But I kinda have a problem with the dish.  A piece of toast doesn’t, in any way, represent a nest.  A nest is lots of tiny bits of stuff.  Not one big flat thing.

So I wanted to rework the dish a bit to actually look like eggs sitting in a nest.  The best thing I could come up with was to make a potato hash and then set a few eggs on top to complete the deal.

Now this is a bird’s nest!

Get it?

I got the idea to spice up the eggs and potatoes with smoked paprika from this post (@ Summer Tomato).  It’s true that while I love bacon with breakfast, I didn’t really miss it for this meal.  Everything was very flavorful as is.  But before I get into making the dish (which is pretty straightforward), I have to tell you something.

I’m A Failure. So when I actually thought about this dish, instead of doing poached eggs, I wanted to make soft boiled eggs so they looks like real eggs sitting in a nest.  How cute right?!  Well, it turns out that I’m completely incapable of making soft boiled eggs.  I went through about a dozen eggs and almost an hour of my life before I threw in the towel and went the poached route.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s make some hash first.

The Nest (Basic Potato Hash)
Serves 2.

- 1 pound potatoes (I used new potatoes, but you could use Russet.)
- 1/4 white or Vidalia onion, diced
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 Teaspoon smoked paprika
- 2 Tablespoons olive oil
- Salt and Pepper

Basic hash stuff.

Making the Hash. This is a really basic hash to make.  There’s tons of variations on it, but sometimes just basic potatoes with a few other simple ingredients is one of the best things ever.

One important step to a good hash is to take the time to really dice up your potatoes into a pretty small dice.  I try to shoot for about 1/4 inch cubes.  And especially if you’re using new potatoes like I did, the skin is great to leave on.

Do a pretty fine dice here.

Also dice up your onion and garlic.

Start by heating up your oil in a large skillet over high heat.  I like to add my potatoes first, with a tiny pinch of salt and pepper and some paprika for spice.

The paprika is where it's at.

After this cooks for a few minutes, add your onions and garlic and continue to cook.  I like to do mine in this order because it insures that the garlic and onion doesn’t burn and just gets nicely browned.

Depending on how crispy you want your potatoes (I love mine really crispy), you’ll want to cook them for 10-15 minutes probably.

Guess what? This was tasty.

Ideally, you can start your eggs when your potatoes are almost done and then everything will come together nicely.  That didn’t exactly happen in my case.

The Eggsperiment. Sometimes things don’t go as I plan in the kitchen and I always try to be honest about those failures.  In this case, I had a serious egg failure.

My nemesis today!

I know how to make a good hard boiled egg so I figured that a soft boiled egg would be easy enough to master.  But even still, I did a little research before starting.  I read this incredible write up on eggs (@ Serious Eats) and figured I’d be able to nail it after one or two tries maybe.  Boy was I wrong.

I swear I followed the instructions perfectly.  I used my thermometer to get the water the perfect temperature.  I used a stopwatch to try to get the perfect timing.

My first result? BIG FAT FAIL.

Fail!

After that, I composed myself and adjusted a bit.  I’m not even going to tell you how I adjusted the original technique because it didn’t matter.  Still I had a big fat fail on my hands.

Fail!!

After almost a dozen eggs, I finally got something that somewhat resembled a soft boiled egg.

And it still really sucked.

Fail!!!!!

The Problem. I think the problem is that there are just too many variables in soft boiled eggs for the home cook to handle.  To start, it’s hard to know how old your eggs are and the age of your eggs matters.  There’s a very fine balance.  You want fresh eggs, but if they are too fresh then they will be very hard to peel.

Basically everything has to be perfect for the dish to work.  A restaurant can normally perfect this over many hundreds of trials, but I just don’t know that it’s realistic for the home cook to even try the soft boiled egg.  So I say: Abandon it!

By the way, if anyone disagrees with me, leave a comment with a surefire way to cook a soft boiled egg (by surefire, it needs to work 9/10 times regardless of eggs or altitude or whatever).  If anyone can do that, I’ll retract my abandonment!

The reason I’m giving up on it is because you can get a very similar result by poaching eggs.  And poaching eggs is something that I can teach people to do successfully 9 or 10 times out of 10.

Poaching eggs. All you need to successfully poach some eggs is:

Eggs
Water
White Vinegar

Bring water to a boil in a large pan.  The water should be at least 8 inches deep.  Add about 1/2 Cup of vinegar for every gallon of water (it’s okay to eyeball it).  Bring the water to a simmer (not boil!).

