Baked Eggy Breakfasts

I love having eggs for breakfast. Lately it has been difficult for me to eat anything but eggs for breakfast. In the interest of variety and health, I force myself to eat cereal a couple of times a week.

Eggs can be so much more than scrambled or hard-cooked. I got more excited about cooking eggs ever since I saw an episode of Cooking for Real on Food Network with Sunny Anderson. In the episode, Sunny made Huevos Rancheros, which is a general term for eggs served Mexican-style, usually on tortillas with salsa, and served with re-fried beans, avocado, or pretty much any other Mexican side normally reserved for lunch/dinner. I'm not 100% positive what an authentic Mexican breakfast would be, but I don't think Sunny's main goal was to be authentic with her recipe. All I can tell you is that it's delicious.

Instead of frying the eggs like regular Huevos Rancheros, Sunny has them baked in ramekins with Mexican flavors. As you can see in her recipe, she makes a salsa and a bean puree, but basically you can use your favorite salsa recipe, or whatever leftovers you have on hand!

Here are some huevos waiting patiently in their ramekin to be topped with the rest of the ingredients, as in Sunny's recipe.




I would recommend layering the following inside a ramekin, from bottom to top: a tortilla (cut to fit inside the ramekin) with re-fried beans spread on top, two eggs (cracked right in there!), salsa (either pico de gallo or tomatillo), cheese (if you please), and then topped off with another cut tortilla with re-fried beans (this time bean side down). Then just brush the top with melted butter and bake for about 35 minutes in a 350 degree oven. After it comes out of the oven, you can even top it with more salsa and sour cream for a gorgeous and delicious presentation.

The success of my first attempt at
baking eggs in a ramekin inspired me to experiment with other combinations, like mushrooms and onions with cheese, and tomatillo salsa instead of tomato. You can even bake eggs in halved bell peppers, just be careful not to overstuff them, because the eggs will expand in the oven. Baking eggs, whether in an edible or non-edible vessel, makes not only a deliciously filling breakfast, but also a beautiful presentation if you are trying to impress someone.


I hope you will embrace the non-fried egg as a breakfast staple!

The Omnivore's Dilemma: a natural history of four meals

I recently finished reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, after hearing about it from so many people. The premise of the book seems simple. Pollan attempts to answer the question, What's for dinner? The evolution of our food system in the last fifty years or so has made answering this question much more difficult because there is so much to consider: the moral implications of what we eat, the vast year-round diversity at the supermarket, how cheap it costs (our wallet, our bodies, and our environment), how fast can it be prepared, organic vs. conventional, and the fat/sugar/carb content. Pollan considers these aspects to be part of our national eating disorder.

To attempt to figure out how this came to be, Pollan follows the food chain for four specific meals, which each represent a category of a meal. The four meals are:

1. A fast food meal. Pollan specifically looks at a McDonald's meal eaten with his family in their car.
2. An organic industrial meal. An assortment of organic fresh produce and processed food from Whole Foods.
3. A pastoral grass-fed meal. Pollan spends a week at a Virginia farm called Polyface operated by Joel Salatin.
4. A foraged and hunted meal. Including a wild boar and foraged mushrooms.

Pollan thoroughly dissects every aspect of each meal, offering valuable information to help answer the questions, What am I eating, and how did it get to my table?

I could continue to describe the book in more detail, but hopefully at this point you want to read it for yourself. I highly recommend it. It will change the way you look at food. Even for those people who feel annoyed at the organic and vegetarian movements, Pollan is very reasonable and doesn't offer a simple solution to food issues. More than anything, this book will make you better aware of the food system that so often keeps us uninformed.