I have something of a crush on Marion Cunningham. I love her Lost Recipes book and I often flip through my edition of Fannie Farmer, just to read her down-to-earth, wise words about cooking (and by extension, family and home). She is on my list of food writers with whom I would love to sit and talk (I would do most of the listening), as she has experienced the entirety of the modern-day food revolution.
Last Saturday, I found myself in a used bookstore and as I skimmed the food section, Cunningham's The Breakfast Book nearly jumped off the shelf and landed straight in my hands. At $4.50, it was a bargain and I do believe that it will pay dividends for years to come. It is chock full of recipes that work for everyday morning meals (the Cereals section will help you happily shake up your basic oatmeal routine) as well as ones that are better for special brunches and holiday celebrations (Featherbed Eggs on page 159, a baked dish of bread, custard and cheese that is similar to a Strata, is destined for my next festive brunch).
The Quick Breads section alone makes the book worthwhile, especially since that section is filled with recipes that appeal to people trying to increase their whole grain intake (I can't wait to try the Buttermilk Barley Biscuits). I realize that I've waxed poetic about a great many cookbooks and that you all can't possibly incorporate all of them into your collection. However, if you are a particular lover of breakfast, this is a book you must look over.
When pressed to determine which is my favorite meal to prepare and eat, I will always admit that I love breakfast above all the rest. What other meal allows you combine sweet with savory in the same way as that morning meal? This looks like a particularly good breakfast, with french toast, fruit and sausage. Thanks to Superape for adding your image to the Slashfood pool!
Today is National Eggs Benedict Day and man, do I wish it were a weekend so I could have some runny-yolked goodness for brunch!
Traditional Eggs Benedict is simply poached eggs on a round of Canadian bacon perched on a split English muffin, covered in a soft yellow blanket of hollandaise. But, as brunch.org (I love that "brunch" deserves its own "org!") points out, there are lots of great variations. How would you like some Country Eggs Benedict (poached eggs and sausage gravy over ham on a biscuit) or Eggs Maryland (poached eggs and hollandaise over crab cakes) or Eggs a la Commodore (poached eggs and Béchamel sauce over foie gras puree on buttered toast circles).
I thought ya'll might care to know that the World Grits Festival kicks off today in St. George, South Carolina. The three-day festival will include grits grinding demos, a grits eating contest, corn shucking competition, and a "rolling in the grits" contest (ages 15 and up. Is that anything like "rolling in the hay," I wonder?).
The festival website features grits recipes like savory grits pies, syrup n' bacon grits, and deep fried grits and cheese. While I'll devour a plain old dish of grits with butter and salt any day, my favorite grits recipe is shrimp and grits, an old coastal Carolinas favorite. I like to fancy it up, stirring grated sharp white cheddar into the grits and topping with handfuls of crumbled bacon, chopped chives, caramelized onions and fresh fat shrimp sauteed in butter and garlic. Serve it with biscuits for brunch or try it with a green salad for an easy but elegant Sunday dinner.
When I was growing up, once every eight weeks or so, my dad would surrender to our cajoling, drag out the waffle iron, and create some of the best waffles. Even the waffles I now make for myself (still on a every-other-month schedule) just don't compare. However, I think that I've discovered a waffle that might just best my dad's fare, as these waffles look crisp, have good, deep wells (all the better to hold your maple syrup) and also contain raspberries. Be still my heart.
This image comes to us from Meliass and she's got the recipe up on her blog, The Boastful Baker (her recipe also comes from her dad. Are waffles a father thing?).
So, I've gotta hand it to Starbucks. Its new site, My Starbucks Idea, is actually...well, a good idea. You sign up and simply type in a suggestion that you think the coffee chain should adopt, and post it to the site. You can also view others' advice, and vote on ones you think are worthwhile.
Then - and this is the kicker - someone from the corporation actually reads the ideas and even puts some of them into practice. Several of the ideas on the site are currently "under review," like the suggestions for implementing frequent buyer punch cards, or for implementing free Wifi access in every store (obviously, many city locations already have WiFi service).