Meanwhile, crack your eggs in a bowl.  You don’t want to crack them straight into the water or you might get shells cooked into your eggs.

Once your water is simmering, gently roll the egg out of the bowl and into the simmering water.  The vinegar will cause the egg whites to contract and make the egg stay together.

I can do this!

For perfect eggs with a runny yolk and firm white, cook for about 3 minutes.  Then remove the eggs with a slotted spoon and dab them a bit with a paper towel just to remove the excess water.

Add the poached eggs to your “nest” and dust with some extra paprika.

The paprika is awesome.

I thought about making a sauce for this, but it’s really unnecessary.  If you poach your eggs perfectly, they kind of act as a sauce as you break into them.

Why you don't need a sauce for this dish.

It may have been because it took me over an hour of failed eggs to actually get a chance to eat this dish, but I absolutely loved it.  It’s really basic, but it shows how you can take a few simple ingredients and make a great meal out of them.

And by the way, if you ever happen to have one to many at the bar, this is the meal for you.

So what do you think?  Soft boiled eggs?  Anyone have any ideas?

When I talk about how I’m “on Twitter” or “Tweeting” I get questions about how Twitter is useful.  A lot of people are skeptical.  My take on Twitter is that it’s most useful if you have a focused purpose.  You have to follow people of similar interest and Tweet mainly about things on your topic.  That way people can follow you if they’re interested in your topic and they know that you’ll be talking mainly on that topic (with the occasional off topic tweet).

I sent out a quick tweet this week to get some links for this post.  This shows the power of Twitter.  You can send out a question (What should I link to tomorrow?) and get a lot of great responses!

Here were the responses which will serve also as my links for the week!

- @LisaKennelly How about the story this week about cheese made from breast milk? That’s pretty “interesting”: http://bit.ly/bywQ9Y Haha.  Ok. That’s pretty intense.

And as a follow up: The comments on his original blog post (http://bit.ly/ciW0zZ) will blow your mind. Key lime pie made with breast milk???

- @WillBlog4FoodDC Check out Dan Barber’s Ted Talk. http://ow.ly/1hdNS Great speech.  I love TED talks.

- @NotDerbyPie You could share my whole fish roast project.  Gladly.  Red snapper baked in salt crust?!  Awesome.  http://tinyurl.com/yeumvhx

- @MangoTomato Homemade Vanilla Extract!  http://tinyurl.com/y8wmdbs I’ve been meaning to try this for months!

Oh and there is a poll of course!

Have a good weekend everyone!  I’ll be spending the weekend cooking and watching college basketball!

I would’ve been happy with any of the results, but I was especially happy about the yeast type.  The end donut is just so light and fluffy.  It’s pretty easy to put away a few of these guys.

Very hard to resist.

I went with a chocolate glaze for this version for no particular reason except that I knew my coworkers would like chocolate.  I thought the glaze was perfect.  It wasn’t too thick.  Just a nice, shiny coat on top of the donut.

Chocolate Glazed Donuts (Recipe from Gourmet originally, but I got it from Joy the Baker)
Makes 12 donuts.

- 1 (1/4-oz) package active dry yeast (2 1/2 Teaspoons)
- 2 Tablespoons warm water (105–115°F)
- 3 1/4 Cups all-purpose flour plus some for working the dough
- 1 Cup milk, room temperature
- 1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, softened
- 3 large egg yolks
- 2 Tablespoons sugar
- 1 1/2 Teaspoons salt
- 1/2 Teaspoon cinnamon
- Canola or other neutral oil for frying

Chocolate Glaze: (From Alton Brown)
Enough for 24 or so donuts
- 1/2 Cup unsalted butter
- 1/4 Cup milk
- 1 Tablespoon light corn syrup
- 2 Teaspoons vanilla extract
- 4 ounces bittersweet chocolate (I actually used milk chocolate)
- 2 Cups confectioner’s sugar (powdered sugar)

Helpful Equipment:
- Candy Thermometer
- Cast Iron Skillet
- Round Cookie Cutters (I like the plastic variety so they don’t get all bent out of shape)
- Stand Mixer (You could just use a wooden spoon to mix everything together and then just knead the dough lightly for a few minutes until it came together.  There were donuts before there were mixers.  But a mixer helps!)

Making the Dough. This dough is pretty easy to pull together actually (especially if you have a mixer). Like a lot of enriched doughs, these are the base ingredients.

Basic stuff.

Since these are yeasted donuts, the first step is to actually make sure your yeast is alive.  Honestly, sometimes I bypass this step, but I decided to check it for this recipe.  Add your yeast and water to a bowl, stir it together and let it sit for about 5 minutes.  If it starts bubbling and foaming, you know you’re in business.  If there aren’t any bubbles, you need some new yeast!

