Grits was one of those odd discoveries. I wasn’t sure what this odd-looking, grainy gruel was that people were eating at Waffle House. I didn’t have the nerve to try it at first. I was content with my waffle and hash-browns, thank-you-very-much. But it was served as part of the All Star Special. I hate wasting food so I had to at least make an effort. One bite told me that there was something there… some possibility for a delicious breakfast. I haven’t looked back.

MMMMmmmm.... cheese grits. Thick and tasty and cheesy.

You and I both know that Waffle House isn’t going to be the best example of any kind of cooking. (Though I have no complaints. You know exactly what you are going to get when you go there. And I would love to have one of their waffle irons.) But it did open a window to the possibility that grits had an important role to play.

Every now and then I crave a good bowl of grits, cheese or plain. That slightly salty, slightly gritty, warm breakfast dish is a great cure for a rough night out. It’s easy to eat and helps build up your appetite so you can get back on your feet. Even if you haven’t had a rough night, grits can be a wonderful treat. I certainly didn’t make this batch after a rough night and I still managed to thoroughly enjoye them. If you get the urge for grits, go for it. It’s slightly more complex than a bowl of cereal, but immensely more satisfying.

I'm hungry for grits again. I'm going to go make some more.

Now, before my mom calls me to berate me for saying that she considers American cooking “a horror”, she doesn’t. Well, she mostly doesn’t. She doesn’t eat at most fast food restaurants and generally isn’t the biggest fan of the heavy soul food that I have come to appreciate, but she is open to trying almost anything. I can say with certainty she won’t like these grits–but that has more to do with the fact that she can’t stand milk or cream (but loves cheese). So, Mom, don’t yell at me, s’il te plait.

Cheese grits
Makes about 2 servings.
Ingredients
1 cup milk
1 cup water
1/2 tsp table salt
1 cup cornmeal (coarse ground is ideal, mine was yellow corn, hence the yellow-orange hue)
black pepper
2 tbsps butter, unsalted
2 oz cheddar, shredded (the sharp cheese also helped make it orangy)

Directions
1. Combine the milk, water, and salt into a medium pot. Place over medium-high heat to bring to a boil. Stir occasionally to help break up any skin that might form on the surface and to make sure the milk doesn’t burn on the bottom.
2. Once boiling, slowly pour in the cornmeal while whisking. Whisking while adding the cornmeal helps prevent lumps forming. Cover, decrease the heat to low, and cook for about 20 minutes. Remove the lid to stir every 2-5 minutes to prevent lumps forming.
3. After the mixture becomes thick and the liquid has all been absorbed and add some freshly cracked black pepper and the butter. Add the cheese, about a third at a time, mixing in each batch before adding the next one. Serve in warm bowls.

Waffles for breakfast. If you had a dog named Waffle, he could eat the leftover waffles. Waffles eating waffles.

It’s kinda frightening that I spent the entire first paragraph of a food blog talking about dogs instead of food. I do like waffles though. Even when it’s not referring to the name of a dog. These waffles are great to make on short notice. You likely already have all the ingredients and there isn’t much work to do to assemble it. I’ve made these almost as often in the morning for breakfast as I have… well, I guess it’s technically morning if you are still up after a night of drinking…

There isn’t anything unusual about these waffles. They are your standard crispy exterior, light and fluffy interior Belgian-style waffles. This recipe is adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. Bittman has a few variations on waffles, but each time I make this I just make the “Quick and Easy” variety. I’ll sometimes add in a handful of nuts or berries to make things a bit more exciting, but I haven’t heard many complaints about regular waffles.

Quick and Easy Waffles
Adapted from Marc Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. It’s a great book.
2 cups AP flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsps sugar
3 tsps baking powder
1 1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
4 tbsps melted butter (cooled)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Optional: 1/2 to 1 cup of nuts, berries, chocolate chips or any other add-in

Directions
1. Begin preheating your waffle iron.
2. In a mixing bowl, combine the milk, eggs, butter, and vanilla. Combine the dry ingredients (flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder) in another large mixing bowl, then add the milk mixture to it. Mix until combined.
3. If you have a non-stick cooking spray, spray the waffle iron with it, otherwise brush it lightly with vegetable or canola oil. Add a ladle full of batter to the waffle iron (check the directions for your waffle iron). Bake until the waffle is done, it should be golden brown and free itself from the waffle iron without too much trouble. Some waffle iron have timers or lights, but it should take at least a few minutes (3-5 minutes).

It's just waiting for you to add the syrup and butter.

MMMmmmm... I even made more biscuits the next day to eat with the left over fried chicken.

