What to do with homemade English muffins

October 3, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

(Besides eating them with butter and jam, of course.)

One of my favorite ways to enjoy an English muffin is in eggs benedict with soft poached eggs and lots of hollandaise sauce. However, in my experience, making hollandaise at home can be a bit of a pain – you need a lot of egg yolks, a ton of butter, and a fair amount of patience, which I don’t always have in the morning when I’m craving a decadent breakfast. So instead, I like to make cheese sauce to smother everything with. It’s not exactly eggs benedict anymore, but it’s delicious.

My Dad taught me how to make this cheese sauce and pour it over eggs. I like to add sautéed mushrooms because it reminds me of mushrooms and cheese on toast, which is another of my favorites. Other good things to layer under the poached eggs include ham or bacon, sliced tomato, sautéed spinach – pretty much anything you might want to put in eggs benedict. This was great with homemade English muffins, but any kind of toasted bread will work. Cheese sauce is kind of like chocolate that way – you can put it on practically anything and it will be good!

Not-Exactly-Eggs-Benedict

Serves 2.

Easy Cheese Sauce

In a small saucepan, combine:

a good handful of grated cheese (any kind – I used orange cheddar)

a small teaspoon of all purpose flour

1 – 2 tbsp milk (you can always add more to thin it out later, but it’s hard to thicken up if you add too much milk to start)

Put the saucepan over medium heat and stir the sauce with a whisk as the cheese melts. When it starts to bubble and get smooth, season it with salt, pepper, and cayenne or hot smoked paprika (I love the smokey flavour it has) and remove it from the heat.

I usually make the cheese sauce first and then sauté the mushrooms, poach the eggs, and toast the muffins. Then when I’m ready to assemble, I warm the sauce up over low heat and add a little milk to thin it if necessary.

Assembly

You will need:

2 English muffins, split and toasted

sliced mushrooms sautéed in butter with salt, pepper, garlic powder and Worchestershire sauce (and/or whatever else you want to use)

4 poached eggs (I love this method for poaching eggs)

Butter the English muffin halves. Top them with the mushrooms and poached eggs. Pour a big spoonful of cheese sauce over the top and garnish with chives if you’re feeling fancy.

Asparagus and Bacon Omelette

June 9, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 5 Comments

In middle school Home Ec, in addition to scones and boxer shorts, we learned how to make omelettes. This, like the scones, is something that has stuck with me since then, and I’ve made so many omelettes following this method that I can now do it one-handed while taking pictures ;). Obviously this is great for breakfast, but it also makes a nice lunch or quick dinner when the fridge is bare (I ate a lot of omelettes in university!). Asparagus and bacon is what I happened to have on hand, but use whatever you want as a filling – sautéed mushrooms are really good. The only thing that you absolutely must have is cheese – at least in my opinion. Eggs and cheese just go so well together!

The secret to a fluffy omelette (according to my Home Ec teacher, anyway) is adding a bit of water to the eggs. As the eggs cook, the water turns to steam, causing the eggs to puff up. It’s important to have a hot, non-stick pan (well pre-heated over medium to medium-high heat, about 6 1/2 out of 10 if your stove dial has numbers) and to have all your ingredients ready and assembled, because the omelette cooks pretty fast. The ingredients in this recipe are simple and completely customizable: it’s the technique that really makes a good omelette. But if a bunch of 12 year old Home Ec students can do it, and I can do it with one hand while taking pictures, then no one has anything to worry about ;)…

Daring Bakers: Mexican Chocolate Marquise

May 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 22 Comments

The May 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Emma of CookCraftGrow and Jenny of Purple House Dirt. They chose to challenge everyone to make a Chocolate Marquise. The inspiration for this recipe comes from a dessert they prepared at a restaurant in Seattle. Check out the challenge details and all the other Daring Bakers’ interpretations of it at the Daring Kitchen.

Last week Nate and I agreed that we’d been eating like crap lately – too much sugary junk, not enough vegetables – and we made a pact to eat better. Then the next day I started making this Daring Bakers Challenge, which is definitely sugary and doesn’t contain any vegetables, unless you count cocoa or tequila as a vegetable.

They were both vegetables/plants, once upon a time, right? Right?!

Oh well. Our fridge is overflowing with lettuce right now, so we’ll make up for it in salads 😉

This is a complicated looking dessert that is actually fairly straight forward, once you get your ducks in a row. The original recipe comes from a restaurant in Seattle, and the yield was for 18 servings!! Thank you Audax Artifex for cutting it down to a more reasonable 6 servings – although this could have easily made 8 servings. It was so rich that only Nate and I managed to clean our plates – everyone else tapped out, so next time I’ll definitely serve smaller portions!…

Hollandaise Sauce

March 2, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

Pulled pork eggs benedict with chipotle hollandaise

My very favorite restaurant breakfast is eggs benedict, and Nate and I have gotten pretty inventive with making it at home: he comes up with creative flavour combinations and I try my best to whip them up in the kitchen. We had a bunch of pulled pork left over, and Nate suggested a pulled pork benny with chipotle hollandaise. I loooooove hollandaise sauce, but I’ve never been able to find a recipe that turns out the way I want it to.

