if I were a meal, I would be brunch

There is not one thing not to like about brunch. Unless you are a brunch waitress, in that case, I tip my syrup stained hat to you, comrades. I think that my most favorite thing about brunch is the proximity of sweet and salty foods and the acceptableness of combining them on one plate. I also like the fact that brunch encourages booze before noon. I am by nature a salty food lover, but I do feel like at the end of every meal, I could go for something sweet to finish it all off. With brunch you usually have the option of adding something sugary sweet to your plate without having to convince your table mates to order dessert. Often when I go out to breakfast with my friends I like to order a chocolate chip pancake “for the table” so we can all jack our glycemic index up a bit before heading out into our day. When I found myself brunch planning this past week I knew two things. I wanted to make quiche and something with chocolate chips in it.



My mom is the undisputed master of quiche. She makes four at a time in her sleep while simultaneously juggling 3-4 grandkids and a glass of chardonnay. I sought her wisdom via email. This is what I received back (my comments/translations in parenthesis):

Sure you can make it ahead it will be fine and whatever veggies you have you can put in. I use warmed half/half with little bit of nutmeg, beat eggs 4, shredded cheese and pour into baked pie shell, I really feel like the baked shell is the answer (to it being good) and Heather (my sister, who has, in recent years proven her proficiency with quiche making) used either fontina or Gruyere in her quiche and that changes it up I always put in cheddar also. (I did not make these inexplicable line breaks- these are included in her email)
I think the quiche that goes over the best is green onion and bacon the classic recipe but they are kinda not the people you make that for. (“those kind of people” are vegetarians. I like how she presents it as a sort of alien race).
Do you mean your (*cough* you’re- sorry grammar nerd here) having them Saturday? you said tomorrow and that would be different.
S

I love so much how she did not give me ONE specific measurement reference save for the fact that I would be using 4 eggs. Fortunately the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and even though this was my first foray into quiche making, I eyed out my measurements successfully. The amounts below are approximations on what I made.



ASPARAGUS and RAMP QUICHE with GRUYERE CHEESE

Premade pie crust (or homemade)
One bunch ramps*, chopped
One bunch asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1-1 ½ inch spears
Olive oil
Butter
Half and half
Pinch nutmeg
4 eggs
1 cup shredded gruyere cheese

*a note about ramps. Also called spring onions their flavor falls in between a scallion and mild garlic. Every spring foodies go absolutely apeshit over ramps. I guess this is because they are available for a limited time only and most foodies like the exclusivity this time constraint provides. I normally try to avoid trendy ingredients, but a couple years ago my friend Stevie bought some at a farmer’s market when I was with her. This was the first time I had ever seen/heard about them. I trust her judgment thoroughly, especially when it comes to food. I knew it was only a matter of time before I made something with ramps. Three years later and here they are.



Par bake your pie crust in a 400 degree oven. To do this: cover the crust with tinfoil and fill the foil with pie weights, dried beans or rice. Bake for about 10 minutes, then remove the weights and foil and let bake for another 2-4 minutes. Remove crust from oven and dial oven down to 375 degrees.





While the pie crust is par baking trim and chop your veggies and shred the cheese. Heat about 3 tablespoons of butter and olive oil (half of each) in a skillet over medium heat. Add the white part of the ramps and cook until they start to become fragrant (just a few minutes), add the green leafy part of the ramps and the asparagus, toss and sauté until brightly colored, just about 2-3 minutes. They will cook through while baking in the quiche so don’t overcook them. Meanwhile heat about 1-1 ½ cups of half and half on a low burner with just a pinch of nutmeg.



In a large bowl beat four eggs together, add about 1 cup(ish) of warmed half and half. Pour this into your pie crust, add the veggies, top with cheese. If your pie mixture doesn’t quite reach the top of your crust, top it off with a tid bit more cheese and half and half. Decorate with criss-crossed asparagus spears if you’re feeling fancy. Bake in a 375 degree oven for about 25-30 minutes. Do not overcook. Test with a knife at 25 minutes, or simply eye it out by giving the pan a gentle shake and if the middle is still liquid, leave the quiche in the oven for another few minutes.



Do ahead: you can make this whole quiche ahead of time and simply reheat it the next morning in a 350 degree oven. I cooked mine early and then left it in the warm oven before our guests arrived.



