All posts tagged Eggs

Guest Post from Carrie of Deliciously Organic!

10.19.11 // Comments:6

(I’m married, can you believe it?!? While I’m away on my honeymoon, sweet Carrie from Deliciously Organic volunteered to tell you a little bit of her story here. I love Carrie’s perspective on food and I love getting to feature her. Read more about her at DeliciouslyOrganic.net.)

If you had two girls, under the age of two, and your husband, a fighter pilot, was flying cover during a war in Iraq, would you be thinking about converting your diet to organic, whole foods? I wasn’t. My life had enough stress without another distraction. But, that’s what happened in 2003.

Two years earlier, after the birth of my second daughter, I began having daily migraines. I was 25. As migraines often are, they were both baffling and debilitating. They started with the birth of my first daughter, but were infrequent and not as severe. I often had to lie down in a quiet dark room, which was almost impossible with toddlers to care for.

I was taking several medications to manage the pain just to get through the day. They continued, though, four or more a week. After two years of struggle, my neurologist suggested adding yet another daily medication to my prescription regimen, a treatment that wasn’t working anyway. I kindly rejected her suggestion and drove home thinking: There must be another way.

The same day I saw my neurologist, a tiny newsletter article caught my eye while going through the mail. It was about the benefits of organic foods. I knew migraines could be related to diet, so I wondered if changing to organic foods might help. I was at the end of my rope and willing to try something different.

eggs in a bowl

At the time, I was eating lots of vegetables to lose the last 10 pounds of baby weight. I replaced my lettuce with organic. It was my first step. I picked lettuce because it was the food I ate the most of. Within a week I noticed a significant difference. The frequency of my migraines decreased, and it was now easier to care of my kids. I didn’t need any more encouragement. I next switched all produce to organic with the intent of increasing the amount of pure and untreated food in my diet and decreasing my pesticide intake. As I dug deeper and learned more, I continued making changes to my pantry and refrigerator. Over the next year and a half, I converted my family’s diet to whole, unprocessed, organic ingredients.

As I began using organic, unprocessed ingredients, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I had a hard time finding recipes that were equivalent in flavor to what we were accustomed to. Nevertheless, I avoided such ingredients as white sugar, white flour, and partially hydrogenated anything. Recipes using whole grains were especially challenging. We weren’t ready to leave the world of paninis, pasta, and pizza, but just substituting ingredients didn’t exactly work out. As my husband likes to say, we ate some terrible pancakes during the transition. This was disheartening because I had grown up with a great love for cooking that I inherited from the women of my family.

I’m blessed and grateful to be a part of a line of wonderful cooks going back generations in Louisiana. From this rich, generational heritage I discovered the bedrock value of simple, delicious recipes paired with creativity and boldness in presentation. I decided that if we were going to eat organic dishes they were going to taste every bit as delicious as the ones I used before.

Over time, I shared with my friends and family how I overcame my health problems. And then I told others. Many were earnestly interested in learning more or in making changes to their own diets. I continued to tell my story, share my adapted recipes, and give encouragement through my blog, Deliciously Organic, and my recently published cookbook, Deliciously Organic.

Through organic, unprocessed food our family of four was able to overcome: severe asthma, eczema, IBS, and migraines. No drugs. Just good, natural, real food.

If organic, whole foods are something you’ve thought about I encourage you to give it a try. I hope you’ll discover, as I have, that eating food direct from the source of the earth uninterrupted by fewer chemicals and less processing is not only perfectly doable and beneficial but also perfectly delicious! And don’t be surprised when your friends and the whole family (including the kids) say, a I can’t believe this is organic. It’s delicious!

breakfast bake

This is my favorite dish to serve when guests come to visit. I want something that doesn’t pull me away from my guests, but is good enough to make them want more. The beauty of this dish is that you can make it ahead of time. This way, instead slaving over a hot stove in a kitchen dusted in flour and filled with dirty mixing bowls, you merely pop this baby in the oven and visit with your guests.

