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.

A Hideously Unphotogenic Tamale Pie

For the past 4 months, I’ve been lying to my fiance. After a catering job, I happened to bring home a huge bag full of leftover tortilla casserole for him to — essentially — burrow into and ravage with a honey badger-like rage. Since then, I’ve been making it myself about every month or so… and for some reason, he’s persisted in calling it “tamale pie.” Our conversations tend to go like this every time:

“Hey, I made tortilla casserole.”

“Tamale pie? Yes!!”

“T-O-R-T-I-L-L-A C-A-S-S-E-R-O-L-E.”

“Tamale pie!”

“Yes. OK.”

This week, I decided to try a new tack: making anactual tamale pie. I rolled over in bed, pulled out my handy copy of America’s Test Kitchen’sSlow Cooker Revolution (just $17 on Amazon, kids!), and thumbed through to their Tamale Pie recipe. It called for such pantry stalwarts as instant polenta (what) and Minute tapioca; I called bullshit, and formulated a plan.

A lot of the recipes I found on the web suggested cornbread batter as the topper on the casserole, which seemed a little too dense for me. And also, wouldn’t that just make it a pile of chili with cornbread on top? Isn’t that just a little… stupid? So I went with polenta, but just the regular kind that you have to simmer for a half hour. If I’m gonna slave over my stove, I’m gonna slave, damn it! (But I can’t turn down a perfectly done rotisserie chicken from Holy Land! Or a jar of Rick Bayless’ enchilada sauce. Or some very seasonal canned beans and corn. Oh no sir.)

All in all, I think tamale pie, while more difficult to make than “tamale pie,” is fucking delicious. The only problem I had with the dish was its appearance. Casseroles are just so hideous. Even the fascistically styled dishes on corporate websites look like abominations of Biblical proportions. Well, ain’t no cure for ugly.

Tamale Pie

• 2 C polenta
• 1 T butter
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 C cooked chicken meats / TVP
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• A coquettish dusting of cumin
• 1 16-oz jar of enchilada sauce
• 1 15-oz can of black beans, rinsed
• 1 15-oz can of (possibly creamed) corn
• 1.5 C cheddar cheese, shredded

Preheat the oven to 375˚F. Cook the polenta in 6 cups of water. Once you get it to a boil, lower the heat and stir frequently until creamy and thick. Add salt and butter if that’s your jam. Spread half of it onto a 9″x13″ baking dish.

Saute the onion and garlic in a 2-quart pan. When vegetables become translucent, add chicken and cumin and lower heat. In about a minute, add enchilada sauce. If the mixture seems dry, add a little water. When the chicken starts to break down, add the beans and corn and turn off the heat. Mix well and ladle into the baking dish.

Spread the last half of the polenta on top of the filling. It’ll be chunky and a little hard to handle, but I just broke it up with my hands. No sweat, it’s going to be haggard anyway. Scatter the cheese on top and bake!

Tater Tot Hotdish

Sometimes I just want to tuck myself into bed with a big, cheesy plate of whatever, only reappearing in polite society on trips to the grocery store for marshmallows and booze. The noncommittal early days of winter are definitely that kind of time. Luckily for me and my bear-like tendencies, the Wisconsin Cheese Board dropped off a ton of cheese samples at work and I’ve been slowly working my way through a wedge of Marieke whole-grain mustard gouda this past week. Mmmhmm.

Last weekend, I threw a shard of my pride out the window and decided to party, Lutheran-style, by making a tater tot hotdish! My earlier foray into hotdishery amounted to a vague kind of thing that wasn’t quite the real deal. I mean, we used cream of mushroom soup, which, given the low standards of Minnesotan cuisine, qualified it as a genuine article. But I wanted to go for something iconic this time.

Instead of using cream of mushroom soup (because I am a stuck-up bitch), I whipped together a Mornay sauce with the aforementioned gouda and some Parmesan cheese. It was great, because then I didn’t have to melt cheese on top of the tater tots, which would have made them less crispy than I wanted them to be. I also went a little farther with the food snobbery and used duck fat as the base for the sauce instead of butter. Honk honk.

Tater Tot Hotdish
Serves 1 big fat fatty or 10 people

• 1 bag of tater tots
• 1-3 lbs. of diced assorted root vegetables (i.e. parsnips, carrots, sweet potatoes, onions…)
• 1 lb. of mushrooms, sliced
• Random herbs (thyme works great, as well as marjoram and rosemary)
• 2 T Duck fat or butter
• 2 T flour
• 1 pint of cream/milk/half and half
• Grated cheese of some kind
• Salt & pepper
• Cayenne pepper

Brown the root vegetables in a heavy-bottomed pan or pot. Once they’re toasty, add the mushrooms and herbs. Put aside.

