Recently I haven’t been shopping much for food and our fridge has been pretty much empty the past few weeks. I woke up the other morning on a rainy day off, hungry and lazy. I didn’t want to go out to the market, and decided to make do with what we had in the house. And we literally only had 3 eggs, a can of anchovies, some capers and a little nub of manchego that had seen better days. So that’s what I ate – the hardboiled, sliced eggs, still warm, with capers, anchovies and the shaved cheese on top. I also drizzled on some of this amazing olive oil my mother brought me back from a recent trip she took to Tuscany.

As I sat and ate my hodgepodge snack, I felt pretty pleased with what I’d come up with. It wasn’t the prettiest breakfast I’ve made, but it was tasty. It felt like the makings of a bigger, better snack.

Even though Jon doesn’t like hardboiled eggs, I convinced him that this would be a pretty open-faced sandwich. We got some ciabatta and used the end pieces of the loaf to make my scrapplings snack into an open faced sandwich. I spread some artichoke tapenade on the toast, added some pickled cherry peppers and fresh thyme, and what started out as a totally bushleague snack became this great little sandwich.

INGREDIENTS:
(Makes 2 sandwiches)

2 hardboiled eggs
Capers
Anchovies
Artichoke tapenade
Peppers
Thyme
Ciabatta

Process:

1. Toast bread. Spread tapenade. Arrange eggs, capers, anchovies, peppers, and thyme.
2. Season with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil and eat while the eggs and bread are still warm.

© 2012 Jonathan Meter and Jessica Hertle

For Jonathan’s birthday, I bought him something kind of corny. It was this little mini cast iron skillet that fits about one egg. I realize this is a completely impractical gift, especially for two people who consistently cook enough food to feed a restaurant at family meal, even though our meals are usually just for us and a few friends. But we saw this little skillet while window-shopping on New Year’s Day, and when Jon’s birthday came a week and a half later, I couldn’t help but go back and buy it for him. My excuse was that we could use it for BiteSized, because it was so cute and bitesized.

What would we cook in this tiny, impractical pan, we asked each other. All I wanted to cook was a grilled cheese, because grilled cheese has become about 70% of my diet now that the restaurant is open for lunch and we continuously have these grilled cheese scrapplings lying around. But Jon was intent on making baked eggs, even though I adamantly insisted how much I don’t like them. Baked eggs always seem to come out either really undercooked, with those runny whites that make my stomach turn, or just an overcooked, dried out mass in a pan. I’ve never really had them prepared well and sort of wrote them off as an egg preparation I don’t care to revisit.

But in our tiny little one-egg pan, Jon and I made a delicious and perfectly sized baked egg that was so pretty and warming, it was a delight to eat. We put crisped pancetta, sautéed spinach, tomatoes and manchego cheese in with our egg because those are our favorite omelette ingredients. We added some pickled cherry peppers for a little spicy crunchiness, and then we baked the egg in the broiler for just shy of 5 minutes. The egg came out beautifully cooked – set whites, runny yolk, and bubbling melted cheese. I was instantly converted and suggested that we purchase enough mini pans to host a baked egg brunch, to which Jon laughed at my going from one extreme to another, once again. I’ll at least buy another mini pan for me, so we can eat our baked eggs together for breakfast.

INGREDIENTS:
(Makes 2 baked eggs)

2 nice eggs
2 loosely packed cups of spinach
1/8 lb pancetta
Few small vine tomatoes, quartered
Manchego cheese, sliced
Cherry peppers, thinly sliced (we pickled ours, but you don’t have to)
Salt and pepper
Freshly picked thyme

Prcoess:

1. Dice the pancetta and render it in a pan with a little olive oil until crispy. Remove the pancetta and leave the fat.
2. Turn the pan heat to high and add a bit more oil if needed. When the pan is hot and the oil is nearly smoking, toss in the spinach and sauté, constantly moving the greens around in the pan so that all the moisture is released and they are wilted. You want the pan really hot, so that the water evaporates immediately and the greens sauté. If the pan isn’t hot enough, the water will instead steam the greens and won’t create the same brilliant green color and seared in flavor.

3. In your small skillet, arrange the spinach and pancetta. Crack your egg in the middle on top of the greens and arrange your peppers and tomatoes around the edges of the yolk.

