On Blue Potatoes and 62C Poached Eggs
Hearty Breakfasts and more.
ON Amaranth Patties
We’re savoring the last bits of summer before fall hits full swing. Following doctor’s orders, I’ve been looking for new ways to carb up and exploring different grains to incorporate into our recipes. Amaranth is a new addition to our kitchen, and after testing out some amaranth porridge last week I’m totally sold. This little grain is easy to cook, contains plenty of protein and amino acids, and has a great consistency with a delicate pop.
Sifting through recipes using my new found love as an entree, I found this recipe for amaranth patties. Our first go round left something to be desired, but after a few adjustments this is an easy dinner recipe I’ll be quick to try again. We served these with a fresh arugula salad and a cucumber + greek yogurt dressing.
Amaranth Patties
Prep time
Cook time
Total time
Author: Maggie Matela Ed hyp
Recipe type: Entree
Serves: 12 Patties
Ingredients
Amaranth Patties
- 1 cup amaranth
- 1 egg
- 1 tbl curry powder
- 1 tsp coriander
- 1 tsp paprika
- 1tsp salt
- 3 tbl onions
Breading
- ¼ cup panko
- ¼ cup parmasean
- 1 tbl fresh parsley (chopped)
Dressing
- ¼ cup greek yogurt
- ⅕ whole cucumber
- 1 tbl lemon juice
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp coriander
- 1 sprig fresh mint
- 1 small bunch fresh parsley
- 1 clove black garlic
- 1 dash sumac
Instructions
- Cook 1 cup amaranth in your rice cooker on the brown rice setting. It’ll help digestion if you put it in the rice maker several hours early to soak. A rice cooker with a timer helps.
- Preheat oven to 450*.
- Caramelize onions.
- Add egg, curry, coriander, paprika, onions and salt to amaranth. Stir until combined.
- Form into 1.5″ patties and coat in breading. Place on greased baking sheet.
- Bake for 30 minutes.
- Pan sear patties (we used about 2 tbl ghee)
- Plate and eat
On Bagels
Last weekend we went to New York to visit some friends for my birthday. There are plenty of things I miss about living in the bog apple — pals, music, affordable housing — but nothing I miss as much as a good bagel. Like most NY trips, I had a full itinerary of binge eating and I saved the creme de la creme of Bergen Bagels for very last. Unfortunately for me, their toaster was broken. I returned home feeling a little jilted, the thought of the perfect lox bagel still nagging at my stomach strings.
We decided to make Peter Reinhart’s Bagels from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It’s a fun time. People always seem to be really impressed if you make bagels, but they’re really not much tougher than bread. There’s some tricky parts though. Sometimes you forget that you’re out of capers. Sometimes you have non-diastatic malt powder and your recipe calls for diastatic malt powder. Sometimes you can’t find high gluten flour and don’t have time to look at several stores (next time you see wheat gluten on its own buy it and fortify the bread flour [ I think. someone correct me if buying the high gluten flour is better than doing that]). And sometimes your mixer breaks and you have to knead the dough by hand at three in the morning when you just want to go to bed and f bagels f them to h.
It is fun though, and these aren’t real problems. Capers : you cry a little and keep better stock of what you have, high gluten flour : use bread flour, Reinhart says they’ll be less chewy than full gluten bagels, malt powder: use it anyway, you’ll have less enzymatic breakdown of the starches, but it’ll still taste good, mixer breaking: remember that kneading is a peaceful and relaxing experience. One thing the recipe doesn’t mention : angelic glows when you take them out of the oven. You’ve got to look at them and smell bagel air for 15 minutes before you eat them. That’s probably the hardest part. Although that’s about the same for all of the recipes in the book.
The bagels were very very good. The inside was chewy, which really complemented the flavors that developed as you chewed. They’re crusty, in that great bagely sort of chewy way. Just the way that most bagels disappointingly aren’t. The everything ones did seem more salt balanced. I topped them with a mix of seeds and salt. I wonder if the salt is a little low for my taste, or assuming a salty sprinkle. It’s 2% though, so I also wonder if I put in an airier salt when I made the dough. I dont think I salted by weight (don’t tell). They were best 15 minutes out of the oven. We also ate some toasted 2 days after and they were still very good. None lasted longer than that. If you keep them in the fridge to cook some after two days make sure they’re well covered or they’ll get hard spots. It’s more a disappointment than a deal breaker, that batch went pretty fast too.
Here I am thinking about bagels in the bog apple.
Maggie must have smelled some bagels at the bottom of the stairwell.
I think Alaina is eyeing up a bagel sitting on my left shoulder.
This is what we at the the Robeling Tea Room. Not bagels, but very good.
I think he just lost his last bagel in a bet. So sad.
ON SOUR CREAM PEACH PIE
My mother was throwing a family brunch to celebrate my sister moving back from Wisconsin. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to impress all my loved ones with this Thomas Keller quiche we made a few months ago, but I was gently reminded that it rounded out to be a $30 quiche. Instead we decided to make a pie with some sad looking peaches that were withering in the back of the fridge. What better way to say I love you than “I was going to throw this away but instead I’m making you eat it.”
