End of the Month Eggs on Toast

The Limerick Edition

First, the limerick:

For this, our new culin’ry quest,
We’ve cooked up some eggs, as you’ve guessed.
We took bread for this vittle,
And carved out the middle
And behold, we’ve got Eggs in a Nest!

Next, a bit of bonus free-form poetry, ala Geisel, with a brief nod to our favorite food nerd:

Eggs in a Nest, Eggs on a Hat, Toad in a Hole, (what’s up with that?)
Eyehole Sandwiches, Hole in One, Eggs in a Basket are second to none!
Secret Eggs, Egyptian Eggs, everyone begs for Gashouse Eggs!
Add tomatoes, red and gory, you’ve got Eggs in Purgatory!
The only constant is the bread, with a hole in the middle for the eggs to bed,
So carve your bread and add your treats,
Eggs in toast are sure good eats!

Next, a recipe:

Bonus artsy photo of Chopper Dave at work:

And last, and most likely least, a bonus culinary “Nantucket” limerick which has nothing at all to do with eggs:

A hungry young monk from Nantucket
Was strolling the beach with his bucket.
When far from his cloister,
He cried, “Look! An Oyster!
If I had a knife I could shuck it!”

Day 6202.
Dear Diary, Platelicker still torments me at every turn. I’ve taken to climbing the wisteria to the upstairs balcony and hiding for long hours at a time just to keep her annoying, wet nose far far from my person.

And now, insult added to injury: My captors spent yesterday evening concocting a dish using buttermilk and eggs and heavy cream, and (despite my yammerish demands) they have not shared a single drop of it with me!

It began thusly: Friday morning, they read the ingredient list for this month’s Paper Chef on Tomatilla. I should note that I also read the ingredient list at this time, as I was curled up in front of my female captor’s computer, attempting to tip the tea mug over in hopes that she would buy a more ergonomic keyboard. (I could curl my body around the old one; this one is just so… flat.)

The ingredient list:
Medjool Dates (eh, too gooey for my aging teeth)
Eggs (do they not realize how sleek and silky my coat looks after I’ve eaten a raw egg? Where, I ask you, where are my raw eggs? Don’t just feed them to me when you run out of cat food!)
Honey (I’ll skip this one. Too reminiscent of that time I licked my female captor’s arm after she applied Ben Gay to a sports injury.)
And, lastly,
Buttermilk. (BUTTERMILK! A delectable blend of butter and milk. The best of all possible worlds. Oh, my scrumptious liquid of joy… feed me, feed me… WHAT? I don’t get ANY of the BUTTERMILK???)

Yes, sad to say, I did not get any of the buttermilk. Nor the eggs, nor the heavy cream, nor the white chocolate (which I am certain I would love if they’d just give me a chance), nor even a nip of the rum.

The rum, I should add, that prompted many murderous thoughts in my feline brain:

Redrum… Redrum….REDRUM!

But, I digress.

I’d hoped for a tasting opportunity when my male captor devoted himself to creating something that resembled a rather delicate and less noxious cow pie out of chocolate meringue, and my female captor left the confines of the house to pick salmonberries for the dessert’s garnish, but no. The parfait itself was snugly poured into a soup can and safely ensconced in the freezer (hah — in their desperation, my captors could not find a proper dessert mold and so this — their culinary pride and joy — will have telltale ridges! If given the chance I would scrawl “Friskees” on it with a fore-claw).

The kitchen counters were now bare. I could not even scour the floor for remnants of the process. Platelicker lurked at every turn. All I could do was wait.

Minutes ticked by. Then an hour. At long last, my male captor removed the parfait from the can, and the two of them proceeded to ruin the monument of creamy goodness with silly garnishes of rum-soaked dates and salmonberries. I should note my one small victory: I managed to distract them long enough to forget the additional garnish of dark chocolate curls. Hah-HAH!

Still, it looked quite impressive. I thought: This means something.

It means tasty goodness. It means a delectable blend of sweet date, tart berry, and cream, cream, luxurious cream, but what it did not mean was this: food for The Cat.

No, agony and woe, my male captor devoured the dish in three minutes flat.

And Platelicker got to lick the plate.

I will, some day, exact my revenge. Just you wait. Next time they pull out the heavy cream and the buttermilk, I tell you this now in all secrecy: It’s hairball time.

Blueberry Sky Tart

We don’t mean to, but we seem to be bouncing from event to event these days with barely time to think of just plain ol’ regular posts here on Belly-Timber. This horrendously busy week is no exception. I’ve got a few starts kicking around here somewhere, but the only thing we’ve time to finish is our entry for this month’s Sugar High Friday.