So I started buying bananas recently despite my well documented, tempestuous history with them and the fact that I pretty much need them to ripen into brown blobs and bake them into something before I will consider eating them. I just still feel like I want to be the kind of person who buys bananas, or at least some kind of fruit. So I bought them thinking that I would make them into banana bread or pie or something or that I would finally get around to trying this “recipe” for one ingredient ice cream. Which is essentially just that you freeze bananas and then mash them in your cuisinart and you get ice cream (suspicious face) “riiiight.” We’ll see about that one. But then something happened. Paul started eating all the bananas. I bought one bunch, then another, then a third and he was all “I love bananas. I feel incredible. I think bananas are the fountain of youth.” Encouraged by his enthusiasm I continued to purchase bananas for a few weeks until he was like “meh. I’m sick of bananas.” Hey, I can’t fault him, I don’t even mess with them myself, so finally, I had some ripe bananas begging to be baked with. Enter chocolate chip banana muffins (which would soon become bread). They were easy, they facilitated the using up of extra bananas and they had chocolate in them.



CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA BREAD
(from Epicurious)

1 ½ cups all purpose flour
2/3 cup sugar
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
1 cup mashed ripe bananas
1 large egg
½ cup melted butter
¼ cup almond milk*
½ tsp. vanilla
¾ cup chocolate chips

*or regular milk, I just like almond milk and thought it would be good here

Preheat oven to 350. Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, mash the bananas and combine with melted butter, egg, milk and vanilla. Stir banana mixture into dry ingredients until just blended. Stir in chocolate chips.



Butter and flour a loaf pan and pour batter in. Bake for about 1 hour, until a knife inserted in comes out with melted chocolate on it, but no uncooked batter.

So like I said, this recipe was originally muffins. If you are making them as muffins, they only take about 30 minutes to bake and I bet they would be delightful. I was out of muffin tin liners and I wasn’t about to individually butter and flour all my cupcake pans, so I was like “f-ck it, banana loaf it is.” This meant that it took substantially longer to cook but ah mah gah, this is some real good banana bread. Kind of almost exactly like the other banana bread I’ve made on here but dare I say, less fussy. There was like a quarter of a loaf left on the cutting board when I left that house that afternoon and when I got home that night it was just a buttery stain and some chocolate smears. Great success.

failure and neglect

I sit here in front of you a total failure of a mother. This blog is the closest thing I have to a child and yet, on May 6th she turned one year old and I completely and totally didn’t even realize it. What kind of parent forgets their child’s FIRST birthday? I mean my parents forgot to pick me up at someone else’s birthday once, but that’s like a totally different ball game. I bet they remembered MY birthday, especially the first one. I mean I can see screwing up when the kid’s like, 32, or some other random, non-milestone age. But Porky is only 1 and I’ve already sorely disappointed in my recognition of her birth. I mean?! On mother’s day I thought to myself “hm, weird, I bet it’s been about a year since I started my blog.” Because I distinctly remembered making and writing about a disastrous rhubarb crumb cake that I made for last mother’s day. And then, like a shady friend who realizes they’ve screwed up, I avoided this blog. I side stepped around her to other websites, websites that demanded nothing of me, where I could go to avoid her accusatory gaze. Until yesterday, when I once again remembered my probable neglect and decided to take a peek.

Yep. Sure enough, on May 6, 2009 I took my first hesitant steps into the blogosphere. It’s funny to look back on because at the time the idea of actually keeping this up was just a way to get me out of a rut, creatively speaking. I felt like I had too much time on my hands. Now I’m like Jesse Spano “time?! There’s never enough TIME?!” Oh and I kept Porky a secret at first. I had posted at least twice before I even had the nuts to tell Paul about it. And now, I find myself squeezing in posts at the last minute on a Friday morning, staying up late to upload photos of something I made the week before. I mean, what the heck is wrong with me? Have I gotten too comfortable? Is this the relationship equivalent of letting myself go? I feel like Ronald Miller in Can’t Buy Me Love (jeez, can I come up with any more ridiculous cultural references in this post?) you know where I once doted on Porky and even sunk my life savings into purchasing a suede outfit for her, now I’m like wearing mousse in my hair and cut off sleeve tee shirts, vandalizing my former best friend’s house and reciting poems that Porky wrote me to some other skanky blog, with no regard for her feelings.

Well, I’m here today first and foremost to apologize and to rededicate myself. I will never forget Porky’s birthday again. In fact, I’m going to put it as an annual reminder in my Google calendar. How’s that for dedication? I hope that Porky and I can grow old together and that I never let myself get too comfortable again. In the meantime, I will just do what I do best and try and nudge myself back into her good graces with first a cocktail, followed by some chicken wings and ice cream cake (from Carvel). Once we have gorged ourselves on cake and chicken, I will give her a spa gift certificate, a homemade coupon book full of favors from me, fine Swiss chocolates and perhaps, a proper post with actual recipes and photographs. I am so sorry my little blog. I hope you can forgive me.



Here’s to one year (and one week) of food, photos, fables, bad jokes and entirely too many exclamation points and parenthesis (I have a problem). Happy Birthday Porky Dickens. I love you so.