I'm also surprised at the quality of the suggestions. Though I'd imagine that the site is highly monitored to eliminate the crazies (or, for that matter, Starbucks haters), many of the responses are actually decent and well thought-out. And some, on the other hand, are flat-out hilarious: one poster calls Starbucks' music "pseudo-intellectual," "over-produced" and "noisy garbage," while another requests that the music in his local store be turned down, so that when he's "making a business call, it doesn't sound like I'm calling from a public place." Um...isn't that what your home and office are for?
Hmm...so I guess suggesting "STOP EXPANDING YOUR CHAIN!" would probably get flagged, huh? Just a thought.
In the world of frozen food, the one frozen meal that has always perplexed me is the frozen breakfast. Why? Why do we make breakfast from the freezer?! Of all the meals in a day, breakfast is quite possibly the easiest one to make "from scratch." Heck, how hard is it to pop two slices of bread into the toaster? And yet the frozen food aisle has an entire section dedicated to frozen eggs with bacon, frozen breakfast sandwiches, frozen oatmeal. What is so difficult about making oatmeal that we have to turn to the frozen stuff?!
However, there is one frozen breakfast item that gets an excuse: the frozen waffle.
Waffles, you see, are not all that convenient to make. They're not difficult, but they do require the preparation of a batter as well as their very own, uni-jobber piece of equipment, a waffle-maker. A frozen waffle, if you find the right one, will not be anywhere close to as good as homemade, but are probably the least lame of the frozen breakfast foods. (About frozen pancakes, we are a little less forgiving because you don't need a special gadget or tool to make pancakes.)
Let's be real here. Going out for breakfast is a luxury because no other meal costs more for what you get. However, even during these recession times, the luxury of going out itself is best had at breakfast because a $9 plate of eggs and toast is still cheaper than a $20 dinner.
Justification for my love of breakfast dining aside, Men.Style.com has culled together a list of the 15 Best Places in America for Breakfast. I've not been to most of these places (obviously, since who has time to travel that much?!?!) but I was glad to see that some place in Los Angeles made the list. Of course, the best place in LA for breakfast is Toast, in my opinion. Take a peek at the list and if your city was left off, what's the best place for breakfast in your neck of the woods?
During my middle school years, I was totally and completely addicted to Tetris. I played every afternoon when I came home from school and when I closed my eyes at night, I still saw the pieces falling into place. Truly, the only reason I don't still play obsessively is that I don't have a program that runs on my current computer (and I'm planning on keeping it that way).
However, a friend emailed me a link today that has me rethinking my position on Tetris. How can I not love how it has been reinvented using waffles in place of the colored blocks! It makes me consider pulling out my own waffle iron and making a game board on my own.
As mentioned in a recent post, maple syrup prices are soaring due to high fuel oil costs and a shorter season due to climate change.
But if you want to indulge your maple syrup-tooth right now, and happen to be in the Angelica, New York vicinity (about two hours from Buffalo), try Cartwright's Maple Tree Inn. The Cartwrights, a family of longtime maple syrup producers, began serving pancakes and syrup for a few weeks during the harvest season in 1963. They've been selling stacks of buckwheat pancakes ever since, to tourists from as far away as Germany and Japan. The restaurant is only open for two months - from February 12 through April 13 this year. How's that for local, seasonal eating?
The Cartwright's pancake recipe is a family secret, but here's a link to The Minimalist's Pancake Primer - his ricotta pancakes are killer (in case you can't make it to Angelica before April 12).
We're in the thick of the maple syrup harvest season right now, but high fuel costs will likely lead to price increases of around 30 percent, according to an article in the Boston Globe.
