Sweet Potato Fries at Home

For brunch, I had baked sweet potato fries, with an egg and some coffee.

The sweet potatoes were inspired by this recipe. But really, that recipe's way too complicated. Just cut your potatoes into spears, toss with a little olive oil and salt, and bake at 450 for 15min. I added a little chopped garlic at that point, tossed, and roasted them for another five minutes or so. They were exceedingly tasty.

To go with it, I pan-fried an egg in a little butter. These are posh fancy pasture eggs from Whole Foods, so I feel ok about eating them, even if eggs still gross me out. I'll work on finding some backyard eggs, but, until then, they're pretty decent. Maybe it was my imagination, but the yolks seem to have a distinct lemon flavor that would make a nice Hollandaise.

Pupusas at Home

For brunch, I had a pupusa with tomatillo sauce, smoked salmon, and coffee.

The pupusas were courtesy of our local well-stocked grocery store. It's nice to live somewhere with a surfeit of Latin American foods again. I cooked them in the toaster. Toasters are extremely useful- watch carefully for flames, but almost anything can be cooked in one. Covered with leftover tomatillo sauce from my little Rick Bayless adventure, they were extremely tasty.

The salmon was an afterthought- initially, I was going to make a pupusa stack, but the salmon by itself seemed like it would overwhelm the pupusa. If I had been extremely hungry, a stack of pupusa, salmon, and crema may have been tasty.

Omelette at Home

For breakfast, I made a potato, green bean, and mushroom omelette, with coffee to drink.

I used TJ's "country potatoes" frozen blend, which is a mix of the aforementioned veggies in a garlic-parsley sauce.

The potato blend is pre-"pan-fried", so it was sufficiently oily that I didn't need to do anything special to my cast-iron skillet. I covered and steamed the potato blend, in the hopes it would cause them to cook faster, then uncovered for a few minutes in an effort to develop some crust. It didn't really work- I got some nice char from the skillet, but only minimal crispiness. After cooking thoroughly, I added an egg. The result was pretty tasty overall, though the mushrooms seem to have been chosen for prettiness rather than flavor. Nevertheless, it was certainly faster than chopping and cooking my own potatoes.

The coffee was less successful. It's the dark French roast from TJ's, aka their cheapest coffee blend. I used to drink it, but after a few years of drinking better stuff (ie, Northwest Coffee) it's awful. So now I'm looking for a palatable, freshly roasted, and inexpensive local substitute. Any suggestions? So far, I have heard good things about Mayorga and M.E. Swing.

Toast for Breakfast

For breakfast, I had rye toast with jam and coffee.



Yesterday, I made a loaf of sourdough rye from Beard on Bread. The starter had been fermenting merrily away all week in my kitchen, so although I wasn't really feeling like baking, I had to.

The texture turned out better than any bread I've made before, and the flavors were good, but it's not remotely sour. Maybe this all has something to do with my lackadaisical baking methods?

Jon doesn't think he can bake, nor do his parents. I am always enlisted to bake holiday cookies because they think they can't bake. Which is silly. I believe that if you can read, you can bake. Probably well. Now, if you tinker with the recipes before actually following them once all the way through, you'd be a bad baker like me...

I really can't help myself. I modified the Beard recipe by using white whole wheat flour instead of the all-purpose called for in addition to the rye flour. I also decided to add a little yeast to my starter on day 3, instead of adding yeast to the dough on baking day, along with a little honey to feed them. I hoped this would combat the boozy dough flavors I usually get by giving the yeast time to develop a little.

I don't know where I went wrong, flavor-wise. I've had incredibly sour rye bread before, so I know it's possible. And the texture was really nice- substantial, without being dry, with a great crunchy crust. But it's just not sour. I'll do a little research, and try it again.



But for breakfast, it was pretty tasty. I ate it with a little butter and some awesome Austrian rosehip jam we found at the ethnic market.



The coffee is Ethiopian Yirgacheffe from Northwest Coffee. I ran out of their house blend last week, and happened to pick this one. The Yirgacheffe is milder than their house blend, and I'm not quite used to it yet.

Bread from Beard for Breakfast

For breakfast, I had some homemade bread with butter and boysenberry preserves, and some coffee.



I ran out of white whole wheat flour a few days ago, so I'm trying to get rid of all the weird, adventurous flours I have on hand before I buy more. Specifically, I have graham flour and dark rye flour on hand. I decided to tackle the graham flour first, with Beard on Bread's graham bread recipe.

Graham flour, interestingly, is just normal whole-wheat flour milled differently. Instead of being milled whole, the wheat is separated into endosperm, bran, and germ, and milled to different degrees of fineness before being re-mixed. Stupidly, I somehow expected it to taste like graham crackers. It did not. But it turned out reasonably well.




