Food Network Musings

Cloud Eggs For Special Mothers

2017-05-14T00:21:00.004-04:00

Happy Mother’s Day! I hope you’re being honored as the best mother ever! Or honoring your own best mother or someone near and dear to you. Here’s a recipe for breakfast (in bed 😊) that can be made with little or no preplanning, but is still super special – Cloud Eggs. Fluffy mounds of egg whites are baked in a hot oven quickly, then yolks are nestled in the center and baked again briefly. Voila, yummy puffy whites with runny yolks.

Cloud Eggs are all over Instagram and the internet. Everyone (and her mother) has been making them lately. As I was searching around for different versions, I found a Rachael Ray recipe for “Eggs in Clouds” from 2012! Did she invent them, I wonder?

It’s funny, I’ve never adored RR’s recipes. I think she’s a fine talk show host, but I've always turned her off when she got to the food part of her show. Ever since November, though, I’ve appreciated her more. Her show is a total escape from reality (essential these days) and she’s always cheerful and enthusiastic. Plus the advice that she and her cohorts give on a wide range of topics isn’t half bad either. Having said that, I will never make a thick soup or thin stew and call it stoup. But with all the incivility and lying and ugliness in our public space these days, am I allowed to say that I sometimes find Rachael Ray a pleasing relief?

Anyhoo, it seems as if almost everybody’s recipe is based on that 2012 RR one, (whether they admit or not). Mine isn’t that different either, except that I'm positive that 2 or 3 minutes is not enough to cook the "clouds" after the yolks have been added. They’re still snotty. I cook them for a full five minutes and I get completely done whites and still runny yolks.

The biggest challenge is keeping the egg yolks intact – when you separate the eggs AND when you place them on top of the egg white nests. I WAS careful, but one of my yolks did not cooperate in the oven and broke ever so slightly.

This is also a great recipe for any Paleo and Whole30 folks. You absolutely can make it with only salt and eggs, but the cheese is a good addition. I haven’t added bacon, but go ahead and add chopped, cooked bacon to the whites with the cheese.

Beat whites.

Fold in remaining ingredients.

Place in blobs on greased baking sheet.

Baked blobs:

Place yolks in indentations.

Baked Cloud Egg

You can also pimp up (out?) the whole thing:

Serve it on an English muffin with hollandaise.
Make bacon cups and serve it in those! Here’s a complicated recipe, and a simpler one (forget about the bean part of that recipe…or not…)
OR take a look at this interesting presentation and vary this recipe. After you’ve framed the cooked bacon into muffin cups, spoon in the whisked egg whites, bake and then add the yolks as per my recipe. You’ll end up with Cloud Eggs surrounded by crisp bacon. What could be wrong with that?

Cloud Eggs (makes 2)

Based on Rachael Ray’s Eggs on Clouds

2 eggs

¼ tsp. salt

2 tbls. grated white cheddar cheese

Freshly ground black pepper

Optional: chopped parsley for garnish

Preheat oven to 450°.

Separate eggs very carefully, keeping the yolks intact. Place each yolk in its own little bowl. Beat egg whites until stiff. Fold in salt, cheddar cheese and freshly ground black pepper. Place 2 round blobs on pam-ed foil. Make a big indentation in the center of each blob with a spoon. Bake for three minutes. Remove from oven and carefully place yolks into indentations and bake for five more minutes. Slide a thin spatula underneath eggs and place on warm plate(s). Garnish with chopped parsley, if desired.

Note: As careful as I was, one of the yolks still broke during baking. Argh!

Baked Meatball Extravaganza, But Please Fry Them First

2017-03-20T20:26:00.001-04:00

I saw this recipe in Good Housekeeping’s March Issue and I just had to make it.

The picture was drool-worthy, although I didn’t actually use their recipe (and I hate the name they gave it). But whatever you call it, the whole reason for this dish is to end up with bubbling hot, gooey-with-cheese meatballs to go over steaming spaghetti.

Use your own meatball recipe or mine…or GH’s. For my meatballs, I use whatever breadcrumbs I have handy. Sometimes they’re fresh, sometimes they’re dried and sometimes both. This time, I cut the heels off the French (Italian?) bread I was using for garlic bread and processed those. I added dried breadcrumbs to make up to one and half cups.

