities of each does well, although G-ma2005 prefers a larger fraction of ketchup). Continue baking for another 30 min or so. It is hard to over-cook it.
Fuzzmama notes that this is not meat as garnish. It is transcendant the next day in a sandwich.
I love potato pancakes. It turns out their preparation does not involve rocket science. Grate four potatoes and one onion (prepare to cry). Mix with two eggs, a few tbsp of flour, and a whole heck of a lot of salt and pepper. Fry large, flattened spoonfuls of the mixture in plenty of hot olive oil until very dark brown, turn, and make the other side dark brown too. Serve with sour cream and smoked fish, or apple sauce. These quantities make about twelve pancakes (serves about four).
As you proceed with the frying (with two pans doing two or three at a time), you can preserve the cooked pancakes on paper towels in a 170 F (80 C) oven.
An expert variation is to drain the shredded potato, let the starch settle out of the drained liquid, and mix it back in, but that may qualify as rocket science. One night we added shredded celery root, to good effect.
Hans-Walter Rix (Director of the MPIA) made this German classic for me, in preparation for an attempt on Käsespätzle I plan to make later this week.
Get some water boiling on the stove and salt it. Mix 200 g flour (about 1.5 cups) and plenty of salt with 2 eggs until smooth. Add water (the word is that soda water works better than flat water, but we did not perform any comparison) a bit at a time and stir until you get a dough that is slightly foamy and flows, but which is not fully liquid.
Pour the dough onto a small cutting board and fling small bits of it into the boiling water with a flexible knife. Boil for a few minutes until the noodles are solid. Drain and then either serve with butter, or else sauté with butter and serve with salt, pepper, and cheese.
If you make the dough too liquid, the noodles become too small and water-logged. Interestingly, the liquid can be replaced with broth or puréed spinach to vary the taste. Top Spätzle makers have a large ricer that looks like an enormous garlic press to make consistent noodles from the dough. I think PMC may have one of these?
"Thick, chunky sauce"? This is a method of, technique for, approach to cooking eggs and not a recipe per se. I can bash out a sauce that fits the bill in 10 minutes, so this is on the table in 15, baby. Here's tonight's sauce:
You could go all arrabiata on those eggs' ass by skipping the spinach and adding some chili pepper flakes or any hot sauce on hand. Hash, anyone? That's onion, cooked potato and leftover corned beef (not really a sauce, but...yum). By the way, add some beets to that hash and you've got "flannel". Of course, there's always puttanesca. You get the idea.
