It’s not often we have the chance to eat breakfast in Vancouver, since we usually just get up there for lunch and dinner, then head home – but last week we went up with some friends and spent the night. The hotel breakfast looked more than a little dour, so we walked to a place I’d read about – Seb’s Market Cafe on Broadway.

A very pleasant spot out on the wastelands of Broadway, Seb’s is a combination market/deli/bakery/restaurant/catering business. Their menu offers a strange melange of options, from a simple plate of toast and scrambled eggs (with or without caribou meat), to elk medallion eggs benedict, to lamb shanks with apricots. I’m pretty sure it’s the only place I’ve been that listed elk steak as a side dish. For breakfast.

I had fried eggs with spinach, grilled tomato, potatoes and toast. I adore eggs with tomato and spinach, so I was quite ready to appreciate this, but I was a little sad that the spinach seemed to be plain, reheated frozen spinach with no seasoning, and the tomato was barely heated, let alone grilled. The eggs were perfect, though, and the toast was a really nice flaxseed bread. We had overindulged a bit at Vij’s the previous night, so the vegetables were welcome no matter how they were done. By the same token, one of our party got the fruit plate with yogurt, which she was very pleased with, as well as a carrot-ginger-celery juice (she asked the waitress about the yogurt, as it was so tasty, and the response was “It’s just good, pure yogurt, eh?” – I love Canada). The other two split an eggs benedict with crab and havarti sauce, plus a glass of cucumber-spinach juice. They reported that the biscuit was excellent and the cheese sauce extremely good with the crab. The coffee was good, too.

It was a fine place for breakfast, especially for the slightly-hung-over. I’d love to come back and try more of their menu sometime when I’m really hungry.

Our fourth of July weekend was more than a little odd, which is why I haven’t quite pulled myself together enough to post on what we ate.

It all started with a birthday party…

My grandfather was turning 98, so of course we had a party. Strawberries have just come in like gangbusters in our area, so we brought a flat, and my mother made yogurt cake and a checkerboard layer cake. It was all very festive and tasty. There were many relatives.

Then came a really swell noodle salad, followed by a long drive east. My father cooked Chinese egg noodles and grilled marinated thin-cut beef and tofu while I stir-fried cabbage and zucchini to toss with it. It was extremely good the first night, but the leftovers served an invaluable purpose, giving us something to eat while we sat in the park at Grand Coulee Dam the next evening waiting for our turn to play on the music stage for the Festival of America.

The mayor of Coulee Dam put us up in a hotel up on the hill. Many of the rooms had little balconies facing the dam, presumably so people could watch the nightly laser light show without leaving their rooms (or their beer). Our room faced the UFO-ish Crown Point viewpoint perched on top of the coulee, which on the whole I preferred. It was one of the stranger hotels I’ve stayed in.

The next morning (which was the 4th of July) we got breakfast at the R&A Cafe, a small diner set into our hotel, facing the Coulee Dam Casino. It wasn’t a bad little place, although the coffee was kind of spectacularly awful. The eggs and bacon were perfectly fine, though, and the biscuits and gravy surprisingly good.

We drove all the way home (the morning light on Banks Lake and the Grand Coulee was gorgeous), put together a dinner of beef kebabs, salad and flatbread, and watched our hometown fireworks display. We felt, perhaps, just a bit disoriented.

I first heard of matzoh brei a few years ago, while reading something by Ruth Reichl – I don’t remember what it was any more, but it made an impression on me. A sort of Jewish French toast, a simple mixture of matzoh and egg, fried in butter and topped with syrup, it sounded just like something I would like – but I had never had it or seen it anywhere. My husband, who grew up eating vast quantities of matzoh, didn’t remember ever having it either. And for some reason we never seem to have matzoh on hand.

Then last week I saw the Passover clearance display at the co-op and, on the spur of the moment, decided to grab a cheap box of matzoh. We ate half of it straight with Saint Nectaire cheese (yum), but set aside several pieces for a weekend breakfast. I went looking for recipes and actually had some trouble finding any – none of my Jewish cookbooks included it, but I did find a version in a book called The Good Egg, so I used that – although I upped the egg quantity so there would be a one-to-one egg/matzoh ratio.

