I took the day off from work today.

After mowing the lawn, watering the garden, and refilling the bird feeder, I decided to treat myself to one of the most basic, yet misunderstood, of food preparations - the scrambled egg.

If your exposure to scrambled eggs has only been in restaurants, or at brunch buffet lines, then you probably do not understand my enthusiasm for the dish.  After all, it’s only eggs and butter, something to be whipped up quickly and in mass quantities for a crowd, right?

But that’s the problem - our society has taught us to interpret scrambled eggs as a dish that’s to be made as quickly as possible.  Here’s the real truth - haste is the enemy of scrambled eggs.  High heat makes for tough, dried out eggs, and result in the short-order scrambled eggs that you find in diners, and the egg jerky that you find in buffets that’s been sitting over a sterno flame for an hour.

Preparing perfect scrambled eggs requires the exact opposite of the process to make an omelette.  When sauteing an omelette, you want to work quickly, tilting and swirling your pan to coat the bottom with egg, over the highest possible heat so that the egg sets and you can roll it around whatever filling you’ve chosen.

For scrambled eggs, you want to cook them as gently as possible, over the lowest heat possible, to yield the most delicate structure that you can.  Perfect scrambled eggs should take a long time to make, and should just barely hold together.  It’s a spot-on dish for a day off from work.

This is my recipe for Perfect Scrambled Eggs.  You can jazz it up a number of ways, which I am sure will show up here soon, but today we’re starting with the basic master recipe.  As with all recipes with fewer than five ingredients, the better the quality of your ingredients, the better the final product.  Find the best eggs and butter you can get your hands on.

Perfect Scrambled Eggs

Butter
3 eggs, preferably organic or at least free range
Salt
Freshly ground pepper

Take a nonstick pan and set it over medium heat.  Place about 2 Tbs of butter into the pan, and keep an eye on it while you whip your eggs up.  You want to let that melt, and tilt the pan so that it gets an even coat of butter.  Once your butter is melted, turn the heat to the lowest possible setting. [note - all of my recipes presume gas cooking; if you are working off of electric burners, have one set to low and transfer the pan over to that one]

Crack the eggs into a small bowl, and use a whisk or fork to stir them up until you have a uniform beaten egg mix.  Pour the eggs into the pan.

Take a nonstick spatula or spoon, and give the eggs a good stir.  Wait a bit.  Stir some more.  What you’re doing here is incorporating the bits of egg that have cooked into the bits of egg that haven’t yet cooked.  As the eggs heat up, they’ll start to slowly firm up - the key is to reach this point in as much time as possible.  Avoid the temptation to turn up the heat - the eggs will cook faster, but they will be nowhere near as delicate, and you will have missed the fun train.

When the eggs are done to your liking, tip them into a serving bowl and top with a fresh grinding of pepper and some salt.  Welcome to the world of real scrambled eggs.

This is not a pretty dish. The picture above is merely for the purposes of illustration.

This all started with oregano, which I have an abundance of in my garden. Oregano behaves much like mint does, in that it gets everywhere and doesn’t ever die off. Since I have more use for oregano than mint, though, I let it live, since it seems to happily coexist with my thyme and my insane sage plant.

So, I have this fresh oregano, and I snipped a bit of it out of the garden. The last time we went grocery shopping, I picked up a can of green chiles without a specific plan on what to do with them - at worst case, they’re really good stirred into a batch of scrambled eggs.

I had forgotten to take any meat out of the freezer, so I was stuck with frozen chicken thighs and breasts. I decided to go with the thighs, but since they were frozen I knew that I’d have to cook them for a while to ensure that they were completely done. That ruled out any sort of roasting or grilling, so my thoughts turned to stew.

In the pantry, I found an unopened bag of Great Northern beans. Despite the fact that I didn’t soak these overnight, it wasn’t a problem since I have a pressure cooker.

So, to sum it all up, I had oregano, green chiles, chicken thighs, and white beans.

This is what I made:

Canola oil
4 chicken thighs, preferably thawed
2 to 3 Tbs oregano, chopped
1 can green chiles
8oz Great Northern beans, or other white beans
White wine
Garlic, chopped
Chicken stock

Get your beans ready - if they are dried, cook them according to the package instructions, and if they canned, open the can, drain them, and rinse them off.