Prove yourself yeast!

There’s a very small amount of sugar and cinnamon in the dough, but these ingredients plus a bit of salt give the donuts a “something special” flavor.

Cinnamon and sugar.

Back to the dough, once your yeast is bubbling, add in all your other dough ingredients.  I added my flour last.  Then beat it on low until everything comes together in a soft ball.  Then increase the speed to medium and beat it for 2-3 minutes until it’s very smooth.

If you don’t have a mixer, I’d recommend mixing everything up with a wooden spoon and then kneading the dough for a few minutes until it’s a smooth ball.

Add your dough to a lightly oiled bowl and then sprinkle a bit of flour on top.

Cover this and let it rise for about 2 hours at room temperature.  It should more than double in size.  This was my dough after a 2 hour rise:

After a few hours...

Forming the donuts. Making these donuts is actually pretty straightforward.  Just roll your dough out on a lightly floured surface until it’s about 1/2 inch thick.  Then using some round cooking cutters (I used the 3 inch cutter and the 1/2 inch cutter for the holes), just start punching out donuts in the most reasonable fashion.  Of course, your goal is to get as many as possible.

Cool.

A secret. Most of the donut recipes I read advised against reusing the scraps of dough to make more donuts.  But this seemed kind of silly to me so I tried it.  After I got as many donuts as I could get out of one sheet, I rerolled my dough and punched out some more donuts.  Guess what: People ate them anyway!

A Second Rising. Once you punch out your donuts, lay them out onto a baking sheet that’s been lightly floured (just so they don’t stick).  Let them rise for another 30 minutes.  This will make sure they are nice and fluffy when you fry them up.  I actually let mine rise for like an hour by accident, but 30 minutes would’ve worked fine I think.

Frying the Donuts. The moment of truth.  You need to fry these bad boys.  And yes you have to fry them.  There’s a lot of ways to do a lot of things, but there’s only one way to make good donuts: fry them.

I fried mine in a large cast iron skillet.  Just add enough oil to measure about 2 inches up the pan.  The donuts will float so you only need to cover half a donut at a time.  Heat up your oil until it’s about 325-350 degrees.  I highly recommend a deep-fry thermometer.  They are very cheap and pretty essential if you want to do some good frying.

This is good frying:

Click the photo to check out the cast iron skillet I recommend!

These will fry very quickly.  About 1 minute a side should do the trick.  Work in batches and use some metal tongs or a wooden spoon to flip them.  When they’re done, move them to a baking sheet lined with paper towels to let them drain a bit.

They really only take a minute.

The Holes. Don’t forget about the holes!  I fried mine up and tossed them right away into a cinnamon sugar mix (1/2 cup sugar to 1 Teaspoon cinnamon).

Don't forget these guys!

The Glazing. Ok.  So you actually want to make the glaze before you make your donuts just because the donuts take no time to fry up.  The glaze is super easy to make though.  Just melt your butter along with your milk in a small saucepan over low heat (or in a double boiler).  Then stir in your corn syrup, vanilla, and chocolate until it’s melted.

Then take it off the heat and whisk in your sugar (sift it if you’re concerned with lumps).  Easy breezy!

Chocolate glaze. Yum.

Once your donuts cool for a minute or two, go ahead and dip them in the glaze!  You can of course sprinkle on any toppings that you want.  The only topping I had laying around was some raw sugar so I used that.  Not very colorful, but whatever. This guy wasn’t going back to the store just for sprinkles people.

It's really hard to eat just one of these.

It should go without saying that these are best to eat as soon as possible.

Chomp!

I don’t think I have to tell you this, but these were really good.

And to be completely honest, they weren’t that difficult.  I was expecting them to be a lot more finicky, but turns out fried dough is probably going to be delicious.

These days I’ve been experimenting a lot more with Asian flavors which, trust me, pack plenty of heat.  A few weeks ago I made a soba noodle dish with a fairly standard spicy peanut sauce.  I mixed the soba noodles with lots of fresh veggies and some seared tofu and tossed everything in the peanut sauce.

It doesn’t look spicy, but it’s got some kick to it.

Deceptively spicy!

I think one of my favorite things about this dish is that it was pretty good at every temperature.  On day one I had it at room temperature.  On day two I had it cold for lunch as kind of a noodle salad dish.  On day three, I brought it back to life in a super-hot pan with a touch of oil and stir-fried it.  It was great all three ways!

