Eggs, for fortifying

I've had this thing with eggs, lately.

This was breakfast: two long-boiled eggs (8 minutes) and Cape Malay papadums that I brought back from Cape Town. They're delicious (Pick 'n Pay, Capetonians: Spice brand, 'Cape Malay chilli poppadums').

You fry them in grapeseed oil for about 10 seconds, drain them and that's it. I know. FRY! There's a kick of spice in them, which goes beautifully with the eggs.

The coffee must be good, the milk hot.

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Book a Botanical Spring Walk

Terrace pleasures

Alpine strawberries, Greek yogurt, and maple syrup.

Tasted better than it looks.

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September Botanical Walk Schedule

Pause

A lunch break, recently. I tend to skip lunch, then I eat too much for dinner. So I've been making lunches for myself. A cup of tomato soup. A sourdough and cheese sandwich.

Other days, it's pea shoots on the sourdough, with a splash of balsamic vinegar. Salad on bread is wonderful! After boycotting balsamic for almost fifteen years I am guzzling it with a vengeance. It is now attractively unfashionable.

I'll be playing with vinegars at home this year, just as soon as some nice aromatics start raising their heads in gardens and wild places.

I am becoming comfortable with the bugs of fermentation.

Boule for breakfast

Good morning. Just me and my boule, here.

The newest boule made me smile. It is the first loaf I've made with the starter that has lived in the fridge for a week. And the loaf rose high, with a crackly crust. So now I know the starter is alive and kicking and biding its time in the cold.

Hey. Aren't we all?

I ate a slice (the crust, in fact) for breakfast, with butter and lingonberry jam, and the very-important cup of coffee. It tastes, and smells, exactly the way it looks. 

I will try not to write a post for every loaf of bread I bake.

For the interested, here are two links that turned my loaf-making successful (once my starter was strong):

Stella Culinary 70% hydration boule
Stella Culinary how to make a basic sourdough boule 

Burying elephants in cheese

What is one to do when a Frenchman hates to celebrate his birthday?

Easy!

Buy cheese.

So I zipped down to Zabar's on Broadway and went to town in the cheese department. Maybe I paid the dried sausage department a visit, too. On the way back, goodies stashed in a khaki backback, I stepped onto the wrong train. Of course. And found myself way west and uptown on the darned 1, at 145th Street, with a lot of other angry commuters. Karma for me, as I'd just given a tourist bad directions. Unwittingly. So we all rode downtown together, in order to go uptown again. 

This evening I hoofed it eleven short blocks south and three long blocks west  to The Winery on 116th to get a quick and cold bottle of Champagne, as a birthday treat. Bollinger special cuvée. And it was delicious. Good things birthdays only come once a year. Mostly. And when I got home I was given flowers. Because it was his birthday.

The cheese tasting was fun, the pate and especially the sausage pronounced excellent.

Some small tarts from Le Patisserie des Ambassades on Frederick Douglass Boulevard finished the meal and almost finished us - lemon, coconut and frangipane. Very good, washed down with the last slurp of Champagne.

I think we'll be eating  cheese for a while...

Green tomatoes and no ham

We are in the thick of it. Tomato sandwich season.

Actually, I overdosed: a couple of weeks ago I had such a good tomato sandwich, made with toasted bread, that I made another, at once. It had been almost a year since the last one.

It was a sandwich too far. (Kind of like that night at the Mexican restaurant and the shots of tequila, a hundred years ago.)

So I took a break.

But I was ready again.

The blogger-across-the-river and I share a love of Hellman's. I don't think too deeply about Hellmans. Some things must be taken at face value. I just eat it. Almost everything I eat is made-from-scratch-locally-sourced-humanely-raised-or-organic.

'Sept the Hellmans.

The bread for this superb sandwich came from BK17, Sarah Owen's community supported baking enterprise*. It is sourdough, and this particular loaf was almost blue with buckwheat. It keeps very well, too. (In the fall edition of Edible Brooklyn, out in September, look for the story I wrote about Sarah and her bread.)

The tomatoes? Green Cherokee, perfectly ripe, grown by Wilklow Orchards, and sold at the Borough Hall Farmers Market.

* Sarah will be bringing her bread to the book party on Saturday...I am very happy about that.

A way to start

Good morning.

Moonstruck breakfast

One thing about living in a 19th century townhouse renovated cheaply to accommodate two apartments on every floor, with poorly installed dry wall and lousy ducts, is that you can...smell the other people.

Sometimes.

And we have quite neutral-smelling neighbours.

But if they cooking - like the new tenant who always burns garlic in a lot of oil, or if they are smoking, or using air freshener or incense, and don't have open windows or doors. The pothead on the ground floor moved out a while ago. I think they are spared our cooking smells, as we're on the top floor, so only our landing-neighbour will suffer.

But I digress.

