Breakfast in Baltimore

I've been visiting my parents a bit more frequently these days, since my mother has been having some health issues, and holidays have been around. So I've been doing a fair bit more of my cooking there as well. When visiting my folks in Baltimore, we very often have our main meal of the day sometime in the middle of it - in other words, a nice big Brunch/Lunch! Breakfast foods are a staple here, in part because I don't make them as often for myself when I'm in New York. For example, I never think to make pancakes just for myself - it just feels a bit sad and lonely eating pancakes alone. There are exceptions: the recipe below for Dutch Baby is probably the breakfast food I make most often for myself at my apartment (aside from eggs, of course, because eggs are awesome), because it's easy to make just one serving with relatively little effort, and I always have the ingredients around. But I'd never make Swedish Pancakes (Crêpes) just for myself. Anyways, while I generally don't treat breakfast as the 'most important meal of the day' that it supposedly is, I DO quite enjoy a nice breakfast, even if it's a dinner time. So here are a pair of my favorite breakfast recipes that I have made (with my dad, generally) on recent visits to Baltimore. Both these recipes are just eggs, milk, salt, butter, flour (and a bit of sugar for the crêpes) - it's amazing the difference proportions can make!

Dutch Baby: (serves 3)

3 tbs butter
3 eggs
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup flour
pinch of salt









This is a 4 ingredient recipe (5, if you include salt), and all you need is an oven, a pan, and an Osterizer. Oh, you don't have an Osterizer? That would be the first mainstream blender ever sold in the United States, but unlike "Xerox-ing", "Osterizing" never really took hold as a household word - so any blender will suite your purposes here. My father estimates that our Osterizer is from somewhere between 1950-1955, so about 60 years old. And it still functions perfectly - let's see your fancy modern blender in 60 years, shall we? But yes, this super simple recipe is fast, easy, and delicious, looks beautiful, and is great for breakfast, brunch, or breakfast-for-dinner.


Preheat oven to 400F. Melt the butter in the pan, wobble the pan around so that the bottom is nicely coated with it. Add ingredients, in order, to the Osterizer, blending as you do so. Pour into pan, and bake for 10-15 minutes, until a loverly, puffy golden brown! And that's it! Eat right away (it starts to deflate a bit if you let it sit) with maple syrup (I always heat mine up prior to serving), or with powdered sugar and lemon, or with a bit of jam. Now note, this serves three quite nicely, and is also really really easy to divide by three. So if you want to scale up or down, it's really easy to do so! When I'm at my apartment, I occasionally make a 1/3 recipe for myself in a circular 8 inch pan, which is about right for one. If you want to make more or less, just change proportions and pan size.

Next, a more complicated but equally (or, dare I say, MORE) delicious breakfast food.

Swedish Pancakes (Crêpes)

3 eggs

1 tbs sugar

1-1/3 tsp salt

175 mL flour (~ a scant 3/4 cup)

500 mL milk (~ a generous 2 cups)

3 tbs butter – for cooking

These are just about ready to flip!

This recipe takes a bit more effort, but is extremely worth it and is wonderfully delicious. When I'm visiting home, we can use the cast iron skillet that my dad owns - we can put it atop of two burners to heat it up. However, you can also make these in a regular non-stick pan - it just harder to get the crepes out if you do it this way, and harder to maneuver around when flipping them.

Mix eggs, sugar, salt, and a little flour to the blender, and blend. Add the rest of milk and flour slowly to thin the mix and blend again, thoroughly. Let sit for a half hour before use (this is not, strictly speaking, required, but it is recommended. I've definitely forgone the half hour and it's turned out fine, though, and cut it down to ten minutes). Use a HOT skillet (the cast iron one mentioned before, or just a nice non-stick pan) thoroughly coated with butter. When we use the skillet, we generally keep a stick of butter in the freezer to keep it from melting, and between each batch we butter the skillet thoroughly with the stick to get a nice, even layer of butter. Pour out the crêpes large and thin - you can actually use some implement to make it more circular or you can tilt the pan, or blow on them in order to shape them a bit better. Watch the crepes carefully, and flip when it is just jelled, (and still has some moisture in the center) - there should be little bubble like features in the centre, see the picture. Let it sit for another minute or two, until the other side is cooked. You should be able to get under it easily with a spatula, and they should be a nice golden brown on both sides.

Now, you can just eat these like this, and they'll be wonderful. Dad and I generally have them with maple syrup, though my mother always is sure to comment when we do this that it's not the FRENCH thing to do. The 'French' thing to do is to have them with some sugar and a dash of lemon juice - this is how my mom eats them. But there are a lot of other ways you serve this base recipe that are also delicious! For example, once you've got the crepes flipped and mostly cooked, you can put a filling in the middle and fold the crepe in half, cooking it a little longer to warm the filling. If you want to make a more savory meal of it, you can use ham and cheese as a filling, letting it sit on the pan so the cheese melts. Or if you want to stick to the sweet side of things, honey and apples. Or just honey. Or berries and fresh whipped cream. Or chocolate chips (letting them melt a bit!) with bananas. Or PB&J. Or just the jam, or just the peanut butter. Or Nutella. Or go all out and make Crêpes Suzette with a grande marniere orange sauce and vanilla ice cream on the side! The point is, there are many amazing ways you can serve them, and it can be a lot fun to experiment. Bon Appétit!