Accompany this with fresh fruit, coffee, and maybe milk for the kids. It’s filling, so no one will be itching for a snack an hour later.

breakfast bake

Bacon, Tomato, and Cheddar Breakfast Bake
If you buy from good sources of eggs, butter and bacon (organic and grass-fed or pastured) they provide healthy amounts of omega-3 fatty acids and linoleic acid. Sourdough made the old-fashioned or artisan way contains probiotics that are beneficial to the digestive system. Adapted from Food and Wine. Serves 8

Ingredients
1 pound sourdough (or a good gluten free bread), cut into 1-inch cubes
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
12 ounces smoked turkey bacon (*or bacon–nitrate-free and pastured, preferred)
1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced
1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes, drained and patted dry
4 cups cheddar cheese (**I prefer raw cheddar)
4 green onions, chopped
1 3/4 cups chicken stock
Celtic sea salt
6 large eggs

Directions
Preheat oven to 350º and adjust rack to middle position. In a large bowl, lightly toss the sourdough and butter and spread out on a large baking sheet. Bake for about 20-25 minutes until bread is golden.

Cook the bacon over medium-high heat in a large skillet until crisp. Transfer bacon to a plate lined with paper towels and pour out all fat except for 2 tablespoons.

Add the onion to the skillet and cook over medium heat until caramelized, about 10 minutes. Add the tomatoes and cook until almost all the liquid has evaporated, about 5 minutes.

Pour the onion mixture into a large bowl along with the bread, bacon, cheese, green onion, and stock. Stir until incorporated and season well with sea salt. Spread the mixture in a 9×13 baking dish and cover with parchment paper and then with foil (I do this so the foil doesn’t touch the food). (At this point, you can place the dish in the refrigerator and then bake in the morning.)

Bake for 30 minutes and then remove the foil and parchment. Bake an additional 15 minutes until the top is crispy. Remove the baking dish from the oven and, using a ladle, press 6 indentations into the bread mixture. Crack an egg into each indentation. Return the dish to the oven and bake for about 15 minutes until eggs are set, but yolks are still runny. Serve immediately.

Bio: Carrie Vitt is the author of the cookbook Deliciously Organic and publisher of popular food blog, Deliciously Organic. Carrie focuses on recipes using unprocessed, organic ingredients with vibrant flavors and simple dishes everyone will love. She is the wife of an Air Force Test Pilot and mother of two daughters.

notes from Shanna:
*Re: bacon: While I stick to a kosher diet, I agree with Carrie that if you’re going to use bacon, look for the highest quality (I like Applegate farms, for example).

**Re: raw cheddar: I love grabbing mine at Trader Joe’s.

Comments:6 Click here to comment! Categories: breakfast, guest post

Gruyère Quiche with Caramelized Red Pepper, Red Onion and Greens

11.11.10 // Comments:15

I bought a new purse last week, for the first time since 2006, all because I asked a stranger in a bathroom where she got hers, and she said Target. I enjoy mushrooms now, after 27 years of hating them, because reading this blog post made me want to. I like reading Bon Appetit because I like reading how this girl writes. I’ve taken a photo almost every day this year because I’ve watched other people do it and been motivated.

In cooking as in life, inspiration to try new things can come from almost anywhere. It can be a conversation with a stranger, an article you notice, something quick you look at, maybe sometimes something you read on a blog like this one. For me, with this quiche, it was even simpler: a solid white pan.

ingredients for quiche

The white dish I’m referencing is not mine, but it’s my brother’s, one he set on the counter the other day, and every time I’ve walked into the kitchen and seen it, I’ve thought, Quiche! That pan needs a quiche! So although making homemade pie crusts is not high on my life’s to-do list, I saw no way around it: a store-bought crust could make a quiche, but a store-bought crust could not use that pan. I knew what I had to do.

