Brunch bounty

I just felt creative this morning. So, over the course of an hour and a half, I cooked breakfast. Which wound up being brunch.

Blurry photo of NS’s egg sandwich, because the camera decided it wanted to shoot it on 1/4 second, and I could not make it do otherwise.

Actually, I started cooking breakfast about 10:30, which is about normal on Sunday morning. I fried bacon. The plan was the standard bacon, eggs, tomatos, and I had avocados. But I wanted a starch, particularly after I decided NS’s breakfast would include his everything roll I’d gotten at the market yesterday and some cheese, to make him an egg-and-cheese sandwich.

I didn’t want to take the time to make gluten free bread. I didn’t have the right kind of potatos to do hot smashed potatos, and I didn’t feel like peeling and dicing to fry some. And then I rememberd some rice tortitas I’d made ages ago, that were pretty good, so I figured I’d cook some rice and try those.

This necessitated me cooking some rice, first; fortunately, my rice-cooker does that job quite handily in about 15 minutes. I seasoned the rice-and-water with some salt and, just for the hell of it, some za’taar before I closed the lid and hit “cook.” Meanwhile, I sliced and drained a tomato, and made some guacamole, as the avocados were a bit too far gone to just dice.

My breakfast. I finished off the tomatos and guac, but left most of one egg.

Dumped the cooked rice over into a bowl, let it cool a little, and added two beaten eggs. It didn’t show much promise of holding together, so I made a mistake; I added some buckwheat flour, maybe a quarter cup, to bind it a little.

Bad move. The buckwheat made it dry and crumbly, so I wound up adding another egg to get it back to the consistency it needed to be. And then the buckwheat pretty much overwhelmed the rice and spice (heh…ain’t that cute….a rhyme) and made the cakes heavy. I won’t do that again.

So I scooped up heaping soup spoon sized scoops of the mixture, and gently eased them into hot canola oil (I have a stove that has the High, 1-8, Low and Simmer settings for the stovetop, and I cooked it on 8). I used my spatula to herd up the stray bits of egg-coated rice, and let them get good and brown on one side before I flipped them, with great trepidation.

Surprise! They held together nicely.

This was one of the hardest things for me to learn in the kitchen. When you’re pan-frying anything, you want to put it in the pan and LEAVE IT ALONE for at least three or four minutes (unless, of course, it’s an egg, and more on that later), until it turns loose from the pan. THEN, and only then, can you flip it without it screwing it up. I wish I had a dollar for every fritter, every burger, every breaded anything I ever tried to fry that I tore all to hell trying to turn it before it was ready to turn. I’ve learned it won’t burn nearly as quickly as I think it will.

Anyway, I made the tortitas and put them on the rack to drain. A cup of uncooked rice turned out about a dozen of them, 2 inches across and maybe 3/4 of an inch thick, for measuring purposes. Then I turned my hand to the eggs.

As my friends on eGullet call it, the “money shot.”

I have been buying duck eggs from the market, because there is nothing in the world any more luxurious than a duck egg fried in a mixture of truffle oil and butter. It’s the epitome of the most magnificent egg you ever had. The problem is that the duck eggs, due to their size, have an excess of white, and it makes them hard to flip. So I decided to try a technique I’d read about on eGullet.

I heated my truffle oil and butter on 2 on my stovetop, and I cracked my eggs into the skillet. When the white turned opaque, but not set, I added about 2 tablespoons of water, turned the heat up to 4, and put a lid on them; cooked for two minutes. Did not flip.

Perfect. Absofreakinglutely perfect. Especially as I used a biscuit cutter and cut off much of the excess white, which Lucy happily ate.

Here’s a recipe for the tortitas, omitting the buckwheat flour. Don’t be tempted to add anything.

• 2 cups cooked rice, seasoned with salt and whatever other seasoning you wish, and cooled
• 2 beaten eggs

Stir the eggs into the rice. Ease mounded spoonsful into a skillet with 1/4 inch hot oil. Fry until golden on the bottom, flip and brown the other side.

You could add chopped chives or green onions or garlic or whatever you wished to the egg-rice mixture; if I’d'a thought of it, I’d'a gone out back and trimmed some chives.

So now, replete from breakfast that wound up being eaten for lunch, I’m going to work on the house and get ready to have ribs and veggies for the chillun tonight. You and y’mama ‘n ‘em are still welcome to come help and have a rib.