I cobbled the recipe together with bits and pieces from my favorite butter-loving mavens. I’m going to cut this pie a little bit of slack because I had enough crust leftover to make a galette, but I will say that I started out with a pound of butter and finished off the evening with just enough to make some eggs the next morning. What I’m saying is that it’s delicious.
I used a pretty standard crust. Lots of butter, lots of shortening, lots of chilling.
While your crust is chilling, peel some peaches and make your filling. This was super simple. Just cream together sugar, egg yolks, sour cream, and vanilla.
It turns out we didn’t have nearly enough peaches….oops! This turned out to be more of a plum-peach pie. IMHO the plums added some much-needed color and fruits fruit, so if you find yourself in the same pickle just remember that when there’s a streusel top, it don’t much matter what’s underneath. Pie!
Crust
- 1.5 sticks very cold unsalted butter
- 3 cups all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 1/3 cup very cold vegetable shortening
- about 1/2 cup ice water
- Dice the butter and return it to the refrigerator while you prepare the flour mixture.
- Place the flour, salt, and sugar in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade and pulse a few times to mix. Add the butter and shortening. Pulse 8 to 12 times, until the butter is the size of peas.
- With the machine running, pour the ice water down the feed tube and pulse the machine until the dough begins to form a ball.
- Dump out on a floured board and roll into a ball.
- Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Filling
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup sour cream
- 3 egg yolks
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 4 cups peeled, sliced peaches (or whatever ya got!)
Crumble Topping
- 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/3 cup packed light-brown sugar
- 3 tablespoons granulated sugar
- Pinch of salt
- 6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter (cut into small pieces)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 425F.
- Roll out the crust and place it in a 10-inch pie dish. Prick generously with a fork.
- Meanwhile, in a large bowl, mix together the sugar, sour cream, egg yolks, and vanilla extract. Place fruit into crust. Pour custard filling into the pie crust and place in oven. Bake for 30 minutes.
- Make the streusel topping: In a medium bowl, add the sugar, flour, and cinnamon. Using a pastry cutter or a fork, cut in the butter until it resembles pea-sized pieces or smaller.
- Remove the pie from the oven and sprinkle the streusel topping over it evenly. Return to the oven and bake an additional 10-20 minutes, or until the topping is browned. If needed, cover the edges of the pie with foil to prevent over-browning.
Easy as pie 😉
ON TIKI PARTIES
I was in a bit of funk the other night so Ed cajoled me into walking it off to a nearby bar. It’s the sort of place thats a little too hot and little too crowded until the dinner crowd trickles off and you remember that they serve skillets of melted cheese and tiki drinks dressed up enough to lighten any mood. Nothing turns the night around like a tiny umbrella.
Ed’s grandma was celebrating her 91st birthday this weekend so we decided to give the gift that keeps on giving and bring a big bowl of tiki punch. We decided to keep it simple with the Jungle Bird.
Lesson 1: Exciting tiki mugs are a lot more hard to come by (and more expensive) than you may anticipate. Luckily your grandmother may already have some! We filled in the gaps with some lucky finds from the wonderful folks at Who New.
Lesson 2: You may need to more than gently remind party guests to Add. Plenty. Of. Ice.
If you find that your lime cups aren’t quite as impressive as you like, try adding a little grain alcohol.
On Lemon Olive Oil Cake
I was recently diagnosed with a rare blood disease. It sounds really intimidating, but there are several episodes of House and at least one Hollywood movie about it. If you’re going to get pinned with an incurable disease, at least its something glamourous, right? Anyway, the long and short of it is that every once in a while you get some belly pains and the extent of the medical advice thats been given to me has boiled down to “EAT CARBS”. Now I can feel totally justified to roll my eyes at all the bread-shamers out there while enjoying some guilt free indulgences.
I’m not typically a huge cake fan (I know, I’m a monster), but the balding female nutritionist I was sent to told me to try incorporating more sweets and pizza into my diet, so hey, doctor’s orders. Like most ladies my age, I have a pinterest and know my way around a search for “rustic cake.” All of the lemon cakes that caught my eye took me back to the same recipe, so we decided to use that as the base.
We had to double the recipe to make three 6″ layers. I separated half of the advised lemon zest and grabbed some rosemary and infused the olive oil in an ISI. You’ll want to discard the zest and rosemary after infusing, they’ll tend to lack much flavor. The result was brighter, if not a little subtle. Probably would have benefited from leaving the ingredients to mingle longer or started by infusing into alcohol and mixing that with the olive oil.
The recipe we started from seemed a little fussy, but the batter texture ended up beautifully fluffy.
We ditched the recommended glaze and took some inspiration from the frosting on cinnamon rolls we made for a recent family brunch (they were great, a recipe you should definitely try). I used a block of cream cheese and a 6 oz. container of creme fraiche. Use the whisk attachment to combine those with half a cup of powdered sugar. I tend to err on the side of less sweet, so you might want to add more sugar for a less tangy frosting.
The cake was dense and moist without being overly sweet. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have eaten enough of the icing in the process to cure you from wanting to indulge in more than a small slice, but your coworkers will thank you tomorrow. Safety warning: I can’t say for sure which of these flowers are safe for human consumption, but judging by the amount of times in my life I’ve been told not to eat berries off of bushes I’m going to assume that some of these are not.
Meet Maggie & Ed