There are many, many variations on biscuits. I’ll get around to making a few different kinds, but this time I wanted something easy, quick to prepare, and not greasy. I was looking for light and fluffy drop biscuits. No rolling or cutting rounds out of the dough needed here. Just mix the ingredients together and plop the dough in individual piles onto a pan. Done and done.

I like using a combination of shortening and butter to get both a light texture and a good flavor. The other addition for flavor is to use buttermilk as the binding liquid. Actually, there is more to buttermilk than just flavor. The natural acidity in the buttermilk helps act as leavening agent when combined with the baking powder and baking soda. Science works!

These may not be as pretty or uniform as biscuits prepared with a biscuit cutter, but I like the craggy, rustic-looking nature of these.

One thing I have learned living in the South is that White Lily flour is essential to getting the best biscuits. No science backing this one up, just good ol’ southern tradition. Using the self-rising White Lily flour is a great standard and lends some fantastic results if you just follow the instructions on the back of the package. I accidentally picked up the non-self-rising White Lily flour, so I had to add my own leavening. You can use other brands of all-purpose flour, but be careful with the protein content. High protein, which is essential for gluten formation, is all kinds of bad news for southern-style biscuits. Not good, people. Not good. Don’t even try to make these with cake flour. In fact, if you have some cake flour, consider using about 1/2 to 3/4 cups less of the regular all-purpose flour and replacing it with the cake flour.

A word of caution before use these biscuits as a base for your sandwiches: These are kinda crumbly. These light and fluffy biscuits are not like the dense, high-fat kinds that are common for biscuit sandwiches. Don’t let it get in your way though, it didn’t pose too much of a problem. Besides, I think I prefer these to the denser kinds. They are much less greasy and have a wonderful buttermilk tang to it. I’ll make some denser rolled and cut biscuits another day. Until then, the ease of these will likely make them my go-to biscuit for the time being. (Besides, I have a bit more buttermilk to use up!)

Light and fluffy biscuits
Ingredients
2 cups sifted flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 tsp sugar
2 tablespoons butter, unsalted, chilled
2 tablespoons shortening
3/4 cup buttermilk, chilled

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 475F.
2. Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar together.
3. Cut in the butter and shortening. If you have a food processor, just whir it together a few times until it looks like cornmeal. I don’t have a food processor, so I just try to work the fats into the flour using my fingertips. Try to work fairly quickly so the fats don’t melt too much.
4. Add the buttermilk and stir to combine. It will be a gloopy mess, that’s fine, these are free-form, messy drop biscuits.
5. Try to make about 6 evenly sized biscuits on a sheet pan and place into the oven. Immediately increase the heat to 500F and bake for about 10 minutes, until the tops of the biscuits have become golden and some of the craggy peaks become browned.

Scrambled Eggs

Glad to be back after a school related lapse.  I will be continuing my trek through the Good Eats episodes with scrambled eggs from the first Egg Files episode.  After going through life with mediocre scrambled eggs, I jumped at the opportunity to try a recipe different from my parents’ recipe.  As it turns out, the key to great scrambled eggs is to induce steam and fold them instead of stirring them.  This allows for a perfectly light texture that is still moist.  That brings me to the main lesson of scrambled eggs: if the eggs look done in the pan, they will be overdone by the time they make it to the plate.  This means that your eggs should still look moist when you serve them to the plate, because they will continue to cook.

So even if you think you don’t like scrambled eggs, I would urge you to give this recipe a try.  Maybe you were like me and had mediocre scrambled eggs all your life.  This recipe is simple, and once you get the guidelines you can do it without a recipe on hand.  So give this recipe a try, and the next time you have guests for breakfast, you can wow them with the best scrambled eggs they’ve ever had.

Eggs with a Side of Bacon

Important Notes:
1.  Research done by Cooks Illustrated demonstrated that adding salt to the egg mixture before cooking yielded a more tender finished product.  I add a little bit per egg, and people can add more to taste if necessary after cooking.
2.  This recipe can be adapted to any number of eggs, the guideline per egg are listed in parentheses below.
3.  Depending on the amount of eggs you want to use a different sized skillet, so the eggs won’t take forever.  Here are some rough guidelines: 1-3 eggs (8-inch), 4-8 eggs (10-inch), 8-12 eggs (12-inch).  This allows for the eggs to be better distributed throughout the pan, otherwise the curds take forever to form (see below).