Cooking for One

My junior and senior year of college, I was in a cooking rotation with two other people: Benson and his roommate, Abe. I'd sometimes eat with the other girls in my house, but my schedule was such that it was more similar to Benson and Abe's schedules (the other two science majors) then it was to the 4 other people residing in my house. So we'd in general grocery shop together and plan meals together, and every third day or so I'd cook. It cut costs, we almost never had leftovers or eat the same thing twice, we all had different recipe banks to go to so things changed up regularly, and on days you cooked, we had deal that you didn't have to do the dishes (Ah, dishes, my old nemesis - I dream of future days when I will have a dishwasher!). The three of us enjoyed each others cooking and meals, but when it came to basic snacks, we had very different tastes. As I've said in previous posts, I really like salt. I tend to salt my foods a little more than others I cook with might - I don't get complaints, in general, I'm just a little heavy handed. And when I want something to snack on, well, I want it to be salty! Popcorn, crackers, pretzels, or whatever. I attribute this to the fact that my parents had a "cracker jar" rather than a "cookie jar" to raid when I was hungry as a child. Abe, on the other hand, was sweet: he had a constant supply of Skittles, Starbursts, soda, and similar. And finally, there was Benson. As salt is to salty and sugar is to sweet, MSG is to umami (savory). Benson is Chinese-American, grew up in San Francisco, and the snacks of HIS choice were the wasabi-coated peas, the shrimp flavored crackers, and, for lack of better description, the crunchy MSG-coated string beans. We joked that we needed a bitter and a sour person to add to our group - but alas, never managed to complete the set. So in addition to the salt and sugar lying around, we also had a shaker of MSG to add to our soups and stir fries for added taste. I rather grew to appreciate it, and still have a shaker around my kitchen, and I certainly don't have a fear of MSG. Such fears, I think, are overhyped - it's really the rare person who reacts badly to it, and it's NOT that bad for you, any more then a bit of salt or a bit of sugar is. In excess, well, sure, but again, so are salt and sugar.

As I've stated before, now that I'm in grad school I generally just cook for myself when I'm in my apartment. When I have a roommate (and I'm currently in between roommates) I will offer food if they're around, but for the most part, food is made just for me. This tends to cut certain dishes out of my repetoire - one's that are just too massive and that I'd have to eat for a week, or foods that would leave me with a lot of leftover fresh vegetables which would spoil before I could eat it all (I almost never buy lettuce, lest I be forced to have salad EVERY DAY until it's gone). One such dish was a regular in college - Chicken with 30 Cloves of Garlic. I'm a huge fan of garlic in general, and a whole chicken is great for when you have a group of people. Usually some people like white meat, and some like dark, so you can generally get the part of the bird you are most fond of (DARK MEAT!). And when you were through, you'd have a chicken carcass and some bones and scraps, which were easy to toss in a bag in the freezer to save for making stock later. In fact, my bone bag was rather a running joke in my college house; it was clearly labeled "Jen's Bones" and the idea was that not only did I make chicken (and turkey, and duck) soup, but  that I was keeping other sorts of bones as well. Our apartment mate Kaila lived in constant terror that we were all trying to fatten her up for "Kaila Soup" (which as you can see that we've still not made, as evidenced by her recent visit!).

Anyway, I've not made Chicken with 30 Cloves of Garlic in several years at this point. But a few weeks ago, I ran into a sale on cornish game hens at the grocery store. Now, these are small birds, not even 2 lbs, so it occurred to me that it was about the right size for me to make for myself, with a few leftovers. And that a cornish hen could probably be cooked in anyway that a full sized bird could be cooked, just by changing the cooking time a bit. So I bought two. One is currently in my freezer, but for the other I used a recipe I found online which is practically identical to my recipe, but using a game hen instead of a chicken, here.



 Chicken with 30 Cloves of Garlic
1 cornish game hen (or more usually, a whole chicken!)
30+ cloves of garlic (roughly 1.5 heads)
3 tbs olive oil
1/3 cup chicken stock (or 1 cup for a whole chicken)
1/3 cup white wine (1 cup for a whole chicken)
1 lemon, quartered
salt, pepper, rosemary (preferably, but not necessarily, fresh)



The recipe itself is simple. Rub the bird with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt, pepper, and rosemary. You can also mince a clove or two of garlic and rub the bird with that as well. Put a quarter of a lemon and some seasoning into the cavity of the bird (along with the organs, if it came with them... delicious liver, neck, heart, and giblets! I actually quite enjoy these parts, though some people do not.). Then put the bird in a roasting pan, and toss the garlic all around it.

