Home-Cured Bacon

Curing bacon at home is easy, don't tell anyone

Ingredients

2 lb pork belly

1/8 cup kosher salt

1 tsp pink curing salt

2 Tbsp black pepper

2 bay leaves, crumbled

1/4 tsp fresh ground nutmeg

1/4 cup brown sugar, honey, agave nectar, or maple syrup

2 cloves of garlic, smashed

1 Tbsp juniper berries (optional)

5 sprigs fresh thyme (optional)

1/4 tsp red chile flakes (optional)

Procedure

Put everything but the belly and the sweetener in a 2 gallon zip top bag and mush it around.

Add the sweetener you’ve chosen and mush again.

Add the belly and rub it all up, making sure it has good contact with the goodies in the bag. Push all the air out by folding/rolling the bag over the belly, zip the top and put it in the fridge. After a few hours, check it and give it another good mushing, it will be easier this time because the cure will be liquified & the belly will have released some moisture.

I turn the belly once a day when I go into the fridge, but at a minimum, turn it after day 3, but just let it hang out in the fridge for a total of 7 days. 

After 7 days, you’ll notice the belly will be stiffer, it’s cured!

Take it out of the bag and rinse it off. Put it in a 200 degree oven for an hour and a half. 

Congratulations! It’s a BACON!

To cook a lot of slices at once, preheat oven to 400 and lay strips of bacon on a sheet pan. Cook for 8 minutes, then rotate pan and cook 8 to 10 minutes more until crispy and brown and bacony. Transfer to a pile of paper towels to drain.

ProTips

• Pink salt is POISONOUS. For realz, don’t accidentally eat this stuff.
• Pink curing salt is not the same as the pink colored Himalayan salt you find at fancy markets. Pink curing salt is sodium nitrite
• If you have a smoker, swap out the 200 degree oven portion for an hour and a half in there with whatever wood you like (Maple syrup cured works well with maple wood; I like applewood with honey cured bacon; I like pecan wood with brown sugar cured bacon.)
• Google “lardons” and prepare to weep with at beauty that is the lardon.
• Bacon grease is fantastic to cook stuff in, don’t waste it.
• Carve off slices as needed, rather than slicing it all up at once (unless you’re going to freeze it). Remember: less surface area = slower spoilage rate.

Roasted Potato Leek Hash

Leeks are soft, so potatoes, garlic & sweets just added

Don’t relegate this recipe to breakfast only, it’s delicious as a side dish for lunch or dinner too.

Ingredients

1 leek, sliced thinly

1 sweet potato

1 russet potato

2 garlic cloves, minced

Olive oil

1/2 tsp. Salt

1/2 tsp. Pepper

Procedure

Grate the Russet and wrap grated potato tightly in paper towels to get rid of excess moisture. Grate the sweet potato.

Heat oil over medium high, add leeks and saute for a couple minutes. Add grated sweet potato, garlic, and Russet. Saute for 15 minutes, tossing ingredients around very occasionally.

ProTips

Browning occurs when ingredients sit in contact with a hot pan, so move stuff around in your pan infrequently for maximum tasty brownage.

French Toast Bread Pudding

Don't take them out before they're brown or they'll collapse too much, like souffles

This can be made as one big pudding, but the individual ones are very versatile and look more special.

Ingredients: 

(per 2 big muffin tins/4 regular size muffin tins)

1 burger bun, torn into 1” chunks

2 eggs

1/2 c. milk

1/2 c. cream

1 Tbsp. sugar

1/4 tsp. vanilla extract

pinch nutmeg

pinch cinnamon

pinch orange zest

2 Tbsp. raisins (golden is nice)

2 Tbsp. chopped pecans

Warm maple syrup 

Procedure

Preheat the oven to 350.

Butter 2 of the muffin tin spots if you’re using giant muffin tins, or 4 if you’re using regular size.

Put down a layer of bread chunks, then some raisins, then some more bread and top with more raisins.

Whisk the eggs, spices, vanilla, and sugars together in a medium bowl. Add milk and cream and whisk some more. Pour this custard mixture over the bread chunks.

Make sure bread gets moistened completely, cover and weight down the bread a little. Allow to soak for 30 minutes.

Sprinkle pecans on top, and bake for 30 minutes, until brown and puffed.

Allow to cool a little before serving with warm maple syrup.