Just for the Halibut

My dad may or may not have been a pirate in a former life. Let’s just say there is some pretty hefty evidence to hint at this hidden history of his. He once spent a night in the middle of a severe hurricane, asleep on a Martha’s Vineyard beach underneath his dingy, with only his raincoat and khaki shorts as clothing. Apparently, he had ignored several severe weather warnings that day and sailed, solo, over to the island; being high tourist season, every motel and inn were booked solid. Despite the gale force winds, tsunami grade waves and lighting rippling against the sky he figured it would not be such a big deal if he simply caught some shut eye underneath the shelter of his dingy on the beach, outside, in a hurricane. I should mention that this was not during his wayward youth. This was actually not that long ago, I’m pretty sure after he had retired from teaching, which means he was sufficiently over the age of 50. About three hours into his slumber he was awoken by what sounded like a truck barreling along the ground beside him. Curious, he lifted the edge of his shelter just enough to peek out and see a coke machine rolling along the beach with all the lightness of a ball of tumbleweed. The wind was strong enough to yank a 500 pound machine out of a wall socket and toss it along the ground like a soccer ball, but my dad was perfectly content to sleep underneath a teensy boat shelter. He is clearly of a burlier, sea faring lot than I. For if I was faced with the same situation would be curled in a ball, weeping on the floor of the police station, or some other actual building structure that I was sure would at the very least protect me from certain death. I’m just saying, if my dad came clean tomorrow and told us all that he had a secret pirating fortune hidden somewhere, some navy seal training he had neglected to mention or that he once spent a fortnight mentoring Bear Grylls, these disclosures would make sense to me.



So, it goes without saying that pirates eat fish. They kind of have to. And I think lemonade, to ward off scurvy. When I cook for my dad I always tend to lean in the direction of seafood. This may also be a subliminal attempt by me to get him to stop eating smoked mackerel for breakfast (I’m not kidding. Is this not behavior that perhaps a certain pirate may be privy to?) because it is the single most disgusting thing a human being can eat, let alone for breakfast. My dad’s apartment is below where my office is. So on mornings when he prepares smoked mackerel, everyone in the building suffers, especially me, because my sense of smell which at times is nonexistent is for some reason, hyper acute in the a.m. hours. It’s like someone just came in the back door and dumped a truckload of fish carcasses on the floor. You can imagine how fun this is on mornings when I have perhaps had a bit too much to drink the night before. So maybe I have a hidden agenda. Maybe if I offer him other kinds of fish at a meal time where fish is actually appropriate (read: not breakfast) he will eventually drop the mackerel as his go-to breakfast treat.



I decided on halibut “just for the halibut?!” my dad said, chuckling, several times as I prepared dinner. Yes, just for the hell of it. Because when one is spending $25.00 on a piece of fish, caution has been thrown to the wind. I had planned on cod or scallops but when I got to the fish market the thick, white slabs of halibut called out to me. They said “Jess, do have any idea how delicious we’re going to be?” If you only cook fish as a treat once in a great while, do yourself a favor and splurge on some halibut. It’s such a great fish; you barely have to do anything to it to make it taste spectacular. It’s almost impossible to overcook unless you’re really trying. Also, this halibut (if you’re buying halibut make sure it is “Pacific” or “Wild Alaskan”), is in season and caught sustainably. If you want to know what’s bad about unsustainable fishing read this (and don’t blame me if you don’t eat shrimp anymore). Sometimes the higher price tag is worthwhile. In this case, I think so.

PAN SEARED HALIBUT with HERB SHALLOT BUTTER

1 ½ lbs. Alaskan halibut
2 tbs. olive oil
2 tbs. butter
salt, pepper

3-4 tbs. softened butter (good quality like Kerry Gold)
½ shallot, minced finely
2 tbs. flat leaf parsley, chopped
1 tbs. chives, chopped
sprinkle of garlic salt
fresh ground pepper

Add shallot, herbs, garlic salt and cracked pepper to softened butter. Mash everything together well with a fork, set aside while you prepare fish.



Preheat oven to 350. Heat olive oil and butter in an oven-safe skillet over medium high heat. Cut halibut into single serving sized pieces and salt and pepper each side. Add pieces of fish to the hot pan and let brown on one side (only about 2 minutes); check to see if the fish will move. If it will move, it’s ready to be flipped, if it sticks, it may not be ready yet. Flip pieces so browned side faces up. Place skillet in preheated oven and bake for 10 minutes. Remove the fish from the oven and spoon a dollop of the compound butter over each piece. Squeeze lemon over the whole pan, serve immediately. Serves 4. We had ours with asparagus roasted with garlic and shallots and a mixed green salad. Simple, supper. Pretty healthy if you think large dollops of butter count as healthy. And I do.