quiche crust

Turns out the process couldn’t have been simpler. Tuesday night, I mixed flour and salt, cut in butter, added water, and formed the dough into a ball, wrapping it in plastic and sticking it in the fridge. I think it took 15 minutes. Wednesday, I pulled out the dough, rolled it out on parchment (with the confidence that only making perfect homemade apple strudel could have given me) and pressed it into the quiche pan, cutting the edges off the sides.

finished quiche

Choosing the type of quiche was even easier. I looked at what I already had in the kitchen—a red pepper, a red onion, gruyere, some random greens—and found a recipe that made the most of those things. Inspiration by necessity! It begins with caramelizing the vegetables, a step that fills your kitchen with the most incredible aroma of browning peppers and onions mixed with coconut oil. Then you saute the greens, mix all those things with eggs, milk, and cheese, and bam: a golden, flaky quiche with the colors of Christmastime.

sliced quiche

The only change I’d make next time is extra salt—the original recipe said to add to taste, but you add the salt to the cooking peppers and onions, so it’s hard to judge at that point, so now I’d just say to be generous—because when I pulled this out of the oven, it was not only delicious but utterly beautiful, the kind of beautiful that makes you want to take a picture when you don’t have a food blog or have someone over for brunch although it’s not Saturday morning or, you know, make a quiche even without this pretty white pan to put it in.

what I’d hoped for

05.04.09 // Comments:10

Saturday omelette

Saturday, I wanted an omelette.

Thing is, I am scared of omelettes. But when I am scared of something, kitchen-wise, it’s usually a good idea to see what Julia Child has to say, and so it was that I turned to Mastering the Art of French Cooking, where detailed, illustrated instructions explain how to master this task, if by nothing else than practicing for days at a time.

asparagus

Among the helpful guidelines were these:

1. Use high heat: This is really important for getting the eggs to cook properly and quickly.
2. Use a non-stick pan: You’ll be shaking the pan around a lot, and a non-stick pan keeps the omelette from sticking.
3. Work quickly: Julia says you shouldn’t even have your cookbook nearby to double-check with. If you’re checking the instructions, you’re taking too long.

After studying the recipe for a bit, I went to work and in minutes, I’d achieved the very thing I hoped for: a lightly golden fold of eggs, mozzarella and chopped asparagus, firm out the outside and tender at the center, thoroughly cooked throughout. Reminiscent of those fancy brunches from childhood—the kind where cooks in chefs’ whites stand behind skillets at the table and custom-make your order while you stand nearby, dressed up, your plate piled high with pastries and fruit and French toast you pulled from a stainless steel platter.

Next time, I might let the mixture brown less, but overall, this was a good first step. And anyway, I am quite sure now that made-in-minutes omelettes are the things good weekend mornings are made of, especially when followed by hours reading in the sunshine, your dog at your side, and a long nap in the afternoon, and a hot fudge sundae, before you watch a silly movie and go to bed too late.

finished omelette

Asparagus & Mozzarella Omelette
Adapted from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Ingredients:
Two eggs
Some chopped asparagus (cooked ahead of time)
Some shredded mozzarella
Salt and pepper
2 Tablespoons butter

Directions:
In a small bowl, whisk together two eggs, just until the yolks and whites have combined.

Heat a nonstick skillet (I used half of a frittata pan) over high heat and melt 2 Tablespoons of butter, moving the pan around to distribute the butter evenly. When the butter becomes liquid and slightly froths, pour egg mixture inside.

Give the eggs 2 to 3 seconds to form a slight surface on the bottom. Then, begin shaking the pan towards you, holding it at a slight angle. Add asparagus and mozzarella. As the mixture solidifies, continue moving the pan back and forth. Then increase the angle slightly to encourage the omelette to fold over onto itself. If it doesn’t naturally, you can use a fork to help it along.

Let the omelette cook a bit longer and slide it onto your plate.

Comments:10 Click here to comment! Categories: before the 2009 diet change