I’m a bit clueless when it comes to tarts. Mention tarts, and I immediately think of something rectangular you pop into the toaster, or of something with high heels, sequins, and a half-guzzled bottle of Boones Farm Strawberry Hill. Maybe it’s my lack of tart pan in the kitchen, but then again, it could be the beeline I make for chocolate any time I’m near a dessert tray. Either way, tarts just aren’t on my usual culinary radar.

So, I left the initial tart brainstorming entirely up to Chopper Dave and pondered mundane things, like would the local gourmet store have tart pans that don’t cost a bundle, and would this dessert be pretty, dammit?

Turns out we didn’t need a tart pan. Chopper Dave’s been on this meringue kick, and it’s yet to end. This incarnation: Meringue tart crust.

Our choice for fruit: blueberries. I had this brilliantly silly notion that we’d make the whole thing blue. Blue-tinted meringue, blueberries… (Okay, they’re purple, but hey, work with me here.) The idea: A cloud of blue meringue, and on top of the berries, another cloud, this one silver and puffy and all of spun sugar. On our trip to the grocery store, after I relented and agreed to expand the color palate, we found the final element for our firmament: Star fruit. The blueberry sky tart was ready for construction.

Of course first we had to endure a few near disasters. Meringue, we learned the hard way, does not do well inside tart pans (yes, the local gourmet store had ‘em). Chopper’s second attempt worked much better: He baked a tart-sized meringue cookie, then just collapsed the middle to make a bowl for the fruit.

Near disaster number two wasn’t so bad or so disastrous, but it did involve the discovery that one should be prepared for flying hot things when one is attempting to photograph spinning sugar. Also, one should keep the dog away.

Two final key points of instruction:

When placing spun sugar on top of blueberry filling, do wait till the filling has cooled or the spun sugar will be pretty for all of about three minutes.

Also, it helps if you’ve charged your camera’s batteries in recent history.

(Quick panic, then, spun sugar yanked off of hot berry filling, tart tossed in fridge, batteries thrown in charger, second cloud of spun sugar made and set aside. Wait, wait, wait, hope the day’s light doesn’t fade because photographing desserts at night sucks rocks, and one hour later…)

“You can eat this one,” Chopper Dave says, setting down a fork. “No dairy.”

I check the playback feature on my camera, decide I’ve got some decent shots, then indulge myself in a bite of blueberry sky tart.

One bite, and holy crap, they don’t call it Sugar High Friday for nothing. And here I thought last month’s Sweet Fleet was over the top. This one’s stratospheric. Chopper Dave puts it on a dessert menu? Dentists will picket.

But hey, it’s pretty, and I’m all about pretty when it comes to desserts.

Excuse me. I’m going to go brush my teeth now.

Eggs. Eggs?!? Any kind of eggs? Good lord, that’s like cutting me loose to write a lullaby and assigning the London Philharmonic as backup. The possibilities are endless. We could get seriously carried away, here.

At least, that’s what I thought at first after reading this month’s IMBB theme announcement from Seattle Bon Vivant. I had visions, see. Visions of grandeur involving salmon roe floating atop a soft boiled quail egg, resting inside a hollowed out hard boiled duck egg. Egg inside egg inside egg. A veritable Russian nesting doll d’oeuf. It would be glorious.

Then (our first trauma), Chopper Dave had to remind me that soft boiled egg yolks are slippery, and the salmon roe would probably glumph into oblivion two seconds after contact. Damn. So much for this week’s crazy idea.

And then (a second trauma), we couldn’t find a single duck egg at this week’s farmer’s market.

And then… Well, not exactly a trauma, but the simple fact that we had a huge box of regular old chicken eggs in the fridge and we really needed to be making some headway on them. (Huge sigh of disappointment. This could get boring.)

So, on to plan B: We’d use just chicken eggs (and not even farm fresh eggs at that, alas), but we had to make something that would still feature the shape and the shell of the egg.

Like single serving soufflés, served in the shell.

Or, as Chopper dubbed it…

And, I might add, know what you’re going to serve them in. We didn’t at first, and when Chopper Dave pulled the muffin tin out of the oven and started talking about photographing quickly while the soufflés still had a bit of height, it suddenly hit me: We don’t own egg cups.

I glanced around the kitchen in a panic, and a glint of copper caught my eye on an upper shelf. Well, he is calling it armor, after all, and armor is typically metallic, and those cups could look like they were made for eggs and not for Turkish coffee, right?

Right. I mean, what’s another day in the Belly-Timber kitchen without the usual healthy dose of last minute improvisation?