This morning it was bacon. Which was just unreasonable. It's Thursday! What hedonist eats bacon on a Thursday? Thursday's Child has Far to Go (I was born on a Thursday and find them troubling, in general).  Bacon is for Saturdays, when no one is going anywhere.

Someone broke the rules.

I actually went to the freezer and stared at the apple wood bacon, there.

I thought about it. Then I pulled myself together.

I reached for the Mazzola's loaf of bread I bought last night (it's the bakery from Moonstruck,  down the road [see comments!!]) and made Moonstruck eggs.

Sweet revenge. Straight flush.

I've been told I have a poker face.

The perfect omelet

Making a good - yes, alright, a perfect! - omelet...or omelette...still gives me a thrill. Because it is still new.

Three good eggs, a splash of milk, salt and pepper, whisk. A hot pan (my mistake had been a gentle pan, tsk) with plenty of butter swirled up the edges.

I like a very simple omelet. Or omelette. Cheese, chives, field garlic. You can see, above, that I was sloppy and did not pull out the one dry yellow leaf. Bother.

The magic part. Sliding a long, rounded knife along the edges to lift them, then sliding it underneath the sharply tilted pan to fold the top one half over the other. The inside of the omelet is barely set (a state described by Julia Childe, as Stephen Orr recently told me, as pleureuse - weeping).

Exactly...

I have no idea how Selina makes perfect omelettes (they are not omelets) for three people, at once.

A sandwich is born (and dies, fast) - Phase 5

I give you...the BAT!

Bacon. Arugula. Tomato.

A schmear of Hellman's, because I do so love Hellman's. A lot of pepper, very little salt.

Heaven.

Sandwich is assembled - Phase 4

But wait! That is not all!

More will be revealed at 1.21pm!

If you missed the live action follow the progress here:

Phase 1 - A Brandywine tomato

Phase 2 - Tomatoes and bacon

Phase 3 - Bacon is crispy

Bacon is crispy - Phase 3

Tomatoes are sliced!

Mayonnaise is spread and arugula is stacked!

If you missed the live action follow the progress here:

Phase 1 - A Brandywine tomato

Phase 2 - Tomatoes and bacon

Phase 4 - Sandwich is assembled

Tomatoes and Bacon - Phase 2

You know where we are going with this, right?

More at 11.21am

If you missed the live action follow the progress here:

Phase 1 - A Brandywine tomato

Phase 3 - Bacon is crispy

Phase 4 - Sandwich is assembled

Tomato sandwich

I think this might be the best thing I have ever tasted.

Striped German, Black Krim, both from the roof; mayonnaise, butter, salt, lots of pepper, brown bread.

I think this was my first tomato sandwich. Ever.

It just can't get better than this.

(Can it?)

Summer food

Tomatoes from the roof, basil from the terrace and burrata from an Italian bovine.

I have never seen American burrata. Has anyone else?

Sitting down to eat

"DINNER SERVICE Even if it’s just me for dinner, I set the table, place mat, flatware, linen napkin, the right choice of wine glass, and I do an actual service for myself. I never eat standing up, I never eat in front of the refrigerator. I treat myself very formally with meals. I don’t watch TV or read. It’s a little bit of a ritual, and it’s more enjoyable. And if there’s one other person, there’s more to talk about because it’s not just me talking to myself."

Mark Morris, Choreographer, to John Leland, for the New York Times' Sunday Routine

I like this guy.

You sit down for a meal, something happens. To you, to your body, to your relationship with food, with yourself and with the person/s who might be there, too.

And if you never do, something else happens. And that ain't good. Sure as eggs is eggs.

Now sit down and have some mulberry pie. Bring a fork.

Greens from the roof

A salad for one: the perk and pepper of nasturtium, the  sweet crunch of fava bean leaves, the soft spots of trout lettuce. And some lamb's quarters (a.k.a. yet another 'pigweed'), thrown in. I like my forays to the roof.

Snack

Sometimes, I overthink food. Courses. Main courses. Salad. Desert. And then the simplicity of these very basic solitary meals becomes overwhelmingly good. Toast, cream cheese, field garlic leaves, snipped. Pepper. Crunch. Standing at the chopping board with my back to the terrace, thinking about things as I chew.

The first chives

My midweek breakfast.

Soda bread

Breakfast. The most hopeful meal. Soda bread, with red currant jam.

Because it does not keep very successfully I sliced the loaf, once it had cooled, and froze it. Easily toasted for future breakfasts. Not pictured is the coffee, deep black. I had forgotten to buy milk.  A bracing repast.

4 Cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1/4 tsp salt, 4 Tbsp sugar, enough buttermilk (about a cup and a quarter, give or take) to make dough. Mix, stir, knead briefly, shape, cut a shallow cross in the top, and bake for 30-35 minutes at 400'F/200'C. That's about it, really. A firm , flavoured crumb.