Rice Bowls, for Breakfast?! Absolutely!

Though the bacon, egg, and hash brown plate once held an iron grip on my heart, I’ve since rediscovered an old flame: the rice bowl. When I was a picky little kid, my grandmother would make me bowls of rice with shredded cold cuts on top, which I would bathe in Maggi (not soy, but it is like crack cocaine for Vietnamese people) sauce. As I got older, breakfast got a little more mobile: toaster confections frosted with negligible amounts of nutrition, hard-boiled eggs, giant bagels with cream cheese. On weekends, my mom would make us scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, and I would construct sandwiches (ancestors to the Breakfast Banh Mi) out of the whole spread. I would add Maggi, of course.

Eating “American” worked out well enough for me because throughout grade school, I felt really self-conscious about eating food that could be easily marked as “Asian.” Many Asian Americans that I know have memories of being teased at school for their “stinky” bagged lunches. Their parents would pack them whatever leftovers were available, so sometimes that meant ma po tofu or tea eggs or rice noodles with fish sauce. Sometimes that meant food that stupid kids could assume was made of stray cats, and they would accuse your family of getting their groceries at the animal shelter.

To avoid the shame of stinky food, I brought Lunchables. These days, I’m much more appreciative of the palate I inherited. The lunches that I now pack for work tend to stink up the whole office, and I’m more than happy to share a few bites with my coworkers.

It also helps that my lily-white husband will literally eat anything I put in front of him, no matter how weird it smells. He loves the rice bowls that I whip up for our breakfasts, and is way more into those than American-style brunch foods like French toast (ick) or eggs benedict. (But I will forever cherish a good Bloody Mary.)

When I make rice bowls, I usually just grab whatever’s in my fridge. As soon as I can tear myself out of bed, I microwave some rice, fry up some meat and vegetables, chop up herbs, and poach a pair of eggs. Past bowls have included: sesame-fried Church’s chicken with nori and kimchi; Chinese sausage (lap xuong) with scallions and bok choy; and kale, onions, and carrots with oyster sauce. A warm, steamy rice bowl is so comforting in the morning, and its flavor beats the pants off of the one-note, typical breakfasts that many Americans are used to eating.

I have a lot of leftovers from making banh xeo, so this morning I sauteed some ground chicken with a handful of bean sprouts and a few dashes of Maggi. For the vegetable component, I picked purple mint leaves, sliced a cucumber, and chopped green leaf lettuce. Just a splash of nuoc cham and a dollop of sambal oelek, and there’s breakfast!

The Best Breakfast Sandwich In The Universe

Feast your eyes, my friends: the best breakfast sandwich. Ever. I call it… the breakfast banh mi.

I’ve been eating this for days on end, and I think we’ve reached a point where it has been fully optimized and further customization is meaningless. There are a lot of components that make this great, and which add a ton of complexity to it. There’s the vinegary hummmm of the homemade carrot and daikon pickles; the spicy pop of Sriracha sauce; the war between the buttery eggs and salty/crispy lạp xưởng (Chinese sausage); the Maggi sauce soaked into toasty French bread; and the welcome coolness of cilantro. None of the ingredients are redundant, and work together to get you moaning and picking up the crumbs with your fingers.Ahhh.

At this point, I can’t even imagine my life without this sandwich. Everything else just pales in comparison. Sex? Alcohol? Bicycling? They’re all ranch dressing compared to the world-shaking twists and turns of breakfast banh mi!

And here’s a philosophical side question: can you have a banh mi without pate? Definitely not if it’s the classic version. But in this case, the pate and the eggs would generate a textural disaster! (Too bad, since I have a can of foie gras that’s burning a hole in my refrigerator.) When you create a dish, you generally want to avoid similar textures. Otherwise, the diner comes away from it with an overpowering sense of its softness (or brittleness, or whatever). I do, however, use mayo in this sandwich, just because I like the taste and it doesn’t overstep its boundaries too much.

Breakfast Banh Mi

Fry up some slices of lạp xưởng in oil. When they crisp up, set them on a paper towel and plate to drain. Pour off the excess oil from the pan. Add sliced green onion to the pan, and saute on low heat . Once it’s lightly cooked, add two whisked eggs and scramble with the sausage. Set aside.

Warm up a sandwich-sized piece of baguette in a toaster oven or oven oven.

Assemble! I like to go (from bottom up) eggs, Maggi, carrot and daikon pickles, Sriracha, cilantro, mayonnaise, and even more Maggi.

Pot Roast Ramen

Breakfast this morning!

Homemade pork ramen stock, Cantonese noodles, soy- and mirin-marinated pot roast with mushrooms, spinach, and a poached egg on top.

Farm-Fresh Vegetable Tamales

He carries tamales,
And a few maize ears…
And out in the pond,
There is no salamander,
Nor frog nor fish
He would not devour

– Mateo Rosas de Oquendo

This poem, by a 17th Century Spaniard in Mexico, denigrates tamales as the food of the lower class mestizos. I quoted it in a paper that I wrote about the colonial Mexican culinary scene to stir up my professor, who was half-Mexican. The paper was basically like, “Mexican food rocks! Spaniards were assholes!” It seems like all of my papers end up like that.