Make the Mornay sauce by starting a roux with the fat and flour. Scald the dairy in another pan. Once the roux stops tasting like raw flour, stir in the cream or whatever and reduce. Add salt, pepper, cayenne, and cheese to taste.

Spread the cooked vegetables onto a baking dish and pour the sauce over them. Then layer the tater tots on top and throw it all into a 375-degree oven. Once the tots crisp up, you’re done! Easy peasy.

Oven Fries & the February Blues

Rosemary, fresh-ground black pepper, and kosher salt are all I needed just now. Dang. For those of you in more idyllic climes, we poor chumps in Minnesota have been experiencing some crazy low temperatures this week, and, frankly, it’s been getting me down.

Last night I was feeling real whiny, but this morning I decided to do something about it! I cleaned my room (even took some pictures for posterity), walked to Eastside co-op to buy some pantry essentials, and spent way too much time browsing apartment therapy for decorating ideas for my next place. Oh yeah, and made fries.

I don’t know why people and publications are always claiming that oven fries are a difficult thing to do. Or maybe my standards are way too low? All I did was slice up some potatoes, coat them in olive oil and seasonings, and popped them into the oven for a while. Flipped them over after 20 minutes and then forgot about them. When I finally remembered, they were done!

One month until spring… right? I can’t wait for picnics, bike gangs, farmer’s markets, late night carousing, swimsuits, asparagus…

Spinach, Capriko, and Mushroom Pie

Man! Being poor kind of sucks, guys! But somehow I can still manage to scrounge something good up while still keeping an eye on “SALE” tags. Though most of my food comes from the regular cheapo grocery store, there are a few luxuries that I prefer to get at my local food co-op. (In my case, it’s the Eastside Co-op in Northeast Minneapolis.) That would include my rare purchases of meat, all of my cheeses, potatoes, and eggs.

When I was planning on making this pie, the co-op happened to have put Capriko on sale, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try that instead of Emmentaler cheese. Capriko, as it turns out, is an awesomely nutty cheese that is produced by Nordic Creamery, based in Wisconsin. It hit just the right savory notes with the spinach, mushrooms, and paprika in the dish and made it swoon-worthy.

I adapted the recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, and added some things that I happened to have on hand. The crust was made from 6T local unsalted butter + 1.5C flour + 4-5T milk. I didn’t prebake the crust and it was fine. The mixture isn’t super goopy by any means, so it didn’t hurt it at all. Saute the vegetables first. You probably want about a cup-and-a-half to two cups of filling. I used mushrooms, onions, and spinach, but you can do whatever you want. Then I threw some thyme, Dijon mustard, and cayenne pepper into the mix for spice.

I shredded the capriko (you can use any similarly nutty cheese) and layered that on the bottom of the crust. The eggy part was about 3 eggs, 1.5C milk, and 2T flour. Layer the vegetables on top of the cheese and then pour the eggy stuff on top. Bake in a 375 oven for 40 minutes or so until it firms up. Finish with some smoked paprika salt

We fucking demolished the pie in two days. Definitely a record.

Butternut Squash & Rosemary Pizza

I love marinara + cheese pizza as much as the next urban food blogger, but somehow I keep wanting more than that. (And yes, I did make a run-of-the-mill mozzarella and anchovy pizza the next time.) Inspired by my recent liberation of a butternut squash from an outdoors window display, I dug into Vegetarian Planet and made the pizza you see above, which was actually inspired by Didi Emmons’ encounter with a similar pizza at Chez Panisse.

Though my experiences with farming introduced me to many worthy winter squash varieties, butternut is still one of my favorites. Its size and versatility are pretty big advantages in a small kitchen — does anyone really like hacking away at 50 lb. Hubbards, as good as they are? Relatedly, my roommate absolutely hates squash, and the last time she was forced to eat it she cried. What a life I hope you don’t cry when you eat this, dear reader.

Butternut Squash and Rosemary Pizza

• Pizza dough, enough for 2 or 3 personal pizzas
• 2 shallots, sliced horizontally
• 1 medium butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into ¼” slices
• 1 tsp dried rosemary
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Parmesan or Asiago cheese, shredded

Saute the shallots with olive oil over medium high heat to brown them. Add the squash and rosemary and cook until the squash becomes tender, stirring frequently.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and roll out the dough into rounds. Assemble the topping on top of the dough and bake for about 10 minutes. Once the pizzas are done, sprinkle with cheese (or don’t) and drizzle some olive oil 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.