We eat a lot of eggs at our house. They are just so handy for protein. They made an appearance in this breakfast I’ve been eating lately, and now they’re in another.

I like the idea of eggs baked in tomatoes, and have tried it several times. It doesn’t seem to work right for me. There’s something about how the eggs don’t get enough heat or something (maybe a specific heat issue?) But last night I had an idea. I am probably not the first to think of it, but it was a big realization to me: how about tomatoes and poached eggs?

So that’s what you see above. I used this tomato sauce from the freezer and topped it with a poached egg and some parmesan. Yum. (And it works for supper too.)

Despite it being my favorite meal of the day, I have horrible breakfast habits. As soon as I wake up in the morning, I get obsessed with getting to work as soon as possible (workaholic much?) And usually that means I tell myself I don’t have time for breakfast. I’ve been trying to do better this semester, because each spring I have crazy Tuesday or Thursday schedules that keep me from eating lunch. I need to have some fuel for the day so I don’t crash during class.

This pita breakfast sandwich (sans sriracha, only because we don’t have any in the house) showed up on Pinterest and has been my breakfast almost every morning for two weeks. It’s fantastic and keeps me going. The recipe is kind of a no-brainer. I’ll post it below, but what I really want to post about is the idea of a fried egg + other stuff in a pita pocket. Rather genius, don’t you think?! What else could you stuff with a fried egg into a pita for breakfast?

Breakfast Sandwich with egg, avocado, and spinach

Ingredients:

1 egg
1/3 cup of baby spinach
1 avocado
sriracha (optional)

Directions:

Fry the egg. Cut the avocado in half, and then cut one of the halves in half again. Slice. Wrap the reminders of the avocado in plastic wrap and refrigerate for the next breakfast. Put spinach, avocado, and egg into pita bread. Drizzle with sriracha if desired. Run off to work as quick as you can.

Last week I was thrilled to find bottled sweetened condensed milk at Trader Joe’s! I’ve been looking for something like this for ages. Hurrah for a new addition to my morning coffee!

We invited all my students over the weekend before exams for an open house. We planned to have warm comfort foods on hand for the students to eat as they were able to drop by. Overall, it went really well. I’m learning that one of the cooking skills I don’t have is cooking for a crowd, but I’m getting better and want to record my menus here for future reference.

We made the following:

• Chili (the picture above is not mine – I forgot to take any pictures)
• Cheddar corn chowder
• Homemade oreos
• Hot chocolate
• My mother’s Russian tea (recipe below)

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user 46137]

Russian Tea

Yield: about four gallons

Ingredients:

2 gallons water
4 family size tea bags
juice of 1 lemon
2 cans of frozen orange juice concentrate
2 cans Dole pineapple juice (you probably could use any brand, but my other insists that it should be Dole and I'm afraid to try anything else)
3 cinnamon sticks
1 Tbs cloves
sugar to taste

Directions:

Brew tea, as usual, with the water and tea bags. Add other ingredients and let simmer for at least one hour.

Brunch at Marche

In what’s seeming to be a new tradition for us, we traveled through St. Louis, Nashville, and Bristol after classes got out for the holiday break, to visit friends and family. (I recounted last year’s trip here.)

As usual, we ate a ton of food. Goodness, it was all so good! In St. Louis we had tapas at Modesto, doughnuts at World’s Fair Doughnuts, and brunch at SqWires, where I realized that I didn’t know how much I had been missing good biscuits. (On the to-do list: find a trusted recipe for biscuits.) We also had an amazing fig and prosciutto pizza made by friends.

In Nashville we ate at all our favorite places: Fido, The Wild Cow, Marche (twice!), and Crema (thrice!). We also stopped in Watertown to try out Nona Lisa Pizzeria, a newish place started up by a foodie friend. Nashvillians, it’s definitely worth the drive. Katie knows her food.

Chocolate peppermint mousse cake at Marche (which we ate at the end of breakfast)

In Bristol we stopped by Pal’s and Blackbird Bakery, of course, but the best meal of all was the one prepared by my mom. She’s feeling great now and made all my favorite foods: green beans, corn, ham, mashed potatoes, pineapple casserole. She also made chocolate covered cherries and chocolate covered peanut butter balls, neither of which she’d made for a very long time. They were delicious and I came back with a tin full of them.

I was so glad to learn about the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap. It was just what I needed to do something, anything festive. I’ve always felt that academia makes it hard to really celebrate Christmas. By the time final exams are done, I’m just worn out and not up to putting up a Christmas tree or anything, really. This year was a little different. I joined the cookie swap. My husband thinks it is just about the most brilliant idea ever, so he was more than happy to help me make the cookies. It was a joy to sit down together and roll the dough in the sugar, unwrap the Hershey’s kisses, and laugh.

My mom developed this recipe in an attempt to recreate the cookies she remembered eating at school when a young girl, and they were a staple around Christmas time when I was growing up. It was through this recipe that I learned the importance of bringing cold ingredients up to room temperature when making cookies, as well as the proper procedures for creaming butter and sugar and adding dry ingredients. The recipe is all the more special to me because my mom just completed a very grueling cancer treatment and is finally back to her old self, making lots of our favorite items. She was pleased to pass on this recipe to me. I made one update – switching out the margarine for butter – but overall it’s still Mom’s recipe.

