Bittman’s Crustless Breakfast Quiche

Or, “We can’t all be perfect”.

The Setup:

I watched this yesterday on the NYT site: It is Mark Bittman, (who I love) and he’s a’makin’ a crustless breakfast quiche. Or, er. ‘Quiche’. It’s not a real one but I don’t really care and neither does he. I wanted to make one anyway, because we’ve got too many eggs. Also, there’s the dangling notion that J. (from the comments) put into my head in a conversation we had the other day, where I’d asked him, “What should I write about?” and he’d said I should do good date food. Well. It’s breakfast and I’m hungry and I’ve got my camera out, so this is as close as it’s going to get now. Call it breakfast date.

This recipe is the same as Bittman’s, with, basically, two or three minor additions (yeah, Jon Stewart said differently about Cindy McCain’s controversial, possibly-stolen-from-Hershey’s butterscotch cookie recipe, but I am here acknowledging that my recipe is not original. So there.):

It’s actually in the oven now. Oh man, live blogging. Let’s go back and review the tape, shall we, America?

The Heist:

You will need:

* Three eggs

* About three-quarters of a cup of cheese

* A cup of milk or half-and-half or cream (I used milk. And skim milk at that. Sue me.)

* Salt, cayenne pepper, herbs

* Shallots, broccoli (or whatever you like)

* A greased ramekin

* A lipped baking sheet to put the ramekin on

Reader, consider the egg.

So perfect in form; so delightful in function. Okay, resume considering other things.

As Alton would say, set your hotbox to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, beat the eggs. Bittman puts in a pinch of salt and a tiny semi-dash of cayenne pepper here; I did that and I added some Italian Herbs to that – you know, that little cure-all shaker with the basil, the oregano, the thyme – and whisked that all together.

Then I warmed the cup of milk in a Pyrex, in the microwave – I did it in spurts of ten to fifteen seconds, with maybe the sum total of heating time being about one minute or less. It should be warm, not hot.

Then I tempered the eggs by adding a little bit of the milk – if you add it all at once you’ll make the eggs hot enough to actually start cooking them, and denaturing their proteins and blah blah science blah. America, you already know that, don’t you? Adding hot things to eggs too quickly is bad. Unless that hot thing is a, y’know… a stove. Or an oven. Or something.

I threw some cheese in (Whoo. Semi-generic Mexican cheese blend – the choice of the discriminating consumer!) and then got to thinking about the contents of the fridge; we had some broccoli left over from last night so I thought “Okay! I will create a nice flavor and color contrast by mincing the broccoli and mixing it with some freshly chopped shallots.” That’s kind of the way I think, really. Yes, it will taste good, but ooo look how pretty. What’s more impressive, I ask you, than judicious disposal of leftovers? That’ll impress your, uh, breakfast date.

Although if you’re having your breakfast date at home one presumes the impression has already been made. Hee-hee. Ahem!

Honestly, though – the shallot is pretty elegant. Consider using it.

i dig shallots. They have a nice punch and a wonderful flavor (that will probably be drowned out by the semi-generic Mexican cheese blend. We’ll see. This is how I learn things, you know – by wasting nice food.) that really lends itself to aromatic cooking. Shallots, like onions or leeks, make a really good aromatic base to anything, and I think it’s pretty French to sauté them with garlic and throw in a bit of demi-glace and some tomatoes. I wish I could remember how to make sauce chasseur. OH WAIT, I can remember! Hey, lookit that.

Anyway. Mincey-mincey, mixy-mixy, and then a bit of greasy-greasy (I ask you, where is that Pulitzer?), and you’re good to go.

Pour your mixture into the ramekin or soufflé and throw it in the oven for about twenty to thirty minutes. Since mine’s in one ramekin instead of four, it may take a little longer than that. We’ll see. I’ll get back to you on that. For now, we wait.

Go check out something edifying, in fact, while this bakes. Look around you!

Hm. Well.

It’s really cute!

It worked, kind of. It tastes good! But if I were you I’d stick with Bittman’s recipe and keep it in multiple ramekins, but littler ones than mine. I thhink it’ll take a bit more finessing before this works; the ramekin was too deep to get everything cooked in thirty minutes, at 325 degrees. I upped the heat to 380 and stuck it in for another 10, and it turned out fine. But this isn’t fool-proof date food – not yet. It’s also unattractive when taken out of the ramekin, which is why, I think, Bittman eats it straight out of his.

