Fresh Tart

I saw a recipe for this bread on the terrific blog Against All Grain. As I've noted before, I find eating even gluten-free grains inflammatory (and with a bigger carbohydrate punch than I can get away with, unless I want to gain weight and feel exhausted...). You could call this way of eating Paleo, but I do fear that people have come to believe that a Paleo style of eating means gnawing on huge amounts of bacon, which isn't true at all. Paleo really just refers to eating the whole, unprocessed foods that humans evolved healthfully to eat for most of our existence - greens, roots, nuts, fruits, eggs, and free-range animals. Grains, sugar, and dairy are avoided (some people tolerate dairy better than others, although it's worth noting that when one gives it up for a month and then reintroduces it, it's common to notice low energy and congestion and perhaps even stomach cramps). I do eat legumes in small quantities (per my quinoa cake recipe below). Healthy, naturally occurring fats - olive oil, coconut oil, avocados, grassfed animal fat, nuts/nut oils (not vegetable oils/margarines or transfats) - are not limited but in fact make up the primary source of calories. (Even though I try not to eat loads of cheese, I do still eat butter and ghee/clarified butter).

I find it an incredibly delicious and satisfying way to eat and it has certainly done wonders for my health. Eating carbohydrates in the form of vegetables, nuts, and small amounts of fruit (particularly fresh berries) instead of processed grains and sugars is the path to appetite control, glowing skin, and steady energy.

I'll take all of those, straight up, thank you.

That's a long introduction for how I came to make this bread! So here it is: I follow Against All Grain on Facebook so when Danielle (the blog's lovely author, with a compelling story of how she manages ulceritive colitis with a grain-free diet) posted photos of a grain-free bread that looked like BREAD I had to give it a go. The bread is primarily raw cashew butter, eggs, and a bit of coconut flour. I'm tempted to call this a cake - a pound cake in particular - more than a bread, but I must say that it makes AMAZING French toast, the way that challah or brioche does. I could easily imagine adding citrus zest to the mix or icing a warm loaf with the cinnamon butter glaze from Roost blog's (another terrific grain-free site) pumpkin donut recipe. Needless to say, I think this is a clever recipe that can be adapted any number of sweet or savory ways. That makes it a winner in my book! (Find Danielle's recipe here.)

I made the French toast pictured with eggs and hemp seed milk and topped it with crushed blackberries (quite terrific right now) sweetened with a bit of maple syrup, courtesy of my friend Kathy Yerich's maple trees. My belly is pleasantly full of grain-free French toast, it's going to be more than 70 degrees today, and I'm off to judge a butchering competition at Whole Foods Lake Calhoun.

Yes.

Happy spring-y weekend! xoxo

I couldn't eat much of anything this terrible, sad weekend, but as my desire to cook has slowly returned, I'm turning to comfort foods. I made pan-seared steaks with a dried-and-fresh-mushroom pan sauce and it was just really nice to serve John and Nathan one of their favorite meals.

I made a good amount of the mushroom sauce with savory French toast in the back of my mind. If you only enjoy French toast for breakfast, you're missing out on a terrific and fast lunch or dinner. I used gluten-free bread for the pic (and my stomach), but if I could eat gluten I'd use challah. Any type of bread works nicely, though, really what you have on hand. Because that's the point - savory French toast is a filling, comforting base for leftovers of almost any type, on the table quickly.

If you're not a mushroom fan, try spinach sauteed with garlic, perhaps with a spot of sausage in the mix as well, perhaps with a pinch of red pepper flakes. Or thin slices of ham and a spoonful of braised beans. Or roasted squash and fried sage leaves. Or in the summer, slices of ripe tomato and crispy bacon. (Best. Thing. Ever.) French toast is rich, so a touch of acid and a shower of black pepper strike a delicious balance.

In case you ARE a mushroom fan, the sauce below is a terrific finish for any pan-seared meat that leaves lovely, crusty drippings behind: chicken, steaks, lamb, venison, veal, pork. Just stir the completed sauce into the hot pan juices, scraping the pan while simmering for a couple of minutes. That's it. However, the sauce is also rich and flavorful on its own, thanks to the beauty of dried wild mushrooms. And sherry. And butter.