This is a great recipe for storing the dough in the freezer, either just in a lump or with the balls pre-formed. You can make the cookies ahead of time for whatever you’re making them for, but I love them best just a few minutes after you’ve added the Hershey’s kisses. The cookies will be incredibly tender and the chocolate all melted and good.

I was privileged to receive three dozen cookies from other swap members – strawberry thumbprints from Melissa at Melissa’s Cuisine, chocolate chip cookies from Julie at The Little Kitchen, and snowflake sugar cookies from Kelly at Eat Yourself Skinny. Everything came beautifully packaged and was really yummy. Thanks, everyone!

Peanut Butter Cookies

Makes 2 dozen

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2to 2/3 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar, extra for rolling
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/4 cup flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
Hershey's kisses, unwrapped (if desired)

Directions:

1. Allow all refrigerated ingredients (butter, egg) to come to room temperature. Preheat oven to 375F.
2. Using a mixer, cream butter, peanut butter, sugars. Add egg; mix until smooth.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together remaining ingredients. Mix into butter/sugar/egg mixture.
4. Roll into tablespoon-sized balls, then roll in granulated sugar. Place on parchment paper on baking sheets, one inch apart. If you aren't going to use the Hershey's kisses, press twice lightly onto each ball with a fork, rotating fork tines by ninety degrees between presses.
5. Bake at 375F for 15 minutes.
6. Immediately after removing from oven, press one Hershey's kiss into the center of the cookies.

Menu:

Hummus with pita crackers, cherry tomatoes, and baby carrots
Toll House chocolate chip cookies
Sugar-and-spice candied nuts
Apple Walnut Gorgonzola Thyme turnovers
Deviled eggs

Preparation:

Friday night, I bought the hummus, crackers, and vegetables from Trader Joe’s, along with the apples, nuts, and thyme. I made a double batch of the cookies and a triple batch of the nuts, and boiled the eggs.

Saturday morning I made a double batch of the turnovers and finished the deviled eggs (I make mine pretty simple, just mash up the yolks with dijon mustard and mayo, pipe into the eggs using a ziptop bag with a corner snipped off, and sprinkle with paprika.)

It all went together very well and everyone seemed pleased. The only thing I would have done differently is expand the card I put out with the turnovers to say not just “contains nuts” but to include all the ingredients. Some guests seemed to not really be sure of what they were eating!  I did make WAY too much food, but at the very worst we will have lots of snack food over the week, and some items (like a second package of hummus and the nuts, which I’ve stashed in the freezer) can be used again when we have two student groups over next weekend.

Classes start up the third week of August, but no matter what many people think academics don’t get summers off and our work doesn’t start the first day of classes. The first two weeks of August I’ve been trying to hold off official work, but it’s been difficult. Already one of the days has been scheduled completely full of meetings. I knew that if I wasn’t purposeful I would let my workaholic tendencies take over. So I’ve been furiously doing non-academic stuff, like cleaning the deck and making curtains. And I finally made macarons. Here they are:

I used David Lebovitz’s recipe, and it turned out beautifully. Interestingly, Lebovitz notes that he tried many different variations to get just the right little feet on each cookie. I rapped the sheets as he did, but one yielded footed cookies while the other did not. No matter, they still turned out delicious. And I feel accomplished. (Although, truly, if you respect the meringue you will be just fine.)

Last week I had most difficult eating experience I’ve ever had, at least when it comes eating while at an academic conference. Usually I look forward to this type of travel, because the costs are covered by someone or something other than me (usually a research grant.) I don’t splurge, of course, but it’s nice to be able to not nickel and dime everything I eat. Plus, there’s the opportunity to try new places, learn about new foods, etc.

Last week was an exception. The conference was held at least a mile from any interesting downtown eating places. I was unable to acquire any decent coffee at all. One evening I got so hungry from the lack of easy access to food that I ordered room service at my hotel (gasp!) and ordered (1) milk and cookies and (2) sweet potato fries. Yeah, I was really desperate and weird.

All this means that I learned my lesson: I need to start bringing some food with me to conferences in case issues like this occur again.  I should probably pack some coffee as well.

(Image above from one of my most favorite conference places to eat, ever, in DC.)

I did escape away to my parents’ home for a few days last week. They have a wonderful neighbor who is originally from France, and while I was there she brought us a delicious plum tart. (She also saved me from certain doom by offering me a cappuccino. I was withering away from lack of caffeine.) I asked her how she made them, and she said that she bought the dough over from France. In her view, it wasn’t worth trying to make on your own, since she could get it for the equivalent of 88 cents over here. But she recommended that puff pastry would be fine.

I made a nectarine tart, seen below. Following her directions, I rolled out thawed puff pastry and blind baked it for about 5 minutes with pie weights on it. Then I added sliced nectarines and sprinkled sugar over it, and baked it at 400F for about 20 minutes.

Since the oven was already hot, I also made pizza margherita, following Mark Bittman’s directions in his iPad app. Behold, the pizza before baking:

There are some things I make to which I exclaim “man alive!!” very loudly after tasting them for the first time. This pizza was one of those. My goodness, it was so delicious! After baking, the tomatoes began to melt a bit, making a sauce completely unnecessary. My very picky-about-his-pizza husband was even pleased.  I can imagine many iterations to come. Although I made these on a day in which I wasn’t as busy as normal, I’m pretty sure that both of these would be doable on a weeknight, especially if I’m able to pull pre-made pizza dough out of the freezer the morning before.