Later, I checked online and found Ruth Reichl’s version here. It’s just a bit different from the one I used – in hers you run water over broken matzohs, then scramble them with the egg in the pan, whereas in mine you soak the entire matzoh and then break it up, then fry as a solid cake. When Jon asked his mother, it turned out that she did used to make this occasionally, but her version apparently involves milk. Obviously there’s a certain amount of permitted variation. I think it would also be good as a savory, with herbs and hot sauce. We may need to experiment further.

If you grew up with matzoh brei, how did your family make it?

Matzoh Brei

Adapted from The Good Egg by Marie Simmons. Serves two.

• 3 sheets matzoh
• 3 eggs
• pinch salt
• 2 Tbsp butter

Place the matzoh in a pan, pour cold water over to cover and let sit 5 minutes. Lift the matzoh out and lay on a clean towel to drain, then carefully transfer to a mixing bowl and break it up loosely. Beat together the eggs and salt and pour them over the matzoh. Stir together.

In a large nonstick skillet over medium low heat, melt the butter. When it bubbles, scrape in the matzoh and egg and flatten into a pancake. Allow to cook several minutes, until the bottom becomes golden and a bit crusty. Break the pancake into sections with a spatula and flip the sections. When cooked on the second side, put the pieces on plates and top with maple syrup.

If you’re not worried about keeping kosher, I recommend pork sausage with this. Or bacon.

When I was a kid, oatmeal always meant rolled oats. Not instant, just the regular oats that need some cooking but don’t take very long. I liked it all right but was never wild about it – the texture was a little slimy, the flavor dull. Then we discovered steel-cut oats.

Because they take longer to cook, they require a bit of planning ahead to be able to do them on a work morning, but a bowl of good oats is well worth a little trouble. I like to set out my pans, measure my water and oats, and generally have everything ready to go the night before, which lets me get them ready in about half an hour after we get up.

We learned this great way of cooking them from Cook’s Illustrated (which we’ve simplified a bit to be slightly less rich) – you toast the oats before you add them to your boiling water.  It speeds up the cooking process a bit, and gives the oatmeal a lovely warmth and depth. If you want to go the whole hog, Cook’s has you saute the oats in butter, then cook them in part water, part milk – it’s very tasty but makes it unnecessary to add cream, which for us is sort of the whole point of oatmeal.

Steel-Cut Oats (serves two)

• 2 cups water (may be part milk)
• 1/2 cup steel-cut oats
• pinch of salt

Set the water to boil in a small heavy saucepan. Put the oats in a medium skillet and toast over med-high heat, stirring frequently, until lightly golden and fragrant. When the water comes to a boil, add the oats and stir well. Adjust the heat under the pan to get a slow bubble and cook uncovered until thick, about 15-20 minutes. Add a pinch of salt and stir it in. Turn off the heat, cover the pan and let sit another 10 minutes if possible (you can eat the oatmeal right when it comes off the heat but the texture won’t be as good). Serve with cream, brown sugar and fruit.

I know everyone and their mother probably has a recipe for potato pancakes, but I recently discovered a new method for making them and it’s SO GOOD. And since Hanukkah, that celebration of fried food, begins tomorrow, it seemed like a fine time to mention it.

The secret is onion – quite a lot of onion, too. Really, it makes a huge difference! Mitchell Davis, author of the very useful book Kitchen Sense, attributes the technique to his mother, and I was amazed the first time I tried it. You grate the onion alternately with the potato so its juices coat the potato shreds and keep them from browning. Then it all gets mixed together with egg and matzo meal and fried slowly, producing a savory pancake with a perfectly crunchy outside and a soft sweet interior. I’ve made them two or three times now, and they are the very best latkes I’ve ever eaten. A little horseradish creme fraiche doesn’t hurt, either.

And by the way, today marks the end of another National Blog Posting Month – I made it all 30 days! Daily posting is not likely to continue, but we’ll see where inspiration leads me. As always, thanks for reading!

Recipe after the jump…

Potato Latkes

Adapted from Kitchen Sense by Mitchell Davis. Makes enough pancakes for two people.