I did a quick Google search for “hollandaise sauce”, and found a recipe by Daphna Rabinovitch from the show Canadian Living Cooks. Canadian Living has been the source of a good number of my trustiest, most reliable recipes, so I decided to give it a try. And it was great! This recipe yields a thick, fluffy, restaurant-style hollandaise. Be warned that it is NOT low fat – there is a lot of butter in here.

For the pulled pork bennys, I warmed up some pulled pork and seasoned it with barbeque sauce, piled it on two halves of a toasted English muffin, topped each with a soft poached egg, mixed a few teaspoons of chipotle puree into the hollandaise sauce and then spooned it over. Delish!…

Snow and a Quiche

February 24, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen Leave a Comment

Yesterday we unexpectedly received rather a large amount of snow (we measured 21 centimeters at one point!), and in usual snowy Victoria fashion, the roads were terrible, life slowed to a halt, and neither Nate nor myself went to work. Instead, we spent the day on the couch watching season one of Mad Men, and I did some baking. Seeing as I had all day, I made a quiche, which I find inevitably ends up taking about three times as long as I think it will. I also tried to modify my usual fantastic, go-to banana bread recipe to be sugar-free, but it turned out to be not-so-fantastic sans sugar 🙁 Someday I’ll perfect the recipe and share it, but in the meantime, here’s my quiche recipe.

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Breakfast Pizza

February 20, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

Quite a while ago I stumbled across a recipe for a breakfast pizza topped with bacon, eggs, and cheese. Of course I can’t remember where I originally saw it, but I filed it away in my brain for later. I’ve been craving pizza lately, and as Nate and I went out for breakfast yesterday, I figured I would make something at home this morning, and breakfast pizza fit the bill.

The pizza dough recipe comes from my trusted friend Martha’s Everyday Food magazine. I mixed it up the night before and let it rise overnight in the fridge, rather than delaying breakfast by waiting for it to rise in the morning. Originally it was for grilled barbequed pizza, but I’ve figured out how to bake it very successfully in the oven. The trick is high heat (500˚ F) and baking the pizza on parchment paper rather than on a baking sheet (I’m sure a pizza stone would also work, but I don’t have one). As this makes a thin crust pizza, it’s best not to overload it with toppings – I adhere to the same principle of less is more for pizza as I do for burritos 😉

This recipe makes two 10-inch oval pizzas topped with two eggs each, enough for two pretty generous servings. If you are not so hungry, you could shape the dough into a slightly smaller circle (8 or 9 inches in diameter) and use only one egg in the centre of each pizza. The variations are pretty infinite: you could divide the dough into 3 or 4 pieces and make small little pizzas (5-6 inches in diameter, 1 egg each) to serve alongside fruit or hashbrowns or something, or you could make one giant pizza and top it with 4 or more eggs to feed a crowd (if you are going to double the recipe, I would still recommend making two pizzas, as it might start getting out of control size-wise). If you are in the habit of having guests for breakfast or feeding a large number of family members, this would be a good recipe to try because it’s ready all at once (unlike pancakes or waffles or omelettes which cook one or two at a time) and can be eaten with your hands….

Huevos Rancheros

January 30, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen Leave a Comment

Last night we had burritos with pork picadillo filling (recipe here), and this morning for breakfast I made huevos rancheros with the leftover beans and tortillas. This is a take on the version of huevos that is served at our favorite breakfast place, Spoons Diner. Nate orders this about 90% of the time we go there, and the other week I finally tried it myself – delicious! I have no idea how authentic it is (probably not very!) but it is sure good, and very filling.

Huevos Rancheros

In a cast iron pan over medium-high heat, brown a flour tortilla on one side. Flip it over in the pan and remove the pan from the heat. Spread beans (I used whole black beans spiced with cumin, but you could use refrieds or whatever you want) over the tortilla and sprinkle with cheese. I used cheddar and a Mexican-style fresh farmer’s cheese. Place the pan under the broiler until the tortilla is browned and the cheese is melted.

Meanwhile, in a small non-stick, oven-safe pan, melt a little butter and fry 2 eggs (or just one, depending on how hungry you are). Season with salt and pepper, but do not flip over – instead, sprinkle with more cheese and place under the broiler until the cheese is melted and the yolks are still a little bit jiggly.

Place the tortilla on a plate. Stir together about 1 tbsp of sour cream and 1 tsp of chipotle puree (or chipotle powder, or regular chili powder) and drizzle over the tortilla. Top with the cheesey eggs and dollop with salsa. Guacamole would also be good. Dig in.

Serves one.