Soba Noodles with Peanut Sauce (Adapted from a Gourmet 2002 recipe (RIP))
Serves 4-6.

Peanut Sauce:  (I spiced up this version a bit from the original)
- 1/2 Cup smooth peanut butter
- 1/4 Cup soy sauce
- 1/3 Cup warm water
- 2 inches fresh ginger, peeled and grated/chopped
- 1 medium garlic clove, grated/chopped
- 2 Tablespoons rice wine vinegar
- 1 Tablespoon chili oil (or sub sesame oil)
- 1 Tablespoon honey
- 1 Teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
- 1 Teaspoon Sriracha (optional)

Helpful Equipment:
- Microplane grater

Noodles: (just some ideas on the veggies. You don’t have to use all of them.)
- 3/4 pound soba noodles or you could use spaghetti in a pinch
- 1 red pepper, diced
- 1 orange/yellow pepper, diced
- 1/2 seedless cucumber, diced
- 1 Cup Napa cabbage, diced (6-8 leaves)
- 1 package (16 ounces) extra firm tofu, seared and cubed
- 4 scallions, diced
- Peanuts, chopped (for topping)

If When I make this again, I think I wouldn’t use all those veggies.  It was almost too much going on with the tofu and the cabbage and the peppers.  I think it may have been better to just pick a few of them and go with it.

Preparing the Tofu. I really loved the seared tofu in this, but you could definitely leave it out if you aren’t a fan or sub it for chicken or shrimp.

Assuming you are using tofu though, you need to first press it to get out some of the moisture.  Just slice your block in half horizontally.

Press out the moisture...

Then lay those two pieces on a few paper towels.  Add a few paper towels to the top and then stick a cutting board on top of the tofu.  Add some weight to the cutting board (like a bowl of water or something).  Let it sit for about 15 minutes.  The weight will slowly press out a lot of extra water in your tofu.

Meanwhile, you can…

Prepare your veggies.  Like I said, I think I overused some veggies in my version.  It was a lot.  Assuming you wanted to use napa cabbage though, you’d want to wash a few leaves and dice them up like so:

Sliced thin is good.

Regardless of what other veggies you decide to use though, I definitely recommend the peppers.  They go great with the sauce.  I kept my peppers in pretty big chunks for this recipe.

I pretty large dice here.

These are all my veggies chopped and tossed together.  As you can see, it’s a lot.  Especially once I added in the tofu and everything.

Colorful!

Preparing the Sauce.  This sauce has a few ingredients in it, but they all add a lot.  If you don’t want it so spicy, definitely leave out the sriracha and maybe cut back on the red pepper flakes.  Also, if you don’t have rice vinegar, you could use red wine vinegar and nobody would be the wiser.

Not pictured: Sriracha

When it comes to sauces like this that have ginger and/or garlic in them, there’s one piece of equipment that is hands down the most useful thing you can have in your kitchen:  A Microplane Zester!

Click the photo to go straight to my OpenSky Store!

Once you get your garlic and ginger peeled, it takes just a few seconds to grate it up and then it integrates perfectly in your sauce! If you’re in the market, you can pick up a really nice Microplace Zester for about 12 bucks in my OpenSky Store!

You could of course chop it with a knife also, but it’s a lot more work.  Trust me.  It’s one of the best 12 bucks you’ll spend on a kitchen tool.

To finish the sauce, just whisk together all your ingredients in a large bowl.  Easy enough.

Whisk it all together.

Cooking the Tofu.  You could keep your tofu raw if you wanted for this recipe, but I decided to pan sear mine quickly.  I just added 1 Tablespoon of chili oil (you could also use a neutral oil like canola) to a pan over high heat and add my sliced blocks of tofu.  After about 3 or 4 minutes on each side, they were browned and delicious.

I sliced them into cubes after searing them.

Sear it then slice it.

Cooking the Soba. I’ve only cooked with soba once before, but I really like it.  It’s got a great nutty flavor that’s very different from other pastas.

This is a lot of noodles.

Basically just cook the noodles according to the package.  Drain them in a colander and you’re all set!

Drained.

The next part got a bit messy for me.  I wanted to mix everything together in a big bowl and let me tell you where I went horribly wrong: I didn’t exactly follow the recipe!

You see, the recipe called for 3/4 lb of pasta and I just threw in two boxes of soba which was 1 pound.  So the noodle to sauce ratio was a bit off in my case.

I ended up with too much pasta, an abundance of veggies, and not enough sauce to make it all happy.

Everybody in the pool!