Yes.

Savory French Toast with Mushrooms
Serves 2

Mushrooms
1/3 c. dry sherry
2/3 c. water
1 oz. dried porcini mushrooms
6 oz. fresh mushrooms, quartered
4 Tbsp. butter
salt
1 clove garlic, minced
squeeze of fresh lemon juice
few gratings of fresh nutmeg (optional)
1 Tbsp. minced fresh herbs (thyme or tarragon or whichever you like best; optional)
1 Tbsp. heavy cream or sour cream (optional)
freshly ground black pepper

French toast
2 eggs
2/3 c. milk or half-and-half
pinch of salt
4 slices bread (challah, country bread, sandwich bread, gluten-free, any type works)
2 Tbsp. high heat oil (sunflower or safflower)
2 Tbsp. butter

For the mushrooms:
Combine sherry and water in a medium saucepan and heat over medium heat until hot (steaming). Add dried porcini mushrooms to the pan and remove from heat. Let sit for 30 minutes, stirring the mushrooms a couple of times, until mushrooms are soft. Using your hands, scoop mushrooms from the liquid and squeeze excess liquid back into the pan, reserving the liquid. Coarsely chop mushrooms and set aside.

Heat a large skillet over medium high heat. Add fresh mushrooms to the pan, along with a generous pinch of salt. Stir around so the mushrooms are coated with butter, then let them be for a few minutes until they start to brown. Give them another stir, add the porcini mushrooms and garlic, and saute for another 5-7 minutes until the whole pan is browned and glaze-y.

Pour the porcini soaking liquid into the skillet of mushrooms, leaving the sediment that will have settled to the bottom of the saucepan behind. Simmer for 3-4 minutes to thicken the sauce a bit. Stir in the squeeze of fresh lemon juice (to taste). Stir in optional nutmeg and/or fresh herbs and/or cream or sour cream and season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Set aside and keep warm.

For the French toast:
In a pie plate, beat together the eggs, milk, and pinch of salt. Heat oil and butter in a large skillet over medium high heat. When hot, dip both sides of the bread in the egg/milk mixture and add to the hot pan. Fry bread until golden brown, then flip and brown the second side. Transfer French toast to plates and serve immediately with warm mushrooms.

When I was a little girl, I thought I'd really be a grown-up when I could eat soft-boiled eggs for breakfast, just like my dad. I was fascinated by the way he carefully tapped the top off with a knife, then sprinkled salt & pepper inside before scooping spoonfuls onto bites of seriously buttery toast (we are a buttery family). I only liked the whites of eggs at that stage of my life, so I was too apprehensive to tackle a whole egg for myself, but the elegance of it all definitely motivated me to learn to like the yolks, too.

And oh have I learned, ha! If you cut me open I'd bleed egg yolks at this point in my life. I kind of forgot about soft-boiled eggs for awhile, lured by the sexiness of poached (it feels very impressive when you first learn to poach an egg, even though it's the easiest thing in the world), but they are very much back in my rotation, especially during tomato season. It's hard to imagine a more humbly glorious breakfast than slices of perfectly ripe tomato, hot buttered toast, and a soft-boiled egg or two. The addition of smoked pork (ham or bacon) would be lovely but not necessary.

Recipe for Perfect Soft-Boiled Eggs at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

My son asked me this morning, "Hey, what's that crumbly cinnamon stuff you put on top of muffins? Make that, like, all the time." Streusel! Yes! We are a family obsessed with streusel. When I was a little girl, I asked my mom if she could make a whole pan of just streusel, skipping the coffee cake part. (She said no.) When my sister was in the early days of a modeling career, her then-boyfriend baked a streusel coffee cake for her and was shocked to discover she'd eaten the entire thing while he was away at work. Two sticks of butter plus a cup of sour cream, strutting down the runway - nice!