• 1 pound potatoes (I like Yukon Gold or similar varieties)
• 1 large onion
• 1 egg
• 2 Tbsp matzo meal or bread crumbs
• 1 tsp salt
• oil

Lay out a clean dishtowel, and grate part of a potato onto it. Then grate part of an onion over that, then switch back to potato. Alternate potato and onion until it’s all grated, then roll up the dishtowel and wring as much liquid out as possible.

In a medium bowl, lightly beat the egg and mix in the matzo meal and salt. Add the grated potato and onion and mix well.

Put a large cast iron or heavy nonstick pan over medium high heat and put in about 1/8 inch of vegetable oil. When it’s hot, scoop up handfuls of the potato mixture, shaping each into a rough disk and slipping it into the oil. Don’t crowd the pancakes – if they don’t fit easily, use an extra pan or do them in batches. Let them cook about 10 minutes, until golden and crusty on the bottom. Carefully flip and cook another 5-10 minutes, keeping an eye on the temperature to make sure they don’t brown too fast. Drain on paper towels and eat while hot.

I would probably never have thought of making this if it weren’t for the “Tom’s Big Breakfast” at Lola in Seattle. A happy plateful of eggs, potatoes, peppers and octopus, I found it surprisingly delicious. So when we left Gretchen’s the other night with a container of leftover boiled potatoes and steamed baby octopus, I knew that we were going to have octopus hash for breakfast.

Since the leftovers were all cooked, all I needed to do was roughly chop the potatoes and toss them into a nonstick pan with a little butter and oil, letting them get good and crusty, then stir in the chopped octopus near the end to heat through. With fried eggs on top and a dab of mayonnaise mixed with habañero sauce, the result was extremely good. And very filling.

We gave the octopus heads to the cats. They all thought we were trying to poison them except Mickey, who scarfed everything we gave him. He has excellent taste.

In general I live by the motto, “When life gives you pears, make pear custard pie.” But sometimes pear muffins are a good substitute, especially if you only have one pear that needs using.

I’ve posted this recipe before (ripped off from a Williams-Sonoma catalog many, many years ago), in the form of part-whole-wheat rhubarb muffins. This time I just used all-purpose flour, replaced the rhubarb with one bosc pear, peeled, cored and diced, and added a heaping tablespoon of chopped crystallized ginger. As usual, the muffins baked up perfectly. Pear is a more subtle addition than rhubarb, but it goes nicely with the ginger and makes charming pockets of soft sweetness. We have a bag of these in the freezer now, ready for quick weekday breakfasts.

Here’s a nice breakfast dish that I had forgotten about. Usually when we have apples on hand, if I haven’t already turned them into applesauce, we saute them in butter and serve them as part of a German apple pancake. Last weekend, though, some fresh Jonagolds were crying out to be used and Jon remembered the apple popover recipe from the San Francisco Chronicle cookbook.

We used to make this a lot, and my parents still do (they often throw in blueberries, which is nice). It’s basically a clafoutis, with a lightly sweetened egg batter baked over apples that have been precooked with butter and cinnamon. As with many dishes of this sort, you could use any sort of fruit or seasoning – I haven’t tried pears, but I bet it would be fantastic. Maybe with a little nutmeg?

You never know how this is going to turn out – we never know if it’s to do with humidity, or temperature, or the fruit, or what. Sometimes the whole thing poofs up into a perfect dome, sometimes you get a craggy mountain range. This one refused to rise at all, but produced fantastic caramelized edges. Certainly nothing to complain about. We ate half on Sunday and saved the rest to reheat for Monday breakfast, which worked very well. It would also do nicely as a dessert, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Giant Apple Popover

from a recipe by Flo Braker, in the The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook edited by Michael Bauer and Fran Irwin

• 2 apples, peeled and sliced
• 4 Tbsp butter
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/8 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 1 Tbsp oil
• 2 packed Tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 425°.

Melt the butter in a large skillet and saute the apples until beginning to soften. Add the sugar and cinnamon and cook just a little more, until soft but not mushy. Scrape them into a pie pan, arranging them to cover the bottom, and let cool.

Combine the eggs, milk, oil, brown sugar, and vanilla in a bowl and beat well, then stir in the flour and salt and whisk thoroughly. If necessary, let the mixture sit to dissolve the flour, then beat again to make sure it’s smooth. You can use a blender if you want.