In spite of them being called BAKED meatballs, you’re not going to get away with NOT frying the meatballs first. Sorry. If you add them uncooked to the sauce, you’ll end up with steamy, poached meatballs. If you bake them instead of frying, you won’t get that lovely, dark, crusty edge which adds so much flavor. For the well-being of the overall dish, get one more pan dirty (which is the story of my life) and fry the meatballs before they go into the sauce. For the sauce, make your own, use my recipe or even a good jarred one is okay.


Use a scant 1/4 cup of meat for each meatball.

Pile sauteed meatballs in a baking dish.

Cover meatballs with tomato sauce.

Top with cheese.

Bake on foil covered baking sheet.

Serve with garlic bread.

Baked Meatballs Extravaganza (makes 24 meatballs)

Printable recipe here.

For Sauce:

1 large onion, finely chopped

1 tbl. extra virgin olive oil

Optional: ½ cup red wine (just skip it if you don’t want to use it)

1 can (28 oz.) diced or crushed San Marzano tomatoes

1 cup vegetable stock

2 tsps. dried oregano

For Meatballs:

1/2 c. Parmesan cheese, grated

1½ cups breadcrumbs

big handful of parsley

½ tsp. kosher salt

2 lbs. ground beef

1 medium onion, finely chopped

2 cups shredded Mozzarella cheese

For sauce, cook onion in olive oil until completely softened. Stir in red wine, if using. Simmer, uncovered, to reduce for 5 minutes. Add stock, bring to a boil and simmer gently, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Add tomatoes and oregano, cover and simmer gently for 20 minutes. (30 minutes won’t hurt.)

For the meatballs, if you need to process the Parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs, do it before adding any of the other ingredients and then set them aside. Process parsley until chopped. Add back in the Parm and breadcrumbs along with the salt and chopped onion, and pulse until mixed.

Add contents of the food processor to ground meat in a large bowl. Mix until combined well. Form 24 meat balls. (I use a scant ¼ cup for each meatball.) Spray a large nonstick pan with nonstick spray and sauté the meatballs in two batches - about 3 minutes on each side on medium heat should do it. Remove the meatballs from the pan and deglaze the pan with a bit of the tomato sauce to pick up more flavor. Stir that tomato sauce back into the big batch.

Place meatballs in greased round or rectangular baking dish. Cover with sauce. Sprinkle over shredded mozzarella cheese. Place on a foil-covered baking sheet. Bake in a preheated 375°F. oven for 25 minutes or until hot and bubbling enthusiastically. Serve with spaghetti. (Reserve a bit of the sauce to toss with the spaghetti, if desired.)

Tomato Soup And 3 Ways To Thicken It…Or Not

2017-03-16T18:45:00.003-04:00

Hi again,

Let’s just get on to the recipe talk and not mention that I’ve been a bit absent. (A BIT?!!) Several seasons have passed and I’ve certainly done my fair share of cooking and dining, I just haven’t written about it. I’ve used Instagram for keeping up, but I’ve missed longer discussions about what’s cooking and happening. I do find myself turning away from the Food Network, though, and tuning into a lot more HGTV (especially when I need to forget about current events) and, so, I’m not promising you won’t see any deep analysis of pressing House Hunter issues or Christina and Tarek updates in future posts.

But today, there’s snow outside and it’s freezing, which calls for soup.

When H is home I make his favorite - Tomato Soup. It’s so easy that there’s really never a reason to use the stuff in a can.*

As with so many cold weather dishes, I focus on wrangling the absolute maximum flavor from the onions, which are the base of the soup. There are several ways you can do this:

Cook them in oil AND a touch of butter.
Add a bit of salt at the beginning, so the onions release lots of moisture and basically steam until completely soft.
If you have it, use a pan with a domed lid. It’s so fun to see how the steam builds up under the lid and drops down to the cooking onions. Also every time you open the pot, you get a mini facial.
Add no additional ingredients, except the carrots, until the onions are soft, soft, SOFT.