If your family also swoons over cinnamon-brown sugar-butteriness, baking the coffee cake as individual muffins is one way to encourage sharing. We're big fans of the little Buddha coffee cakes at Lucia's, which gild the lily with a drizzle of icing, so I do the same. You could skip that step, though, and enjoy the muffins as is, preferably warm, with a cup of coffee, on a tray with a little bouquet of flowers, served to you in bed by a seriously cute kid (or two, or more).

Happy Mother's Day!

Recipe for Cinnamon Streusel Muffins at TC Taste/Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

Bacon, caramelized onions, double cheese, and eggs. This works on so many levels.

Recipe for Bacon & Onion Tart at Andrew Zimmern's Kitchen Adventures/Food & Wine Magazine.

Somehow on my trip to Provence this summer I completely missed socca, or chickpea flour pancakes. I'm a little bit obsessed with them at the moment, hot off the griddle, topped with nothing more than a grind of black pepper. That's how they're served in Provence, as a snack, wrapped in paper, meant to be washed down with ice-cold rosé.

OK!

But they make terrific breakfast/brunch food as well, served as a savory pancake topped with a fried egg and garlicky spinach. Last year I posted a recipe for just one pancake as the perfect base for a fast lunch of leftovers. I declare that a crispy, savory pancake can transform any ho hum leftovers into something sublime.

And then, if you're home late from a holiday party, craving a new twist on grilled cheese, do this: Smear two pancakes with harissa, press haloumi cheese into the middle, and griddle for a few minutes to warm through. Seriously the most perfect after-celebration food ever.

Recipe for Socca (Chickpea Flour Pancakes) with Fried Eggs & Spinach at Dara & Co./Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

This pancake is meant to be served with a dusting of confectioners' sugar, which is lovely, but I'll be honest...a generous drizzle of Sapsucker Farms maple syrup, with a tidy pile of crispy bacon, is a very, incredibly awesome way to usher in fall.

For my gluten-free friends, I did a little experiment using gluten-free, all-purpose King Arthur flour and the pancake puffed up nicely and was quite delicious. Do it!

Recipe for Dutch Apple Pancake at Dara & Co./Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

I bought the loveliest local blueberries at the market last week, as plump and pretty as as my Grandma Meyer. I got them home, popped a handful in mouth because I'm greedy, and was shocked to discover...sour! Oh so sour!

So I dumped them into a saucepan with some (not too much) sugar and turned them into a quick, warm sauce that tastes great with almost anything, sweet or savory. We've so far spooned the sauce over yogurt, pork tenderloin, raw nuts, soft cheese...

...and crepes! Recipe for Crepes with Warm Blueberry Sauce at Dara & Co./Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

Gluten-free note: I did a crepe test run with Bob's Redmill Gluten-Free All-Purpose Flour at 11:30 pm tonight - yep - and they worked beautifully! So...adapt away. Don't forget to eat them with butter!

Recipe for Bacon Jam at Dara & Co./Minnesota Monthly Magazine.

Shauna - aka Gluten-Free Girl - tweeted over the weekend about a fun project she thought up for today.  She invited food bloggers anywhere and everywhere to post about The First Thing They Ever Cooked.  When I saw her tweet, I smiled and sent myself a reminder email titled, "Buttermilk Pancakes!" (That's what I do these days, email myself reminders, sigh.)

As if I'd forget about pancakes!  I spent the first nine years of my life completely obsessed with the little butter delivery vehicles, and while I don't eat them so often anymore, they hold a warm, fluffy place in my heart.

While my mom, my stepmom Susanna, and my Grandma Meyer taught me how to cook - or even better, let me learn how to cook - my dad was actually the pancake maker in our family.  He flipped pancakes most Sunday mornings on a big electric pancake griddle.  In the winter he'd make them in the kitchen, but in the summer he'd set up the griddle outside on the patio, and Stacey and I would chow down at the picnic table, hair bleached from living in the Lakefield swimming pool, mosquito-bitten legs dangling from our favorite summer pajamas (that's me with the short hair).  The skillet would ping as it cooled down, the perfect accompaniment to the carbs flowing into our veins.  Those were nice days.