My only complaint is the overwhelming smell of fermentation my bread always has. Sort of boozy. I've heard it's from too much yeast, or too much time rising? Next time, I want to try the overnight refrigerator rise that bread bakers advocate for more developed, nuanced flavors.

Regardless, I added some butter (not Cabot's, needless to say), and boysenberry preserves from TJ's, and it became delicious.

The coffee is TJ's pinon blend. I still don't like it, but it's almost gone. I can't wait, so I can buy some beans from Northwest Coffee instead.

Cookie Wedge for Breakfast

For breakfast, I had a chocolate chip cookie wedge and some coffee.

The wedge is the last slice from the giant cookie I made last week.



Hi giant cookie. I made giant cookie because this recipe's dough spread a ridiculous amount while I was baking it last time, and I ended up with a blobby sheet of cookie amoebas. I figured same result, less work.

Sort of. I purposely made them more dense because I was going for a cookie cake sort of texture. It worked well, but the density obscured some of the more delicate butter/brown sugar flavors I liked.

The coffee is curious. I want to say horrendous, but I'm trying to stay open-minded until I try it a few more times. It's New Mexico Pinon Coffee from TJ's. Maybe I'm making it way too strong? If anything, it reminds me of Starbuck's (grammatical digression: if the coffee chain is named after Melville's character "Starbuck", the chain should be "Starbuck's Coffee", not "Starbucks Coffee", no? Am I missing something?) cold-brewed iced coffee- very strong, with blunt, bitter flavors.

Foam Coffee in St. Louis

For breakfast, I had a cappuccino and a "savory croissant" from Foam Coffee in (across the street from?) the Cherokee-Lemp Historic District.

The coffee was delicious. My cappuccino tasted vegetal and intensely grassy, to the degree that I wondered if they roast in-house. Nope, their beans are from the Northwest Coffee Roasting Co. (which I totally need to try, and happens to be on my running route. Now I have a new reason to go for a morning run.)

My croissant was good, although it was described to me as 'bacon and gruyere'...instead, I caught some serious moldy cheese funk. I think he meant to say 'gorgonzola'. I hate moldy cheese, but it was otherwise tasty- flaky, with an onion-heavy filling.

The decor is gorgeous- I could move in and feel right at home. Exposed brick wall, distressed wood floors, and an attractive mix of mid-century and traditional-style furniture. Jon noted the aesthetic is reminiscent of Snooze.

The only thing marring our morning? The roomful of screaming children. I felt like I was in some Park Slope-esque circle of hell. I do not mind children in public. I respect that sometimes parents need to get together in an adult space and bring their children. But I also expect them to try to control their children, and not to be selfish fucks who think a coffee shop is an appropriate venue for a playgroup. Screaming ensued. Running ensued. Toy car races down the ramp running the length of the coffee shop ensued. Parental attempts at control most certainly did NOT ensue. Really? There is a park, with a playground, like two blocks away. Come buy your morning coffee, and then go there. I promise your little snowflakes won't wilt in the thirty-degree weather if they are properly dressed.

I don't blame Foam for the irritating swath of humanity we encountered there, and will be back for more tasty coffee in the future. But, for Foam's sake, I hope Saturday morning playgroup is not a regular thing.

Revenge of Super-Pancake

*No, I did not get a new camera. I had to get a photo of this, so enlisted my trusty cell phone camera.

For brunch, I had ricotta pancakes and coffee.

I saw the recipe for pancakes earlier this week, but I really hate pancakes, so promptly forgot all about them. Then this morning, I was overcome with a french toast craving, but we'd run out of bread yesterday. Enter the pancake.

I remembered seeing the recipe, and had been wondering what the hell to do with the dozen eggs I bought yesterday anyway (I got them to make kasha, but not even I can eat that much kasha), so it was perfect. I replaced the flour with white whole wheat flour, and the ricotta (which smelled weird) with Greek yogurt.

The recipe was not as time-consuming as I'd feared, but does use an absurd number of kitchen things (three bowls, two kinds of eggbeater wisks, sundry spoons, knives, and spatulas). The painful part was cooking the damn things- between the LOW heat and trying to flip something that fluffy and sticky, I gave up after completing a single one. I spooned the rest of the batter into a parchment-paper-lined cake pan, and baked it for thirty minutes at 350.

I actually haven't tried Super-Pancake, having eaten my experimental stove top-cooked one instead. It was incredibly fluffy and delicious, not at all sour from the yogurt. I'm hoping Super-Pancake tastes as awesome as it looks. If it does, I'd make it again as a great quick-cake sort of recipe, with some maple syrup frosting.

The coffee was also tasty- it was Trader Joe's dark French Roast blend. I'm slowly working my way through all TJ's coffees, which seem to be uniformly good, if not very remarkable.