While I peeled the garlic, you don't actually need to - I've made it before without doing so, and if you cut off the bottom before cooking the garlic, you can just squeeze it once it's cooked and it pops out the end. But I actually find it kind of relaxing to peel garlic once in a while, so I went for it anyway - it's easier to eat that way! It doesn't make a huge difference either way. And if I'm being honest, I didn't use 30 cloves of garlic - I only had 27 available, alas! But I think that's close enough, don't you?

Next, baked your game hen at 425F for 25 minutes. Mix the wine and chicken stock, and after those 25 minutes, turn down the heat to 350F, pour the liquid over the bird, and cook for another 35, basting every 10 minutes or so. For a full chicken, well, it depends on the weight, but I'd do a similar temperature changing so you can get the crisp skin. But it will then be much longer baking in the second part, because... size. Once your bird is cooked (judging by a meat thermometer, and when the juices run clear when you cut it), you can remove it from the oven and carve it up to serve. For the game hen, this meant that I cut it in half lengthwise with my kitchen shears and ate half of it, saving the rest for the next days' lunch. Half a game hen was just about the right amount for one, especially with veggies for a side. For a chicken, obviously, carve it like you would any other chicken.

You can just use the juices as a sauce, at this point, but I wanted something a little thicker and saucier, so I strained out the garlic and other particulates and cooked it down a bit in a sauce pan. I thought it needed a little more flavor, so I added a little bit of salt, msg, lemon juice (a few drops) and apple cider vinegar to brighten it up a bit! I've read numerous places that adding a bit of acidity can really improve a dish, and it turned out very nicely here, especially considering I improvised the additions! So overall, I would call this a very successful adaptation, and I would happily get game hen as a replacement for whole chicken again in the future. Since cooking for one can be a bit aggravating at times, it's always nice to find a good way to moderate my serving sizes and open up my repertoire a bit!

Sauces: Pears and Caramel

As I mentioned in my last (long) entry about the lobster, Benson and I additionally made dessert to go along with our meal. It's a dessert that we'd made before, and like quite a lot, as it is both simple and tasty. It also has the added benefit of looking much more impressive than it is. The only downside is that if you get pears which aren't yet ripe, it can take a while to bake. But if you are stuffed with lobster (or some other delicious food), you can just wait around while it sits in the oven long enough for things to get soft. Or get impatient (as I did) and eat the pears a little firmer than one might have ideally, since they will still be tasty. This is from another cookbook that Benson gave me (and another excellent one, I might add), James Pattersons "Sauces." It's actually almost more of a textbook than a cookbook - since for the most part its technique on making sauces and how to modify them and adapt them, rather than straight up recipes. It HAS recipes and instructions for the various sauces, of course, but presumably you want to serve the sauce WITH something, and that, for the most part, is left open. For example, we've also made a delicious chicken dish from this cookbook [name of chicken awesome-sauce here]. More precisely, however, we made a sauce which was supposed to be good with chicken, and just baked some plain chicken thighs and tossed the sauce over it to finish. But that works just fine, as it was an awesome sauce indeed. As for this dish, it's really really tasty, but after we made it the first time, we reduced the amount of sugar significantly as it was also a little too sweet for our taste. If you want to do the full sugared recipe, you just change the amount of sugar in the recipe below to 1/2 cup of sugar.

Roast Pears with a Pear-Butterscotch Sauce
3 pears, peeled and sliced in half
                (preferably, but not necessarily, ripe).
1/3 cup white granulated sugar
2.5 oz of butter (5 tbs, cut in small chunks)
1/2 cup heavy cream          
a quarter of a lemon

Peel your pears, cutting them in half lengthwise and coring them. Rub each one with the lemon (this keeps them from browning). Put the pears in a single layer in a heavy bottomed pan (which you will later be putting on the stove top, so keep that in mind!). Sprinkle the butter over the pears, and the sugar on top of that. Bake the pears at 375F, for, depending on how ripe the pears are, anywhere between 15 minutes (if they're ripe) to an hour (if they're not - mine usually have to cook a bit over an hour since I tend to get the firmer pears).

Once the pears are cooked, you can remove them from the pan, and place the pan on the stove top. At this point, the sugar will have caramelized a bit, and should be a nice brown color.  If you didn't have to cook your pears as long, this might not be the case, so cook the mixture on the top of the stove until everything is nicely browned. Once this is done, mix together the butter and sugar together and add the cream, whisking the mixture while scraping the bottom of the pot. You want to do this at low heat, so that the caramelized sugar dissolves into the sauce smoothly, and everything becomes nice, creamy, thick, and delicious.

Sauces also suggests adding 'Poire William' (a pear liquor) to your sauce at this point to flavor it, but I've never had it on hand, and frankly I don't think it needs it - it's pretty tasty as is! So once you have the sauce and the pears, you can just put them in a bowl and eat them. They're also really good with ice cream, as you can imagine. Every time we make this, we end up with more caramel sauce then you can eat with just the pears, but I'd definitely recommend the sauce for other desserts as well. Either with ice cream, or in a smoothie as a pear flavored sweetener, or simply poured over [insert your favorite fruit here]. Definitely a treat!

The finished dish!