I was so thrilled when I finally found a copy of Nancy Silverton’s pastry cookbook
The muffin batter itself was a lot like my usual muffin recipe - yogurt and oil, not too sweet. The difference was the addition of ground toasted fennel seed into the batter, a fabulous idea in itself – plus a creamy center of ricotta mixed with a bit of sour cream, that spills out when you bite into the muffin. Mmmm.
When a farmer hands you a beautiful fresh summer squash and tells you, “this is only the fifth zucchini I’ve picked so far this year,” you really want to do something nice with it. I made fritters.
Zucchini fritters are something I used to make a lot, but it’s been a while and I can’t find my original recipe, which was from a low-carb book by Fran McCullough and seems to be lost in the mists of time. I made something up, based loosely on my memories and on a recipe in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
This week has been crazy busy, but we did make time to get down to opening day of our local farmer’s market. It was a classic Pacific Northwest Memorial Day weekend, which is to say it rained every. single. day.
Fortunately there were plenty of vendors and customers, and the hardy Prozac Mountain Boys managed to keep the music playing without floating away.
We bought leeks, fingerling potatoes, asparagus, hothouse peppers, and butter, which seemed like a pretty good haul for the season (thank goodness for Hedlin Farms’ greenhouses). Then we checked out Gothberg Farms’ stand. A local goat dairy, they’re newcomers to the Mount Vernon market, and we’re really excited to have them here. I expect we’ll be eating a lot of their cheese in the months to come, but for now we limited ourselves to a tub of fresh ricotta and a block of Queso Blanco.
In the annals of putting fried eggs on top of things, this breakfast came very close to perfection. Here’s how to make it.
Take one Dungeness crab, cooked and cleaned.
Pick the meat out and set aside. Put the shell into a saucepan, cover with water, and simmer for about 10-15 minutes. Strain and keep warm.
A sudden craving last weekend had me searching my cookbook shelf for a recipe for buckwheat pancakes. I don’t know where the urge came from, but I wanted that earthy, rich flavor, preferably smothered in applesauce, for Valentine’s Day breakfast.
It was harder than I thought finding a recipe, but I ran one down in a true American cookery resource, Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook from 1961. This is a book that reads like something from another dimension, including this marvelous bit of advice in the “Hints for the Homemaker” section:
Every morning before breakfast, comb hair, apply makeup and a dash of cologne. Does wonders for your morale and your family’s, too!
My family’s morale is going to have to wait until after breakfast, sorry, Betty. But in any case, the recipes are pretty sound. I halved the recipe for buckwheat pancakes, starting it the night before as advised, and it turned out beautifully.
I thawed a container of Jonagold applesauce from last fall, and fried up a couple of homemade sausage patties that were left over from the previous week. The pancakes were wonderful, springy and chewy and with plenty of deep buckwheat flavor. They were also great with butter and syrup.
Even after halving the recipe, we couldn’t eat them all by a long shot. Eventually it dawned on us that we had made blini, and blini are made to be eaten with caviar. It was Valentine’s Day, after all…
It baffles me that something as wonderful as a scone can often be so awful.
The scones I grew up with (my mother’s) were like rich biscuits: a little fluffy, a little crumbly, with a sweet butter flavor. They might have some currants or a bit of zest, but the main attraction was always the scone itself, plus whatever fabulous jam you smeared on top. They also weren’t too big, so you could have the pleasure of going back for seconds or thirds, perhaps trying a different jam on each one.
Commercial scones, on the other hand, always seem to be huge, floury and dry. Not to mention full of chunks of things: citron, cranberries, nuts – all distractions, in my opinion. This sort of scone gets you to drink a lot more coffee than you normally would, just to wash all that dry plaster out of your mouth. I can never eat more than a bite or two.
They need to be made at home, and eaten fresh. That’s all there is to it.
Eons ago, on our honeymoon, Jon and I stayed at a wonderful place in the San Juan Islands called the Inn at Swifts Bay. It was a charming little B&B with a hot tub tucked back in the woods and a movie library of great quality – and the breakfasts were amazing. It was fifteen years ago and I still remember some of the food (I told you I had food on the brain, didn’t I?). One thing that made a huge impression on us both was the smoothie that kicked off each morning’s dining. Served in a large goblet, it was a puree of peach, a whole lime, banana, and pineapple. It was divine, and as soon as we were settled in our new (married student housing) apartment and owned a blender, we started making them for ourselves.
These days I can’t eat peaches (and pineapple makes my mouth feel a little odd, too), and I usually prefer a glass of orange juice with a hot breakfast than a full-on smoothie, but we still make smoothies on weekdays, especially if we’re feeling a little frail and dehydrated. Every summer I buy flats of local berries and freeze them, so all winter we can mix berries with mangoes, oranges or bananas for a variety of flavors. My usual smoothie formula for the two of us is something like: 1-2 cups fruit, half a cup of full-fat yogurt, half a cup of orange juice, two scoops of vanilla-flavored whey protein powder, and water to dilute and top up.
It’s easy, tasty and restorative. Always a good backup during the holidays, when one sometimes needs a bit of restoring.
When it comes to festive breakfasts, it’s hard to beat a blintz. A soft white crepe wrapped around a cheesy filling, fried golden and drizzled with syrup…I’m making myself hungry just writing about it. Blintzes were one of the foods my husband wooed me with (along with breakfast burritos, chocolate pudding and curry (no, not all at once)) and I’d say they worked quite well.
There are a lot of directions you can go with blintzes. Sometimes we put fruit in, or you could make a different flavor of crepe to wrap around (buckwheat, perhaps?), but they’re really great made plain, so everyone can put whatever topping on they want. You could even do them savory: mushrooms seem like an obvious thing to try.
This is kind of embarrassing, but I can’t deny (and you’ll know this if you’ve been reading for a while) that I will put a fried egg on almost anything. And when you think about it, French fries aren’t that different from hashbrowns, right?
I don’t usually bring leftover French fries home, but these were special fries. We had lunch at Nell Thorn last weekend, after spending a quiet Sunday morning in La Conner checking out some of the Art’s Alive exhibits. Thinking we’d be restrained and share an order (after downing some incredible oyster shooters), we asked for a single Nell burger with fries and a side salad. Unfortunately for our good intentions, the kitchen cut the burger neatly in half, put each on its own plate and filled in the space around it with fries. And these are Nell Thorn fries, done with local potatoes and herbs and served with spicy house-made ketchup. We ate far too many, then just had to take the rest home. And, of course, ate them for breakfast. What would you have done?
For those who have not had a large Rubbermaid container of leftover curried eggs to work through this week, and are therefore not completely burned out on them, here’s a recipe (I omitted to include it in my Easter brunch report, obviously a mistake).
Ideally, this should be done with freshly found Easter eggs, wet with dew, delivered to the kitchen by victorious children, anxious to get back out into the fray. The finished dish will be ready by the time all the hunting is done, assuming you’ve begun the prep beforehand.
If you have no children or Easter eggs available, however, you can boil eggs just for this purpose. You could even make them sometime other than Easter. I won’t tell.