You can make this soup with absolutely no thickener and it’s fine, but it’s obviously on the thin side. There are a few methods for thickening this or any soup to give it a bit more oomph.

The first way is to add flour. I add the bare minimum - 1 tablespoon to eight cups of liquid. Stir it in when the vegetables are COMPLETELY soft and cook the flour on minimum heat for 3 minutes before adding any liquid.

These onions are completely softened
The second way is a trick I learned from Julia’s The Way to Cook. Add raw white rice to the soup before simmering. Cook for a good 20 to 30 minutes and when you puree it, the rice magically thickens the soup. Julia’s rule was ½ cup raw rice for 8 cups of liquid. I halve that.
Neither the flour nor the rice change the flavor of the soup, but the third method does (but in a good way, I think). Add a medium, peeled and chopped Yukon gold potato when you add the tomatoes and stock. One potato will definitely add body to the soup.
There’s one more way to slightly thicken or smoothify the soup – add some cream - either to the entire batch (1/2 cup) or just a drizzle to each serving.

A note about pureeing:

A blender is the way to get the smoothest, shiniest, prettiest soup (aside from a tamis sieve, but this is real life). Blend the soup in batches, which, admittedly, can be a pain when pureeing hot things. The easiest thing to do is to fill the blender no more than half-full, remove the center plastic part of the lid and cover that hole tightly with one of those silicone pot holders that I NEVER use as pot holders. The soup (it’s hot!) invariably spurts up to the top (no matter how little you’ve added) and hits the silicone pot holder. But it won’t escape down the sides since you have the top open AND the silicone pot holder just rinses off. Pretty genius.

A food processor does a great pureeing job, but you won’t get quite the same silky texture as you will from a blender. But I do avoid the food processor when I’m pureeing a soup with potatoes, because of the cardinal rule of what NOT to do in a food processor – mash potatoes. They come out like glue. However, if your soup is potato-free, go for it.

Luckily, there’s one more way to deal with the soup and it’s the easiest – an immersion blender. I avoided them for the longest time, because they do the least perfect job of getting a smooth and sleek soup. But real life has intervened and, now I turn to it often, because the cleanup is superfast. It purees the soup or sauce or whatever really quickly, but it WILL have a slightly coarse texture…which you can always say was what you were after in the first place. Note: I wouldn’t make mashed potatoes with an immersion blender, because they come out gummy, but one potato in 2 quarts of liquid is fine.

My Tomato Soup (makes 8 to 10 cups)
Printable recipe here.

Before blending

1 tbl. olive oil

1 tbl. unsalted butter

1 large onion, chopped

salt

2 medium carrots, peeled and chopped

1 tbl. flour (See note for other thickeners at end of recipe.)

28 oz. can of San Marzano tomatoes, diced or chopped

4 cups vegetable or chicken stock (I usually use Swanson’s vegetable stock)

freshly ground black pepper

optional: ½ cup cream

Heat olive oil and butter over medium heat in large saucepan. Stir in onion with a big pinch of salt. When it sizzles, stir once more, cover, and reduce heat to low. Cook for at least 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the carrots after five minutes. Taste the onions and if they’re bland, stir in a bit more salt. Continue to cook, covered, until the onions are completely soft.

Stir in the flour, over low heat. Cook, stirring every once in awhile, for 3 minutes. Stir in tomatoes, stock and pepper. Bring to boil, cover, and reduce heat to a nice simmer. Cook for 25 minutes. If adding cream, add it 2 minutes before the end of cooking time. Puree as desired. Or drizzle a bit of cream in each bowl just before serving.

To use other thickeners:

To thicken with rice – Skip the flour and stir in a good ¼ cup of raw white rice, when adding the tomatoes. Puree using any of the methods above.

To thicken with a potato – Add one peeled, chopped Yukon gold potato when adding the tomatoes. Puree in a blender or using an immersion blender.

*The only time I use bought tomato soup is when I follow a tip I learned decades ago from H’s mother. She added concentrated Campbell’s Tomato Soup to the top of her meatloaf. My meatloaf is my own, but I’ve been topping it with (undiluted) tomato soup forever and it’s really good. (I know it’s weird.)