When all the Meyers would gather at Dickerson's Resort on Lake Florida, my dad would make pancakes for the crowd.  I was an annoyingly picky eater as a child, with a small appetite, but pancakes, yeah, I would always eat pancakes.  My dad would hand me a stack and I'd get to work tucking butter slices between each layer, all the way to the top.  After a generous pour of Aunt Jemima syrup, I was ready to dig in, melted butter and thick syrup pooling together in a sweet, glossy frame.  Mmmm...

One year I made the mistake of eating 20 pancakes in one sitting.  I was utterly, disgustingly stuffed, but that wasn't the problem.  My error was packing that many away in front of all of my cousins, man, I've never heard the end of it.  My grandma said, "She's about to grow," and she was right (of course).  I shot up four inches that summer.  The Power of Pancakes.

The recipe my dad followed was on the back of the Bisquick box.  The first version I made, however, The First Thing I Ever Cooked, was from The Betty Crocker Cookbook.  I was up early one weekend morning, and hungry for pancakes (shocker), so I decided to make them on my own.  My dad had let me flip them before, and my grandma had let me crack eggs and measure flour for cake batter.  I felt ready to fly solo.  We were out of Bisquick, so I leafed through the cookbook and found a recipe for buttermilk pancakes.  There was no buttermilk in the fridge, but there was a note in the recipe about how to create a buttermilk substitution by adding vinegar to milk.  Worked like a charm.  I made several pale, crinkled cakes before I got brave enough to 1) turn the griddle heat high enough, and 2) flip the pancakes with some confidence, but I eventually found a groove.  After I'd amassed a passable stack, I started tucking butter, pouring syrup, and digging in.  They were good.

And I was off and running.  I taught myself to stir in chocolate chips and other goodies.  I liked them really thick and fluffy...until I discovered crepes.  Lovely, eggy crepes, filled with berries or bananas, or nothing at all (but a pat of butter).  I made pancakes so often that I finally got tired of them.  True.  And a little sad.

These days, I still make pancakes for myself and for my son, but I don't tuck butter slices between each pancake.  I stir whole grain flour and flaxseeds into the batter, and often add a scattering of blueberries just before flipping.  Sometimes I layer the hotcakes with cottage cheese for added protein and staying power (very tasty, I highly recommend).  If I use syrup at all, it's real maple syrup - sorry Aunt Jemima.  I still love pancakes, but I guess that learning how to make them myself ended my obsession.

Although this version, from The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham, threatens to reignite my passion.  These pancakes are tender, fluffy, and completely delicious.  Despite the whole-wheat flour, they are light as air, yet sturdy enough to hold blueberries or nuts if you're so inclined.  I spooned on some of the strawberry-rhubarb compote I had in the fridge, which I wouldn't have touched as a kid, but I added maple syrup too.

And a pat of butter on top, for old times' sake.

What's the first thing you ever cooked?  (Note: here's the compilation post that Gluten-Free Girl put together, listing the entries of everyone who responded.  Excellent reading, there are so many talented writers out there!  And lovely food memories...)

Buttermilk Pancakes
From The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham
Makes 14, 3-inch pancakes

Note: The batter holds well in the refrigerator for several days.

1 c. buttermilk (I use a bit more, more like 1 1/4 c.)
1 egg
3 Tbsp. butter, melted
3/4 c. all-purpose flour (or 1/2 c. whole-wheat flour, 1/4 c. all-purpose flour)
2 Tbsp. ground flaxseeds (optional)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda

Put the buttermilk, egg, and melted butter in a mixing bowl.  Stir briskly until the mixture is smooth and blended.

Stir the flour, flax seeds (if using), salt, and baking soda together in a small bowl so they are well blended.  Stir into the buttermilk mixture only until the dry ingredients are moistened - leave the lumps.

Heat a skillet or griddle to medium hot.  Grease lightly and spoon out about 3 Tbsp. of batter per pancake.  Spread the batter with the back of the spoon so it is thinned out a little.  Cook until a few bubbles break on top.  Turn the pancake over and cook briefly.  Keep pancakes warm until enough are cooked to serve.