4. Shave manchego cheese over the top of your egg and sprinkle with salt, pepper and thyme. Cook egg under a raging hot broiler for no longer than 5 minutes, keep an eye on it to make sure you don’t overcook the yolk. Eat warm right out of the pan!

© 2012 Jonathan Meter and Jessica Hertle

At heart, I’m a bread and butter person. I have a weakness for bread like none other and could probably live off a 90% carb diet. I love butter almost as much, especially sweet and salty whipped butter – anything that acts as a vehicle for butter, or VFB as our friend David likes to call it, I’ll eat it.

I’ve been on a garlic-confit kick because we keep getting this awesome garlic at the farmer’s market and I often buy too much of it, or have a ton leftover from making dinner and don’t want it to rot away in the vegetable bin. So the other night, we made garlic confit and I had the idea to mix it in with butter and make toasts. For the holiday festivities we put radishes and watercress on the toasts to make little tea sandwiches, and disguise the fact that we were about to eat a loaf of bread and stick of butter for dinner. Well we didn’t eat the whole loaf and all the butter, but Jonathan’s taken care of that in recent days.

Our little tea sandwich toasts were a fun easy snack and we had leftover garlic confit and very tasty, fragrant olive oil to use in cooking and salads for days to come.

INGREDIENTS:

For the Garlic Butter:

7 heads of garlic
Sprig of rosemary
Sage leaves
Tbsp black peppercorns
Tsp coriander seeds
Olive oil, to cover

Process:

1. Slice off the tops of the heads of garlic, wasting as little of the cloves as possible.
2. Remove a stick of butter from the fridge and allow it to come to room temperature.
3. Place garlic heads in a small baking dish and combine with herbs and spices.
4. Cover with olive oil and a parchment lid. Top with foil and bake at 250º until very soft, about 45 minutes to an hour.
5. Remove from hot oil carefully and allow to cool. Strain off the oil and reserve it for future use – just make sure to keep it refrigerated.
6. When the garlic cloves are cooled, peel them and put in mixer with butter. Whip until garlic and butter are combined and butter is light and fluffy. Spread on toasts and enjoy!

For the Toasts:

Slices of bread of your choice, toasted
Radishes, sliced
Watercress, picked and cleaned

Process:

1. Spread garlic butter on toasts. Top with radishes, watercress or whatever else you like. Sprinkle with sea salt and serve at room temperature.

© 2011 Jonathan Meter  and Jessica Hertle

Last week Jessica and I were invited to attend a coffee tasting by our friends at Craft Coffee. Michael Horn, the creator of whatisfresh.com, started craftcoffee.com about a year ago to help spread quality, artisanal coffee. Subscribing members to Craft Coffe receive a tasting selection of coffees every month, handpicked by Horn’s team. As the emphasis on the importance of locality and sustainability grows, we all pay a premium for specialized, local and organic, and artisanal ingredients, and Michael Horn is making coffee one such product.

Despite our high respect for artisanal products and the people who craft them, the craft of making coffee often winds up as an afterthought. In New York, there’s definitely a growing market for quality coffee, but the craft of making coffee is still underrated, especially in many restaurants. In a city where everyone is seeking out craft beers, artisan cheeses and homemade pickles, Horn saw an opportunity to introduce coffee and brewing coffee into that realm of specialty products.

Craft sells all fair-trade coffee that comes from roasters all over the United States. Every month they select several coffees to mail to subscribers. The Craft team’s process for tasting coffee and selecting the beans is extensive and in many ways similar to wine tasting.

At the event last week, Jess and I had the opportunity to taste the three different coffees Craft is offering in their holiday gift boxes. Michael’s team of coffee tasters and brewers had laid out some of the foods that they found notes of in each of the coffees. These included some fruits, nuts and also a peanut butters sandwich. Jess and I didn’t get all of that, but we did love the coffees we tried. Hopefully we’ll both soon develop a more sophisticated coffee palette, but for the time being we were happy to walk away with our gift baskets of fresh coffee beans.

You can check out Craft Coffee’s website at craftcoffee.com to learn more about what Michael and his team are doing all over the country to change the way we consider, brew and drink our daily cup of coffee.

© 2011 Jonathan Meter and Jessica Hertle