ProTips

• Be careful when you press down on the bread to moisten that you don’t overflow your muffin tin.
• Make sure these are good and browned when you pull them out. If you pull them out when they’re too underdone, they’ll collapse a lot as they cool.
• Maple syrup is not maple flavored syrup or pancake syrup (basically flavored corn syrups). It comes from a sugar maple tree and has one ingredient: Maple Syrup. Grade B is more flavorful and darker than Grade A- kind of counter intuitive, but I prefer the Grade B syrup.
• To turn this into a dessert, serve with whipped cream, ice cream, or creme anglaise. Melted vanilla ice cream is essentially creme anglaise, that fancy whitish custardy sauce many plated desserts are served with. The microwave and some good vanilla ice cream make a really quick creme anglaise, which is awesome on this bread pudding.
• Variations besides raisin & pecan: dark chocolate chunks and orange marmalade, white chocolate chunks and dried cranberries, cream cheese chunks and fresh berries (blueberries, raspberries and/or strawberries)

Savory Baked Egg in Tomato

With a Tangeringe Mimosa, Roasted Leek Hash,
House-cured Bacon,
and French Toast Bread Pudding

This recipe scales really really well, so if you’ve got family coming for breakfast and brunch, this is a great choice. On the other end of the spectrum, this is an easy, mostly hands off, thing to make for one (or two; hubba hubba!) in the morning.

Ingredients

1 tomato with a fat bottom

1 egg

1 tsp grated Parmesan

pinch salt

pinch pepper

herbs for garnish

Procedure

Preheat oven to 425.

Slice the top off the tomato, and carefully scrape out the pulp, but don’t dig too deep at the bottom.

Sprinkle the insides with salt, pepper, and cheese, turning and shaking, so the cheese gets on the sides too.

Spray a baking sheet with olive oil/Pam and set the tomato on the baking sheet. Crack an egg into the cavity.

Bake for 20 minutes for soft but thick yoks, adjust by 5 mins in either direction depending on how done you like your eggs.

Sprinkle with desired herbs and serve.

ProTips

• Serve these on a bed of hash to soak up eggy tomato goodness.
• If you’re doing a big batch of these, they may take more time. Just check for doneness by jiggling the pan a little.
• Depending on your mood or what you’re serving these with, you can vary these with the herbs you choose to add at the end. Oregano and basil are lovely for an Italian tomato egg; Mexican oregano, cilantro, and chili powder are great for a Mexi egg; thyme and marjoram make a good French egg. Fresh herbs are better, but dry are just fine for this (except cilantro- for the love of all that is holy, never buy dried cilantro. WTF is wrong with you!?)

Tangerine Mimosa

Brunchy goodness

If you like mimosas, shake it up a bit by using tangerine juice instead of the usual orange juice. You can juice your own, or buy a little container of tangerine juice in the produce section of your grocery store. If it’s too tart, add more Chambord.

Ingredients

3 oz. Champagne

1 oz. tangerine juice

splash of Chambord

raspberry for garnish

Procedure

Add to a champagne glass in this order: Champagne, juice, chambord. Garnish with raspberry and drink that sucka!

ProTips

• Use Asti Spumanti (an Italian sparkling wine) for when people think they don’t like Champagne, it’s sweeter.
• Only sparkling white wine from Champagne, France is actually “Champagne.” Everything else is sparkling wine.
• Cava is sparkling wine from Spain and is a good value usually.
• “Brut” means dry, and is pronounced “broot.” The opposite of that is “Sec,” or sweet. “Demi” means “a little.” So “demi sec” on a sparkling
• wine label means it’s a little sweeter than brut. And “Extra Brut” means it’s a pretty tart/dry sparkling wine, with minimal sweetness.

First, locate the teats on your cashew...

I've been buying almond, coconut, and/or soy milk instead of milk for quite some time now. Recently I concluded that making nut milk shouldn't be that hard and googled around for guidance. I think I have this process pretty streamlined, have stuff to say, and am ready to document it, so here goes:

Cashew Milk
Cashew milk is flipping delicious and easy to make, so if you want to try making nut milk, I highly recommend starting with cashew. If you have a kick ass blender (vita-mix, blendtec, etc.) you won't even need a nut milk bag/fine mesh to strain it, because you won't need to strain it at all.

1. Get RAW un-dicked around with cashews. No salt, no whatever else. I buy them in the bulk bin now. You will need about 1 cup of cashews to make 3 cups of cashew milk.
2. Soak them in plenty of water for a few hours or even overnight. You can soak them in the pitcher of your blender, so you don't dirty another thing in the kitchen. 
3. Strain and rinse them off.
4. Add them back to the blender pitcher and add just enough fresh cold water to cover. I use filtered water from my Brita for this.
5. Blend on your blender's juice setting (my Blendtec starts out slow, then beats the crap out of them for maybe a minute and a half on this setting).
6. Behold your cashew cream! Depending on what you're up to, you might need to stop here. More on that later.
7. Add in the rest of the water (up to the 3 cup mark is a good place to start) and put the lid back on securely. I shake the pitcher at this point to basically wash down the sides.
8. Blend again on the whole juice setting.
9. Check it out! It looks like milk! 

