Week 1: Cheesy Cheeseless Scrambled Eggs with ... Oh, Never Mind
This week's recipes from Chrissy Teigen's first cookbook, Cravings, are "Cheesy Cheeseless Scrambled Eggs with Burst Cherry Tomatoes" and "Garlic-Roasted Bacon" (pages 16 and 17). Chrissy's recipes are a fun read. Her introductions are funny as are her instructions. I don't know if you follow her on Twitter but you absolutely should. She is hilarious and her personality is such that you think she's already your best friend even though she has no idea who the hell you are.
I never cook recipes as written. I always modify to suit my taste, caloric needs, etc. I am challenging myself with this project to cook them exactly as the author (Chrissy, in this case) has written them. Immediately when I saw how much oil and butter and heavy cream are being used in the eggs recipe I almost died inside. I usually use maybe half of the fat called for in recipes so I am worried that it will come out too greasy for me. We shall see. Incidentally, I just put the ingredients I'm using into a calorie tracker and the calories for the meal came out to 777 (well, before I add toast and butter, if I do) so I suppose that's as good an omen as one can get if one believes in such things like we are in Las Vegas or something but I don't believe in numerology nor omens.
It's Sunday morning as I'm typing this right now. I got out of bed at a leisurely 9am and somehow convinced my brain to just go to the store right away for weekly shopping. I bought special eggs because Chrissy tells me to. Normally I just buy the $2 eggs at Trader Joe's. Today I think I spent just over double that amount. Still, eggs are a great nutritional and financial bargain relatively speaking. It remains to be seen if the eggs I bought are "the ones with the really yellow yolks." I had a partial package of bacon in the freezer and pulled it out last night. It's the good stuff you buy at Costco.
So, anyway, shopping is done and the kids are psyched to have breakfast for dinner.
Time to cook.
Let me start with my biggest error. Maybe only error, actually, but it's a big one.
I had the wrong bacon.
I mean. It was still bacon. But it was a slab of bacon and not cut so I had to cut it myself. I had used it previously for a recipe so the slab was cut in half horizontally which made for short, thick (sometimes too thick) pieces. So ... yeah. But I had a Tim Gunn moment and made it work which really just meant trying to cut it as uniformly as possible.
Three cloves of garlic on the bacon didn't seem like it would be enough but it was. I don't know if it would have been enough had I had actual thick sliced bacon where a machine slices it and not a rank amateur. I'll try it next time. The flavor was pretty good. (Oops - spoilers.)
The eggs I bought were difficult to crack. The shells were pretty delicate. Here's a photo of how lovely their yellow yolks were:
Oh, yes. I am dumb. Let's just see how yellow the yolks are by cracking them into a yellow bowl! Those specs aren't shells. They are legit egg goo which I can't think about or else I'll never eat eggs again. OK, moving on.
When I took the ingredients photo I left out the salt, pepper, and chives.
Taaa-daaa!!! See: empty spot that's sad because it's waiting for toast.
Verdict:
Kid #1 (the 12 year old) thinks that she would eat this again only "regular eggs, no tomatoes, regular bacon, and toast." So, uh, just scrambled eggs, bacon and toast? Yup.
Kid #2 (the 19 year old) says it was "all right."
I say that the eggs took over twice as long to cook as stated in the cookbook instructions. This is not unique to this cookbook but it is annoying. At 12-15 minutes they were not safe to eat. They were very liquefied still. Chrissy urges in the recipe to keep the temperature low even though the temptation to raise the heat will be high. I kept it low. It took a long time. The cherry tomatoes were great but, as per my usual, I would halve the olive oil requirement. I really liked the tomatoes with the eggs together. The bacon is interesting and I will probably try it again once I have regular bacon. Kind of upset about my bacon mistake but that's life.
Next week's recipe will be Dutch Baby Pancake! I'll make it for breakfast because I don't think having that for dinner is a good idea.
I never cook recipes as written. I always modify to suit my taste, caloric needs, etc. I am challenging myself with this project to cook them exactly as the author (Chrissy, in this case) has written them. Immediately when I saw how much oil and butter and heavy cream are being used in the eggs recipe I almost died inside. I usually use maybe half of the fat called for in recipes so I am worried that it will come out too greasy for me. We shall see. Incidentally, I just put the ingredients I'm using into a calorie tracker and the calories for the meal came out to 777 (well, before I add toast and butter, if I do) so I suppose that's as good an omen as one can get if one believes in such things like we are in Las Vegas or something but I don't believe in numerology nor omens.
It's Sunday morning as I'm typing this right now. I got out of bed at a leisurely 9am and somehow convinced my brain to just go to the store right away for weekly shopping. I bought special eggs because Chrissy tells me to. Normally I just buy the $2 eggs at Trader Joe's. Today I think I spent just over double that amount. Still, eggs are a great nutritional and financial bargain relatively speaking. It remains to be seen if the eggs I bought are "the ones with the really yellow yolks." I had a partial package of bacon in the freezer and pulled it out last night. It's the good stuff you buy at Costco.
So, anyway, shopping is done and the kids are psyched to have breakfast for dinner.
Time to cook.
Let me start with my biggest error. Maybe only error, actually, but it's a big one.
I had the wrong bacon.
I mean. It was still bacon. But it was a slab of bacon and not cut so I had to cut it myself. I had used it previously for a recipe so the slab was cut in half horizontally which made for short, thick (sometimes too thick) pieces. So ... yeah. But I had a Tim Gunn moment and made it work which really just meant trying to cut it as uniformly as possible.
Three cloves of garlic on the bacon didn't seem like it would be enough but it was. I don't know if it would have been enough had I had actual thick sliced bacon where a machine slices it and not a rank amateur. I'll try it next time. The flavor was pretty good. (Oops - spoilers.)
The eggs I bought were difficult to crack. The shells were pretty delicate. Here's a photo of how lovely their yellow yolks were:
Oh, yes. I am dumb. Let's just see how yellow the yolks are by cracking them into a yellow bowl! Those specs aren't shells. They are legit egg goo which I can't think about or else I'll never eat eggs again. OK, moving on.
When I took the ingredients photo I left out the salt, pepper, and chives.
Taaa-daaa!!! See: empty spot that's sad because it's waiting for toast.
Verdict:
Kid #1 (the 12 year old) thinks that she would eat this again only "regular eggs, no tomatoes, regular bacon, and toast." So, uh, just scrambled eggs, bacon and toast? Yup.
Kid #2 (the 19 year old) says it was "all right."
I say that the eggs took over twice as long to cook as stated in the cookbook instructions. This is not unique to this cookbook but it is annoying. At 12-15 minutes they were not safe to eat. They were very liquefied still. Chrissy urges in the recipe to keep the temperature low even though the temptation to raise the heat will be high. I kept it low. It took a long time. The cherry tomatoes were great but, as per my usual, I would halve the olive oil requirement. I really liked the tomatoes with the eggs together. The bacon is interesting and I will probably try it again once I have regular bacon. Kind of upset about my bacon mistake but that's life.
Next week's recipe will be Dutch Baby Pancake! I'll make it for breakfast because I don't think having that for dinner is a good idea.
Looks delish!
ReplyDeleteI did really like the tomatoes with the eggs.
Delete