See? It’s kind of wet. I’ll try two eggs and less milk next time. You can’t always win, America. It was still a pleasant breakfast, but my version will take a little refining. I’ll get back to you.

One of the dangers of live blogging, I guess, is that there’s no opportunity for revisionist history.

-D

Applied Quesadilla Theory

I have definitely laid this down in print somewhere else.

David’s Kitchen Axiom No. 5: With a little imagination, anything can be a quesadilla.

And I mean it. Given tortillas, grease, and heat, anything in your kitchen can be made into a delightful quesadilla! But wait, you say. David, doesn’t quesadilla just mean ‘little cheesy thing’ in Spanish? Don’t you need cheese?

Oh, America. How little you know!

… Well, okay. You are right, technically. But I am more right, because anything in your kitchen can be successfully encased between two tortillas and cooked with some olive oil in a skillet, and rather than calling that a “pan-fried tortilla sandwich”, I propose the more familiar title. You can call it what you want, America.

But really. When in doubt, a sandwich is almost always your best option, especially when you’re trying to clean out the fridge. I kid you not, this can be done with anything: I made a quesadilla once with leftover tilapia and tarragon cream sauce, and it was delicious. Give it a try. What’s in your fridge right now, for example?

Say you’ve got some leftover barbecued chicken and some steamed broccoli (this is what is in my fridge at present, among other things). In fact let’s see what happens, here! Let’s do this, America!

Okay. Leftover blackened cajun chicken that Mama barbecued from the evening previous. We got some of that, we got some broccoli, we got… oh! Oh hell yeah! We have some jalapeño pepper that I chopped up about four days ago. Ooooh this is gonna be good.

Okay, I like to make my quesadillas primarily about the vegetables. You may have noticed that I am now eating poultry. Well. Yes. Red meat is a no, often enough, with rare exceptions (well.  medium rare exceptions)  But I’m trying to get the entire family to scale back on eating meat, and I think we can all have a little animal protein, so long as we have less of it overall.  So we have lots of vegetation to counteract it.

So note the proportion: three or four parts vegetable to one part animal.  I think that’s probably going to be my general rule of law from now on.  We have, looking like a weather-worn Italian flag (or a brand new and spunky Irish flag), orange bell pepper, onion, and broccoli, with that little sidebar of garlic and jalapeño.

A quesadilla is one of those foods that can just sort of fit around anything in the fridge, like I said; you can clean out the refrigerator with it, you can stretch a single barbecued chicken breast into a meal, it gets lipstick stains off your collar, it’s new, it’s improved, it’s old-fashioned, it never needs winding, never needs winding, never needs winding (apologies to Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan).

So a little olive oil and a skillet and I am in business, here.  And I’m not picky; I put it all together in the one pan.

A little cheese, a few tortillas, and you’ve got yourself a sandwich.  I like to squeeze lime juice over it.  Not a lot – just a lil’ spritz.

Fabulous.  It all works out really nice, and tastes lovely.  At least, with savory things.

Behold the fabulous train wreck that was the frutaycremadilla, a concoction J. and I came up with a few weeks ago.

Uh.

That was my idea.  We had a lot of fruit at the time.  And some whipped cream.

Look, I’ll say right now that this was maybe a dumb idea.  But it was a fantastic dumb idea.  (Those are the best kind.)

Yeah, don’t do this.

Sure, it seems like a great idea.  The warm fruit, the crispy tortilla, the soft, cool whipped cream…  … the soft, cool whipped cream.   … Damn it, I should have thought that through.

David’s Kitchen Axiom No. 5: Think it through.

So J. and I tried to make a quesadilla with fruit and whipped cream (and J. decided that it should be a cremayfrutadilla; nomenclature to, y’know, fit the contents), and everything was going swimmingly until that first incision.  I think those are J’s hands, not mine, because A) of the way he’s holding the knife and B) the fact that the backs of my palms are hairier.  Yeah.  Sorry.

J. made the cut, and…

There was splattage.  There was leakage.

The whole thing was a gorram disaster.  I will not post the image of J. attempting to eat said disaster, because it got all over him and it’s embarrassing for both of us, okay?  I don’t even have those pictures.  He does.  … Because I took them with his camera.

-D