Heat a thin layer of oil in a wide pan until shimmery. Lay each chicken thigh, skin side down, into the pan, and saute without moving for about 7 minutes, then turn each thigh to cook for another 5 minutes. Remove to a clean plate, and pour off the excess oil/fat in the pan, leaving about 2 Tbs.

Throw your garlic into the pan and fry that up, until golden. Take some wine and deglaze the pan, scraping up all of the chicken bits. Add about 2 cups of chicken stock, then the beans, chiles, and oregano.

Place the thighs back into the pan. Add more stock so that the liquid level comes up about 1/2 to 3/4 up the thighs.

Bring to a simmer, cover, and turn the heat to low. Cook for 1 1/2 hours.

Before serving, take the thighs out and remove the meat from the bones. Add the meat back to the pan.

Two of the garden items that survived through this past winter were the thyme and the sage. As a result, both have gotten an early start on their growing, and it’s gotten to the point where the sage plant is absolutely thriving, reaching halfway to my hip and having developed light green and purple blossoms.

Now, I knew that you could cook zucchini blossoms, but I had no idea what to do with sage blossoms. I tried eating one off of the plant, but the flavor was a little too intense in its raw state - like a little grenade of sage flavor. So, I decided to try the best approach to cooking any untried food item - fry the suckers in butter.

I picked a handful of sage blossoms and some sage leaves and washed them, setting them aside to dry. I figured the best delivery device for fried sage in butter would be pasta, so I made some spaghetti and, seeing that I was already cooking anyway, threw some chicken breasts in for good measure.

I’ll start with the chicken, which is a variation of a recipe that I’ve seen before using veal. If you want everything to come together at the end, you should also start a pot of water boiling for your pasta before making the chicken, and squeeze and zest your lemons.

Chicken with Sage and Ham

2 chicken breasts, pounded slightly to uniform thickness (or as close as uniform as you can)
2 sage leaves
2 slices of ham
2 toothpicks
Flour, salt, pepper
Olive oil and butter

Get yer chicken ready! Take your flattish chicken breasts and add salt and pepper to both sides. Place a sage leaf on each, then cover with a slice of ham. Use the toothpicks to stitch the ham to the chicken breast, then dust both sides of each chicken breast with flour.

Heat a saute pan over medium heat until hot-hot-hot. Put about two tablespoons of olive oil in, swirl to coat, then add a small pat of butter, also swirling to coat. Wait a bit so that the butter begins to darken ever so slightly, then lay your chicken down in the pan. Saute without moving (the chicken, not you) for 5 to 7 minutes, depending on thickness (again, the chicken, not you), then carefully turn and cook the other side for another 5 to 7 minutes. Remove to a clean plate and cover with foil.

Pasta with Sage Blossoms, Lemon, and Brown Butter

8 oz pasta
Sage leaves and blossoms
3 Tbs unsalted butter (more or less)
Juice and zest of one lemon
Black pepper

Drop your pasta into your boiling water and start your timer. You want to time this so that the pasta is done and in a colander by the time you begin the sauce.

As the pasta cooks, melt the butter in the same pan that you used for the chicken until it begins to brown slightly, then add the sage blossoms and leaves and step back about four feet, because the moisture in the sage will create some hot fat splatters. Fry the sage for about 30 seconds, then add the lemon juice and zest.

Leaving the heat on low, add your drained pasta to the sauce and toss it around. The pasta will absorb the butter sauce beautifully. Turn off the heat, add a few grindings of black pepper, and turn the whole thing out into a serving bowl.

Serve the chicken on a bed of the pasta, with lemon halves on the side.

So, I had mentioned that I spent part of the morning on Friday making dessert. While I knew that one of our distinguished guests was bringing a homemade cake (completely from scratch), I also knew that, in said cake, there would be no chocolate. That was my in.

I decided to augment the dessert selection by making a chocolate pots de creme, which is really just a fancy way of saying “melted chocolate held together by egg yolks”. Really, it is.

At first, I had the hardest time finding which cookbook had held the recipe that I used earlier. I grabbed one book, but the pots de creme recipe didn’t look familiar (also, it called for a dozen egg yolks, and I’m fairly positive I would have remembered that). Finally, I grabbed my copy of Williams Sonoma Paris: Authentic Recipes Celebrating the Foods of the World, and found a recipe whose page was splattered with bits of chocolate and stained with cocoa. Pretty sure that was it.