Curds

Ingredients:
4 eggs
4 teaspoons to 3 tablespoons of milk (Between 1 teaspoon and 1 tablespoon of milk per egg)
4 pinches of salt (1 pinch per egg)
A small pat of butter

Beginning to Fold the Eggs

Almost Finished

Directions:
1.  Whisk the eggs, milk, and salt in a small bowl.
2.  Heat the butter in a 10-inch nonstick skillet over medium heat.  Add the egg mixture and stir occasionally until you see curds (see picture).
3.  After you begin to see curds, turn the heat up to medium-high and shake the skillet (slide forward and backward on the burner) to make steam.
4. Begin to fold the eggs intermittently between shaking until the eggs begin to coagulate more and most of the liquid is gone from the pan.
5. Serve the eggs immediately onto a plate (remember you already added some salt, so taste them before salting).

Rolled Spinach and Cheese Omelettes

My original plan was just to scramble some eggs and keep it simple. Then I remembered that I had some ricotta and Parmesan in the fridge. I also had some chopped frozen spinach in the freezer that I tossed into the microwave to thaw. As I went outside to pick some parsely I realized that my plans were quickly snowballing out of control.

Making things worse, I wasn’t going to be satisfied with a regular omelette (or omelet? Wikipedia says omelette, so I’m sticking with it). Folding it in half is so predictable. Maybe rolling it is cliché, but I have never had a rolled omelette, so I felt cool coming up with the idea.

Feel free to add anything you want to your version, bits of bacon, ham, vegetables… Keep in mind that these omelettes are thinner than regular ones, so rolling large or chuncky things would probably just cause it to tear. I’m happy with how this turned out, especially because I wasn’t even trying to do anything original when I started. In the end this was more complicated than scrambled eggs, but still easier than a real omelette.

Spinach and Cheese Omelette

Ingredients
3 eggs – 1 per omelette
milk – a splash per egg, about a tablespoon per egg
salt and pepper
frozen chopped spinach
olive oil or butter
any cheeses on hand: ricotta, Parmesan
parsley (for garnish) (Now that I have a plant of this stuff I tend to toss it everywhere.)
salsa

Directions

1. Break three eggs into a mason jar, add a splash of milk and a pinch of salt, cover and shake–presto scrambled eggs.
2. Put enough spinach for three omelettes (about 2 tablespoons per omelette) into a bowl and microwave until warm.
3. Heat a large non-stick skillet over medium heat until hot. Add a splash of olive oil (~1 tsp) (or butter for more awesome taste) and swirl to coat the skillet.
4. Add about one third of the egg mixture and swirl to coat the skillet. This will be a thin omelette, that’s fine. Let it cook until it sets, this will happen fairly quickly (~1 min). Flip it as soon as you think it has set enough to handle.
5. Spread about a tablespoon of ricotta, a teaspoon of Parmesan, a few cracks of black pepper and a good pinch of the spinach over the open omelette. Transfer to a large plate.
6. Once on the plate roll the omelette into the spiral you see below and repeat steps 4-6 with the other two omelettes.
7. Serve with the salsa and some chopped parsely. Enjoy your breakfast.

Spinach and Cheese Omelette

Bacon

Cooking for Engineers has two articles about the many many ways to cook bacon. Oven-bake, oven-broil, microwave, grill, and pan-fried are all covered. To me, the oven is the best way of making bacon. I have used Alton Brown’s Good Eats method before with success and wanted to see what a longer slower cooking time yielded. (If you look at AB’s recipe, he shows you how to cure the bacon and everything, I just buy my own and skip down to the end where he says to put it in the oven.)

AB calls for putting the bacon on a cooling rack set into a baking pan into a cold oven. Then turning the oven to 400F and cooking for 12 to 15 minutes (from the time you turn the oven on, not from when it is preheated). This is good and quick.

Bacon

Cooking for Engineers takes a different approach to the oven method. Long and slow. You preheat your oven to 200F and use the same bacon-on-a-cooling-rack-in-a-baking sheet as AB. This method takes a lot longer. Three to four hours long. But hey, if you don’t have anything to do for a while or want to make bacon to reheat in sandwiches or something later, this is the way to go. I actually prefer this method for a number of reasons. It seems to render more fat from the bacon. The fat that is rendered is pure bacon fat. Pure white in color. No burnt bits in it. The bacon is great for saving and using later.

So if you have time, I say go with the long and slow oven cooking. If you want bacon faster, go with the higher temperature oven method.

Bacon

Ingredients

Bacon

Recipe (slow method)

1. Set oven to 200F.
2. Place a cooling rack into a rimmed baking sheet. Lay the bacon on top of it. Place in oven.
3. Cook for 3-4 hours. If you like softer bacon, take it out after about 3ish. If you like crispier bacon, take it out after 4ish.

Recipe (faster method)

1. Place a cooling rack into a rimmed baking sheet. Lay the bacon on top of it. Place in oven.
2. Turn the oven on to 400F.
3. Cook for 12-15 minutes. If you like softer bacon, take it out after about 12ish minutes. If you like crispier bacon, take it out after 15ish minutes.