Fuel prices - sugarmakers use fuel oil to boil the harvested sap into syrup - combined with already low syrup reserves from several poor harvest seasons are driving up retail prices. Warmer winters due to climate change have shortened the season, causing historically low output. Plus, there's an increased demand for maple syrup as consumers grow increasingly hip to its superiority over the faux corn syrup-based pancake syrups.
I wasn't always a breakfast person. That's changed in the last few years as I've discovered how much better I feel after having a substantial breakfast. Unfortunately, there are some tough choices to make. Most traditional breakfast foods are either all carbs or high in fat, or so it seems. I know there are good choices too, but the bad ones seem easier.
A researcher at the University of Illinois is working on changing that. She is on the tail end of creating a cereal made with as much soy protein as can be packed into it without having off flavors or textures. Apparently those are common problems when working with soy. The cereal also passes the FDA test to claim high fiber and high protein. The developer also worked to make the cereal low in fat.
Sounds great to me, if it tastes good. The researcher says that while it does need to be tweaked, the cereal has compared well with other healthy cereals already on the market in taste tests.
Well, I don't even know if this cereal will ever happen or if it's real in the first place. I do think it sounds promising, though. So what do you think? The perfect breakfast or ...something else?
Millions know Kellogg's Corn Flakes as a relatively healthy breakfast cereal. However, did you know that when it was first invented (on March 7, 1897), it contained no sugar (rendering it tasteless and bland) and wasn't designed to constitute a whole meal, but simply complement a variety of foods?
Created by Dr. John Kellogg, he had intended to serve it solely at his sanitarium, but his brother Will saw the potential in the flake of corn and began marketing it heavily. This caused a rift in the family, that culminated in a legal battle between the two brothers. John won and Corn Flakes went on to become one of the best-selling breakfast cereals of all time.
Though invented sometime in the late 19th century, Eggs Benedict is still, in my opinion, the ne plus ultra of brunch foods. But a lot of people (including myself) are put off by making hollandaise and poaching eggs. Well this twist on the classic brunch dish, from Bon Appétit, does away with the hollandaise, replacing it with a gorgeous but unintimidating chive oil. Prosciutto takes the place of Canadian bacon and asparagus adds a springy touch. Serve over traditional English muffins, or skip them in place of something else. We had these for brunch at my parents' this morning (thanks, Dad!), over cornmeal biscuits.
Egg-poaching tips: adding a little vinegar to the cooking water helps the egg white to solidify faster, cutting down on feathering. Make sure the water is simmering, not boiling, when you put the eggs in - vigorous bubbling will break the whites. And use the freshest eggs you can; they spread less.
Next week I'm starting a new job that requires that I actually leave my house in order to do the work. It's going to force me to change my routine fairly significantly and one of the things I'm going to have to do is get a whole lot more organized about food. I've never been good about making time to eat breakfast in the past when I've done the 9 to 5 gig and so I've been pondering ways to make it easier to ensure that I eat something in the morning.
One thing I'm planning to do is bake up a batch of Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies (my mother's recipe is after the jump). I could go buy myself a box of breakfast bars, but when you make them yourself, you can control what goes into them, ensuring that they are lower in sugar, fat and chemicals than the ones you buy ready-made.
Okay Slashfooders, now it's your turn. How do you make sure that you eat a fairly healthy breakfast each day?
Have you ever stashed a Coke in the freezer, hoping to chill it quickly, then forgotten all about it, only to have it explode all over your frozen peas?
I have something of a crush on Marion Cunningham. I love her Lost Recipes book and I often flip through my edition of Fannie Farmer, just to read her down-to-earth, wise words about cooking (and by extension, family and home). She is on my list of food writers with whom I would love to sit and talk (I would do most of the listening), as she has experienced the entirety of the modern-day food revolution. 
As mentioned in a 
We're in the thick of the maple syrup harvest season right now, but high fuel costs will likely lead to price increases of around 30 percent, according to an article in the 
A fraking amazing Battlestar Galactica cake
Iced Tea 101
Pierogies + cheese + onions + kraut = Parmageddon!