So, here’s the magic formula, with the ingredients straight out of that book and the procedure based on the book but adjusted somewhat for my tastes:

Pots de Creme au Chocolat

1.5 C whole milk

1 C heavy cream

1 C powdered sugar

8oz bittersweet chocolate (I used Scharffen Berger, 72% if I remember correctly), chopped up

2 T unsweetened cocoa

pinch of salt

1 large egg, whole, plus 6 egg yolks

1/2 t vanilla extract

These things are incredibly easy to make, which is probably why they are my go-to recipe for chocolate desserts. First things first, preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Some preparatory steps - take eight 6oz or 8oz ramekins (they are cheap and widely available, about a buck and a half each if you shop around) and put them into an ovenproof dish that will fit them (a Corningware casserole is good for this). Take a saucepan of cold water and pour it into the dish until the water level reaches about a third of the way up each ramekin. Take out the ramekins and pour the water back into the saucepan. Set the saucepan of water aside, or pour the water into something that you can heat up in the microwave. As long as the water is hot when you put the dish into the oven, it doesn’t matter how it got that way.

You know what you just did? You just made the preliminary measurements for a bain marie, or water bath. It’s an important part of custard making - by cooking the custards, covered, in water, it maintains a nice, steady temperature which cooks them evenly. You’ve now measured the proper amount of water needed to cover the ramekins halfway (and before you quibble that I specified a third of the way - Archimedes Principle. That is all).

Onwards to the recipe. Take another saucepan and set it over medium heat, then throw your milk, cream, and sugar into it. Give that a good stir to dissolve the sugar, and heat it up until you see some simmering action going on along the edges. Turn the heat off.

Toss in your chopped chocolate, cocoa, and salt and stir until everything melts together. Turn the heat back on and heat until you see small bubbles at the edge, then turn the heat off again. Set this pot aside to cool for a bit while you go get the eggs.

In a large measuring cup (I mean large, like 8 cups or so) or large bowl, whisk the whole egg and the egg yolks together until blended. While stirring with one hand, ladle a little bit (like, half a ladle) of the warm chocolate mixture into the yolks, then a little more (you do it this way to avoid cooking the eggs with the hot chocolate - this brings the temperature of the eggs up slowly). Slowly incorporate the rest of the chocolate in a slow stream (don’t stop stirring). Add your vanilla.

At this point, the book suggests running the mix through a sieve. Seeing that I am lazy, and I don’t mind lumps in my food if they are lumps of chocolate, I generally skip this step.

Assembly. If you haven’t already, bring that reserved pot of water to a simmer, or microwave it in a microwave-safe thingy until it just boils. Either pour or ladle the chocolate mixture into the ramekins, then set the ramekins into the oven-safe dish (leave out one so you have a space to pour the hot water). Pour the hot water into the dish until the water level reaches the halfway mark of the ramekins, then put the last ramekin in. Cover the dish, either with a lid or with foil.

Carefully place the dish into the oven for 25 minutes. Take it out, uncover it, and with great care because you will most certainly burn yourself if you aren’t careful, remove the ramekins and place them on a kitchen towel to cool. When they have cooled to room temp, cover each one with plastic wrap and throw them into the fridge until you’re ready to attack them.

I just realized that the picture here has a sprig of rosemary sitting in the chocolate, and I haven’t mentioned it before. One thing about this recipe, once you get the hang of it, is that you can infuse the chocolate mixture with any number of other flavors, just by simmering an extra element (such as rosemary) in the milk-cream-sugar solution prior to adding the chocolate. Here, I chose rosemary, but you can also go with lavender or anything else you can imagine. Just pick out the flavoring element, or sieve it, before you add the chocolate.

The pots de creme ended up being the perfect counterpart to the strawberry cake that was brought to the party. The cake, which was so light it felt like a prop when I lifted it, was a white cake with fresh whipped cream, and strawberries in the shape of hearts (which is great, because I don’t shape my food often enough), was the exact opposite of the chocolate custards, which were very dark and very dense.

So, to keep things fair, I ate both.

