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:
© 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:
© 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:
For the Toasts:
Slices of bread of your choice, toasted
Radishes, sliced
Watercress, picked and cleaned
Process:
© 2011 Jonathan Meter and Jessica Hertle
Join our mailing list and get our monthly updates.
Contact Us | Terms of Use | Trademarks | Privacy Statement
Copyright © 2009 Bite Sized. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress and WordPress Theme created with Artisteer.