Pour the batter over the cooled apples and put the pan in the oven. Let bake 20 minutes, then turn down to 350° and bake another 20 minutes or until golden on top - do not open the oven door while the popover is baking!

Serve the popover in thick wedges. Good hot or cold.

It’s no secret that I love fried eggs – I do tend to put them on every possible type of leftover. But I also love boiled eggs, and often have one for breakfast with cereal and a pot of tea.

Everyone seems to have their own method for boiling eggs, and I have different methods depending on what final result I’m going for. If I want them hard-boiled for making devilled or curried eggs, I use the approach of putting them in cold water, bringing the pot to a boil, then turning it off and letting it sit covered for exactly twelve minutes, then quick-chilling the eggs. But when I’m boiling an egg for breakfast, I want it soft and runny inside, with the white just set.

My usual 5:30-in-the-morning technique is to pop an egg in a small saucepan, add water to cover, put it over high heat, then forget about it until I hear it bubbling. I look at the clock, then wait two minutes more before taking the pan off the heat and rinsing the egg in cold water. If I think it was on the boil for a little longer, I peel the egg and eat it out of hand. If I get the timing right, I put it in my little chicken egg cup, crack the top and eat it with a spoon (and toast soldiers, if I am so lucky as to have any). The final result depends a lot on whether I actually saw the water come to a boil or not. I suppose I could remedy this by bring the water to a boil first, then adding the egg and setting a timer, but I haven’t had as good results that way.

Regardless of how done it is, the deliciousness of a boiled egg depends a lot on where you get it. We’ve been lucky this year to have gotten eggs from some very fine, spoiled hens – first from Laura at (Not So) Urban Hennery, then from Katharine and Erik at Well Fed Farms. When the chicken is free to roam, eating bugs and salamanders and anything else that comes its way, you get extremely flavorful (and healthful) eggs. The kind that don’t need anything but a pan of water and a sprinkle of salt to be absolutely perfect.

I was so thrilled when I finally found a copy of Nancy Silverton’s pastry cookbook at Powell’s a few weeks ago. Of course, I still haven’t made the recipe I bought the book for (the incredible homemade buttermilk crackers we had at Duckfest), partly because my eye was immediately drawn to the ricotta-stuffed muffin recipe. Our favorite goat cheese vendor had fresh ricotta last week, we just had to do it. Really, could you have resisted?

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.

I did run into a few difficulties. My muffin tins might not have been large enough, because even after I filled them past the point I thought was wise, I still had enough to scrape into a small bread pan. The dough was much stiffer than I expected and was rather hard to work with; on the other hand, the filling did not leak at all and the muffins didn’t explode in the oven, so maybe that was how it was supposed to be.

If I make this again (probably not for awhile, as we still have most of this batch in the freezer) I may switch it up a little. The batter seemed like it had too much flour and possibly too much baking powder, and it surprised me that it had no salt. The Gothberg Farms ricotta is so fresh and tender it doesn’t really need the sour cream added in, and I think a bit of sugar, vanilla or maybe fresh herbs might be good additions. We ate our muffins with lots of fresh raspberries on the side, but you could toss berries into the filling instead. I can think of lots of different directions to go here – what would you do with this muffin?

Ricotta Muffins

Almost (but not quite) as written by Nancy Silverton, from Nancy Silverton’s Pastries from the La Brea Bakery.

batter:

• 2 tsp fennel seed
• 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/2 cups yogurt
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil

filling:

• 1/2 cup (4 oz) ricotta
• 4 Tbsp sour cream
• salt

Preheat the oven to350°.

Toast the fennel seeds in a small pan. Let them cool and grind them in a spice grinder or mortar.

Combine the ground fennel seed with the flour, baking powder, baking soda and sugar. Make a well in the center and pour in the yogurt and the oil. Mix them together, then incorporate the dry ingredients from the sides. Mix well, making sure to get all the flour from the bottom of the bowl.

Mix the filling ingredients together in a separate bowl. Grease your muffin tins with oil or butter, then spoon in batter until the cups are 1/3 full. Drop in a spoonful of the ricotta filling in the center of each cup. Top with the rest of the batter – the cups should not quite be full (extra batter can be baked in loaf pans or additional muffin tins).

Bake 25-30 minutes, until golden brown on top. Serve with berries or jam.