Pictures of each, below:

After deciding that I wanted to serve a soup course, I went through a number of my cookbooks with the general theme of “Spring” in mind. Whatever recipe I ended up with, I wanted it to be a celebration of spring and something light to usher in the evening. I gravitated towards green soups, so peas and spinach and a number of other vegetable soups were considered. In the end, I decided on this recipe for asparagus soup that appears in Tom Colicchio’s book Think Like a Chef.

The prospect of combining two hallmarks of spring, asparagus and mushrooms, appealed to me, and the soup is very straightforward, which would allow me the time to get on with preparing the rest of the meal. The custard seemed to be a nice touch, as it’s something that you don’t see in home cooking too often, but it seemed easy enough to do.

When we went shopping for ingredients, I noticed that 1) I don’t have access to fresh morels, and 2) dried morels are super expensive (around $8.99 for two ounces). I settled on shittake mushrooms instead, which were available fresh - if you were to make this dish, you could probably substitute any mix of mushrooms that are available to you and discover new combinations fairly easily. Also, Colicchio’s original recipe calls for ramps, which are wild onions, and which also weren’t available, so I substituted scallions instead. That’s the great thing about soup - you can always play around with the ingredients quite a bit and still come out looking good.

I won’t list the straight recipe here, since you can find it in the cookbook (and also you can just Google it), but you take 2.5 pounds (or so) of asparagus, chop them in half, and simmer the chopped stems in 2.25 C chicken stock, and reserve the chopped upper halves (the part with the pointy bits). As the stock simmers, gathering asparagus flavor from the stems, you saute the chopped upper halves with some shallot, salt, pepper, and ramps or scallions. Strain the stock, throw away the stems, and pour the stock into your sauteed mix, simmering for five minutes more. Dump the whole thing into a blender and puree. Soup’s done, unless you’re a stickler for running it through a sieve.

As for the custard, set aside about 45 minutes for it. Chop up the mushrooms (1/4 pound), and saute them (along with some scallion or ramps) in a little bit of oil for about five minutes. Throw in a cup of heavy cream, bring to a simmer, turn off the heat, and let that mushroomy goodness steep throughout the cream for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, or whenever you get around to it again. Strain the mix (keep the mushrooms, keep the cream), let the cream cool a little, and then whisk in one egg + one yolk. Divide among eight three ounce ramekins (buttered or spritzed with Pam), stir a little of your mushroom mush into each, and bake in a water bath at 325 degrees for 25 minutes. When they are done, take them out and let them cool on the counter a bit.

When you are ready to assemble, run a knife around the edge of each custard and invert into your serving bowl. If your butter/Pam karma is good, they should just plop out. If not, you may be screwed.

Ladle a little bit of the hot soup around the custard, tilting the bowl to fill in any spaces, and serve. Well, taste for salt first (it will probably need some), and then serve.

While I’d like to say that I’ve never attempted to make fresh pasta before, I know I’d be lying. I just can’t remember when I would have done it, though.

Here’s the deal - I have had, in our apartment before we moved, and now, in the basement, an Atlas brand manual pasta maker. It’s the kind that clamps to the side of a table and has a hand crank. I don’t remember ever using it, but the box has still got the price tag from Fortunoff on it, and when I opened it, inside was a yellowed, crunchy newspaper clipping about making your own pasta.

The clipping is dated from 1990.

So, eighteen years ago, I bought this pasta maker, probably tried it once, and then put it away. But now, I’m older, wiser, and more nimble with my kitchen skillz.

It’s time to give it another shot.

As you may remember, we have a dinner party coming up, and in fact, it’s been moved up to this Friday evening. I’ve already tried a short rib recipe, which I concluded was too heavy for this time of year. I finally did decide on a soup course, a pasta course, and then a main course, which, at this point, will probably be shrimp.

This is my dry run for the pasta course. The recipe for the pasta dough comes out of a recent issue of Saveur, and the duck ragu is from last month’s issue of Gourmet, which I normally would not have picked up except I was stuck in Houston airport and needed reading material.