The fact that tamales are still around despite Spanish efforts to eliminate them from the Mexican diet speaks to how appealing they are. Making them definitely has to be a community event — otherwise, that mountain of corn husks ain’t getting filled any time soon. I found a recipe for the dough at Veggie Num Nums, and improvised the filling. We didn’t really have meat or cheese, so this time the filling is vegan.

Another thing we did differently was the corn husks. Traditionally, you use dried out corn husks, but we had plenty of fresh ones to use. I asked Rick Bayless on Twitter (yes, yes) if that was kosher and he said it’d be fine. They made smaller tamales but the green husks made a pleasant contrast to the yellow tamale dough.

Sitka, one of the kids at the farm where I worked, helped us out. The poor kid might have had swine flu, but he promised that he washed his hands before assembling the tamales. Hahahaha! I’m not sick yet, so I think I should be fine. (Famous last words…)

Tamale Dough (Lifted from Veggie Num Nums)

• 2 cups masa harina
• 1-2 C stock
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 C olive oil, frozen (I didn’t freeze mine and it was fine.)
• salt
• chili powder

I kind of threw everything into a food processor until it got doughy, and that seemed to work fine. Remove to a bowl. That’s all!

Vegetable Filling

• assorted sweet peppers
• onions
• chili powder
• olive oil
• corn

Saute until the peppers and onions become tender. Throw everything into the food processor and chop up. Cut the kernels off of the sweet corn and put aside.

To assemble, spread a tablespoon or more of the dough onto a corn husk. You can use several different methods, which are outlined here. I used the first one because I thought it was the cutest and most simple. Once you fill the husks with dough and filling, steam them for about 20-40 minutes, depending on their size. The dough should firm up quite nicely.

What Dreams Are Made of

Flour, vegetable oil, water and salt. Well, shit.

During her time at Grinnell last semester, my anarchofreegan doom metal friend Emily instituted Tortilla Tuesdays, nights when she would make mounds of tortillas by hand in exchange for attendees’ fixins. Before then, I had never even contemplated making tortillas. It seemed like something that should be left solely to the specialists.

But it’s so simple! It’s like trying really hard to figure out what to get your mother for Christmas and settling for a generic candle that’s she’s kind of OK with when you could have just asked her in the first place. In the end your mother thinks you don’t love her. This is the same thing.

The recipe is so easy that I’m going to write it down from memory right here:

Flour Tortillas

• 2 C flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 C vegetable oil
• 3/4 C boiling water

Combine the first three ingredients in a bowl and mix them together while the water boils. Make an indent in the mixture and pour the water in. Mix it with a spatula for the first 30 seconds or so until it cools down, then use your fingers.

Once it gets to be the consistency of dough, roll it into little balls with a 1-inch diameter. Set them down in a baking tray or something and cover with a cloth for 45 minutes. Once their time is up, roll out each one to your desired thickness and toss ‘em onto a hot skillet. I believe the cooking time is 20 seconds, flip, 10 seconds, flip, 10 seconds and you’re done. [Edit: Actually, Emily corrected me on this one. It's 10/20/10 seconds.]

They come out really nice and chewy, just how I like them. And you can top them with pretty much whatever — Emily likes them with peanut butter and jelly, or you can go for more Mexican-inspired things.

This guy over here has homemade refried beans, guacamole and salsa. Fuck yeaaaahhhh these are so good when you’re drunk!

Breakfast the Morning After

Ooooh, victory tastes so good. While the Obama campaign did lend itself to the donut-and-bacon combo, that wouldn’t have been enough to keep our hangovers at bay. I wonder, what kind of puppy is Barack going to get the kids? Thanks to you, America, I can spend my morning thinking about the First Puppy rather than mulling over desperate plans to live off the grid. America’s cool again!

My victory breakfast consisted of garlic-and-rosemary fried potatoes, an overeasy egg, locally produced bacon (not pictured) and green onions sauteed in bacon fat. Oh baby!

Also, some additional news: I’ve started contributing to another blog that has absolutely nothing to do with food! On the Freesound blog, you’ll find a series of interviews that I’m doing with bands and musicians on my college campus. If you like my writing here, you might like this stuff? I’m still updating The Kitchen Bitch though, so it’s ok if you don’t care about music so much!

Egg-in-a-basket? Toad-in-a-hole? Popeye Eggs?

I was having an argument with my friends the other day regarding what the proper name for this dish was.  I called it “eggs-in-a-basket,” someone else called it “egg-in-the-hole” and another person called it “eggs-in-a-hat.”  There doesn’t seem to be any other dish that is as challenging to talk about as this one; whenever you bring it up people are going to be wondering what the hell you’ve been smoking, to be calling it such a strange name.  For simplicity’s sake, I’ve decided to start calling it “toastily eggcellent.”  That just about covers all the bases.

 

Toastily Eggcellent

• 1 slice of bread
• 1 egg
• butter

Do I even need to write directions?  It’s pretty straightforward.  Aw hell, why not?

 

Using a glass or something similarly cylindrical, cut out a circle in the slice of bread.  (You can totally use the leftover bread circle to sop up the egg yolk if you’re into that shit.)  Put a little bit of butter in a skillet over medium heat until it gets bubbly.  Throw the bread onto the skillet, let it sit for about 30 seconds and crack the egg into the hole.  Let it chill for a bit, at least until the bottom of the egg is cooked firm.  Flip it over and cook it to your liking.