At this point it tastes very very neutral, so give it a taste and adjust for the consistency you like. If it's too creamy, just add more cold filtered water. I also like to buzz in a pinch of sea salt, a tiny bit of maple syrup, a tiny bit of vanilla extract, and a tiny pinch of cinnamon. If you go overboard on that stuff, it tastes like Horchata, which is damn awesome, as well.

If you find, as I have, that you'll want to make a 3 cup batch of this every week, I recommend soaking a big batch of cashews all at once, then portioning them out into ziploc bags for the freezer. If you don't want to wait 20 minutes while they thaw a little, they can be zapped in the microwave for 30 seconds when you're ready to make milk, so the whole process from using pre-soaked, frozen cashews takes only five minutes.

Other ideas
Double Honey Nut Cheerios 
Flavor your nut milk with honey and a pinch of salt and pour over your Honey Nut Cheerios. OMG Sweet Jesus.
Honey Nut Semi Freddo
Make honey nut semi-freddo by flavoring the cashew cream with plenty of honey and a good pinch of salt and freezing it. It should be too sweet to eat before you freeze it because freezing dulls the sweetness quite a bit. I stirred it once or twice as it was freezing too. This was amazingly good. I think I'm going to try this with hazelnut cream and chocolate next.
Coffee Cream
Coffee cream can be made by adding less water than when making milk, and can, of course be flavored however you like.
Chocolate Cashew Milk
Mix 1 Tbsp. agave nectar with 1 Tbsp. cocoa powder and a pinch of salt until it looks like Hershey's chocolate syrup. Add a little cashew milk to thin and stir until dissolved. Add more cashew milk until it tastes the way you want.
Delicious Cashew Spread
Start with 1 cup of extra thick cashew cream and add 2 Tbsp. nutritional yeast, chopped fresh herbs, cracked black pepper, and garlic (or any combination of that stuff- this combo tastes a lot like Boursin cheese). Awesome on crackers, crudite, and baked potatoes.

Creamy coffee!

Crepes

This recipe is my favorite crepe recipe because it produces the absolute thinnest crepes AND the batter doesn't need to rest because it doesn't use flour and so mixing it doesn't produce gluten. It's adapted from The Cake Bible and I've used it for years with great success. (Please pardon my bed-head, it was Sunday morning and I'd just rolled out of bed into the kitchen.)

Strawberry jam filled crepe getting dressed with whipped cream; Lemon sugar crepe; Nutella impostor crepe

Ingredients
3 eggs
1 c milk
3 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted
3/4 c cornstarch
1/8 tsp salt


For Sweet Crepes:
1 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp Grand Marnier


For Savory Crepes:
handful of rough chopped fresh herbs
or
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard


Clarified butter for cooking the crepes (just nuke butter until melted and scrape off/fish out the white bits, leaving clear yellow goodness)


Procedure
Place the ingredients (except clarified butter), in the order given, in a blender and blend at high speed for 30 seconds.


Heat a crepe pan on medium-high heat until hot enough to sizzle a drop of water. Brush the pan lightly with clarified butter and pour 2 tablespoons of batter into the center of the pan. Immediately tilt the pan to the left and then down and around to the right so that the batter moves in a counterclockwise direction, swirling to cover the entire pan.


For the thinnest possible crepes, pour excess batter immediately back into the blender with the rest of the batter. So, to recap: Pour in batter, swirl around fast, quickly dump extra back where it came from and return to heat. This should all happen quickly- otherwise, adjust the thing you're using to pour in your batter so you're pouring in exactly the right amount. 1/4 cup measure giving you too much batter in your pan? Try another scooper that's smaller.
Cook until the top loses it's shine and starts to dull and the edges begin to look dry and lacey, about 20 seconds. Use a small metal spatula to lift the edge, check to see if the crepe is speckled with brown underneath, then flip the crepe with your fingers and cook for about another 15 seconds.

I have a blue steel crepe pan. No Really. I use my offset icing spatula for crepes, it's thin and easy to handle.

You can fill them however you like but I like mine brushed with melted butter, sprinkled with sugar and a squeeze of lemon.

Breakfast of Champions!