As it turns out, making fresh pasta is really easy. It’s just flour (3 C), eggs (3, plus one yolk), a little bit of salt, and some water (1 T) and olive oil (1 T). Using a large plastic sheet that is designed for rolling out pie dough, I mound the flour in the middle, make a little space in the center, and throw everything else in there. Take a fork, whisk the eggs to break them up, and then incorporate the flour a little bit at a time, until your arm starts getting tired because the dough is getting stiff. Switch to your hands, knead the dough for about ten minutes, then wrap the ball in plastic wrap and leave it alone for 30 minutes. This would be the time where you clamp the pasta maker to your kitchen counter, and set out a number of sheets of parchment paper, which will serve as your resting areas for your pasta sheets. You can probably start the sauce at this point.

Every pasta recipe I’ve seen seems to follow the same pattern. Take your dough ball, cut it into four pieces, taking one and leaving the others wrapped, and form it into a rough, flat rectangle with your hands. With the rollers set to the widest setting, feed the dough through the rollers, fold into thirds like you were dropping it into the mail, and run it through again. Do this four or five times.

Set the rollers to their next thinnest setting, and run your dough through again. You don’t need to fold it anymore. Keep reducing the width of the rollers and running the dough through until you’re at the last, and thinnest, setting. Around three-quarters of the way through, you will wish that you had set aside more counter space for this project, since the pasta sheet will get progressively longer as it gets thinner - I keep a knife nearby and like to cut the sheet in half (remember what setting you were on when you did this) to keep things more manageable.

If the sheet is a little tacky, dust it with some flour - don’t worry about drying it out, the extra flour will come out in the cooking water. As you are done with each sheet, dust it on both sides with flour and, draping it over your forearms, set it down on parchment while you roll out the rest of the dough. I find the act of rolling pasta very relaxing and therapeutic, especially feeling the cool pasta sheets against my arms, and the cutting.

Oh yes, the cutting. Once you are done making all of your pasta sheets, take your first sheet (which will have dried a bit) and roll it up loosely, so you have something akin to a canneloni or egg roll. Using a sharp knife, cut the roll into ribbons (keep in mind that when you boil them, these noodles will get wider, so try for thin cuts). Sprinkle flour over the ribbons and work your fingers into them to separate them into noodles. Repeat with the other sheets, forming a loose pile of flour-dusted noodles on your parchment. This is a task that can easily be delegated to others, so if you are in a hurry you can get your sheets turned into noodles faster by aggregating the work.

I suppose this is the right time to talk about the duck ragu. You can find the recipe in Gourmet, but, in a nutshell, you take a duck breast and saute it, skin down, in butter and olive oil for six minutes, then two minutes on the other side. Set that aside, throw in some garlic, onion, half of a cup of red wine, rosemary, chicken stock, and chopped canned tomatoes. Stir it all up, put the duck breast back in, set the heat on low, covered, and get back to your noodles. After an hour, you take the duck breast out, chop up the whole thing, defat and reduce the sauce, and put the meat back in. It’s really easy and amazingly good.

Time to put it all together. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil - and realize that it will take about 3000% longer to boil the water than it will to actually use it to cook the noodles. Seriously. Once your water is boiling, throw some salt in there, and put your pile of noodles into a colander, and set the timer for one minute, thirty seconds. Really. One minute. Thirty seconds. Put your noodles into the water and start your timer - use something to stir the noodles so that they don’t stick to one another.

You now have exactly one minute and thirty seconds to put a small amount of hot duck ragu at the bottom of a bowl. There’s a story behind this, actually - the first time I had tried this recipe, my noodles stuck together as soon as I drained them (also, I cooked them for three minutes, so that may have had something to do with it) and when I put the ragu on top, it kind of sat there on top of a block of noodles (which is, actually, the picture that you see here). My neighbor recommended draining the noodles, but then immediately tossing them with the sauce, which helps to separate the noodles.

So, that’s what we’re doing here. When your timer gets close to the end, drain the noodles in a colander and immediately mix them with some of the duck ragu. The fat in the sauce will coat the noodles and keep them (mostly) separate. That’s it, you’re done.

Because of its simplicity and the ability to make the sauce ahead of time, this dish is most definitely going to comprise the pasta course for Friday night. Running it through two dry runs has enabled me to tweak the cooking time for the noodles, as well as learning the trick about tossing it with the sauce.

We are hosting a dinner party for around ten people on April 26, and I’ve been menu-planning in my head ever since I first found out about it. The reason for the get-together is to celebrate the engagement of one of the couples in attendance, so I wanted to go a little further than your typical casual crowd food.

Last night, I did a dry run for one of the dishes that I was considering making for the dinner - braised short ribs over polenta. To make a long story short, while I can see tweaking this into a great dish, I think I’m going to continue searching for a better main course.

One of the problems that I ran into involved the translation of a recipe meant to serve several people into one that serves only one or two. I had bought about a pound of short ribs (three ribs, to be exact) and had seasoned them overnight with a mixture of salt, pepper, rosemary, and thyme. The next day (which was yesterday), I browned the ribs, added red wine, and then placed the covered pot into the oven to cook for the requisite two hours.

The original recipe, which I obtained from epicurious.com, calls for two bottles of wine and 8 or 9 pounds of ribs. I estimated, quite incorrectly, that two cups of wine were enough. As the evening wore on, the pleasant smell of roasted meat and red wine gradually turned harsher, and I checked on it just in time to save it from becoming a scorched mess. The wine had simmered away to nothing, but thankfully the fatty nature of the short ribs prevented them from burning. I added more wine and finished the cooking.

Following the recipe, I whipped up a quick batch of boxed polenta, and, taking a cue from a recent recipe that I saw in a magazine, added some gorgonzola and chopped almonds. As a final step, the short ribs are topped with a gremolata, which is a mixture of chopped parsley, lemon zest, and garlic. I’ve used gremolata before, as a finishing step to osso buco, so I was not hesitant to implement it here.

So, the end result is what you see here. The short ribs were very tender, with no hint of scorching at all, although you can see that simmering anything in red wine for two hours is going to turn it very dark. I was disappointed in the texture of the polenta, and vow never to make it from a box mix again. The gremolata could have benefited from being covered and cooked on top of the ribs for about five minutes, as the flavor of the raw garlic was a bit much. This is what I do with osso buco, and I should have carried the technique over to this recipe.

Ultimately, though, even though I know that these fixes would make the dish much better, I will not be making it for the dinner party for the simple fact that it is way too heavy for this time of year. Even after only one rib, I was completely stuffed, and I intend to serve about three courses at the dinner, plus dessert.

I could imagine this recipe for cold weather, but as the sun is finally up when we leave for work and when we get back home, and my tulip bulbs are blooming, it just isn’t the appropriate time of year to serve this dish.

The search continues.

Composed butters are always a handy thing to have in the fridge, because they’re easy to make, keep well, and can be used on just about anything that benefits from having butter melted on it (which, if you think about it, is pretty much everything).

What I am presenting today is a master recipe which allows you the greatest flexibility in terms of using what’s on hand and what looks good at the grocery. At its heart, this composed butter consists of a stick of butter, an aromatic such as garlic, onion, or shallot, a citrus element, and wine.

Composed Citrus Butter for Fish and Shellfish

For the base:

1 stick of unsalted butter, diced

For the aromatic:

1 clove garlic, peeled and chopped fine
or
1/4 or 1/8 of a small onion, chopped fine
or
1 or 2 shallots, say it with me, chopped fine

For the citrus:

Zest and juice of one lemon, or one orange

And all the rest:

About 1/4 cup of white wine

A couple of tablespoons of finely chopped italian flat leaf parsley

Directions

1. Take the diced butter and place it into a heat-proof bowl or glass storage container.

2. In a small saucepan, combine the aromatic elements, the citrus elements (the zest and the juice), and the wine, and bring to a simmer. Keep this going until it’s reduced by half, stirring it every so often, and then pour the hot mess over the butter.

3. Using a fork or a small whisk, mix and stir the butter until it softens and incorporates everything. It shouldn’t melt completely if you keep at it, but it should soften enough for you to work the other ingredients into it uniformly. Add the chopped parsley towards the end and work that in as well.

Cover the butter and refrigerate until ready to use. You could even freeze it for longer storage.

Ready to use? Melt a small pat of citrus butter over grilled or sauteed fish, or use (in conjunction with olive oil) as your base fat when you saute shrimp, scallops, or even vegetables. Stir some into hot rice, or pasta.

Did I mention that composed butters are very flexible?

You could probably use limes for your citrus element and substitute cilantro for the parsley, but that would steer you more towards southwestern and Caribbean dishes and lower the flexibility somewhat. If you go this route, I would recommend garlic as your aromatic and maybe even punch it up with some hot sauce or canned chipotle chiles.