Anyway, after I tossed everything together, I added my tofu, along with some chopped peanuts and scallions for texture.  My version turned out good, but not great.  I think I maybe tried to experiment a bit too much instead of just following the recipe.

The peanuts are key.

The good news is that the sauce is actually amazing.  I think it would easily hold up to meats (chicken satay anyone?), but it works well in a noodle dish like this also… assuming of course that you use the right amount of noodles.

I’m being pretty picky with my criticisms.  My version turned out more than edible.  I think it could just be improved is all.

Do you have a go-to peanut sauce recipe?  Leave a comment!

I subbed out the actual serving unit for widgets as it would completely give it away.  Also, I think that the amount of “widgets” in any given container is always the same.  The say “About 8″ but I’m pretty sure that they are always identical if that’s any help.

The Facts.  The first thing that stood out to me when I checked out the facts of this product is the huge list of fats that they listed.  Most of them are zero grams except Polyunsaturated Fat.

Polyunsaturated Fat isn’t actually bad for you in moderation.  It’s found a lot in fish and nuts and seeds.  When used instead of Saturated Fats and Trans Fat, it’s been shown to actually lower cholesterol.

Of course, any 2nd grader can tell you that something doesn’t add up with the fats here.  0 + 0 + 0 + .5 grams = .5 grams.  But the total fat is listed at 1.5 grams.  Where’s that missing gram?

Well, turns out it’s kind of hard to know.  If there are other fats in trace amounts (which there obviously are in this case), they don’t have to list them.   We shall never know!

Other than that, it’s looks like a big salty, carby thing.  There’s no sugar in it at all so it’s definitely not sweet.  190mg of sodium is pretty high though.  Just five of these little suckers is almost 10% of your daily salt intake.  That’s pretty intense.  Especially considering I can eat like 20 of them at a time.

On the vitamin side, there really isn’t a lot to mention.  A bit of iron for ya, but other than that this is looking like a big void.

The Ingredients. I think I’m a pretty firm believer in the theory that you should be able to tell roughly what something is by looking at what it’s made of – hence this post idea.

The jury still might be out on this one.  We’ll see how you guys do.

Enriched Flour – This came up sort of in the first Guess the “Food” post also.  The basic story behind any enriched flour is that they take perfectly good flour, strip it of all of its nutrients and then “enrich” it with nutrients and ingredients of their choosing.

From a processing standpoint I can see the advantages to this I guess.  You can guarantee a uniform product and customize the flour to your liking.  From a consumer standpoint, it kind of steams my broccoli if you know what I mean.  Here’s a few of the standout ingredients that make up this batch of enriched flour:

Wheat Flour – Of course, the first ingredient is real flour.  Too bad they can’t just use that.

Niacin – Niacin is a vitamin (also known as B3).  It’s listed as one of the 40-80 essential human nutrients.

Reduced Iron – It’s basically just elemental iron that’s used as a nutritional supplement here.

Thiamine Mononitrate (B1) and Riboflavin (B2) – Both are important vitamins and essential for humans.

Folic Acid – Yet another important micronutrient that they thankfully added back in.

Of course, normal flour has all of these things and a lot more, so the question again is, how is this “enriched” exactly?

Soybean Oil – Ok.  The next ingredient on the list and therefore the second most prominent ingredient by weight is an oil.  You probably have some of this in your pantry.  It’s normally marketed as “vegetable oil” in the States. Pretty harmless stuff if used in moderation.

Salt – My favorite ingredient.  The fact that it’s third on the list accounts for the high sodium content of these widgets.

High Fructose Corn Syrup – I don’t know why, but I was floored to see this in this product.  I guess because I’ve made a very similar thing on Macheesmo and it never occurred to me to put any kind of sweetener in it.  Of course, HFCS is used for other things besides sweetening like preserving foods, which makes more sense in this context.  This stuff is in everything!

Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oil – The partially hydrogenated part refers to a process of making the oil semi-firm at room temp.  Cottonseed oil is used in a ton of processed foods to increase shelf life.

Malted Barley Flour – Just a standard kind of flour.  In fact, you can buy it!  It’s supposed to improve flavor and texture of baked goods and also, again, increase shelf life.

Yeast -  For some reason I was shocked also to see yeast in this product.  You probably know what yeast is, but it’s generally used to make things rise.

Baking Soda – Also known as Sodium Bicarbonate this stuff is also helpful when you want something to rise.

Vegetable Monoglycerides – As stated in parenthesis, the main purpose of this is to act as an emulsifier.  It helps mix two things that don’t normally want to mix, like oil and water.  Monoglycerides can be made from either animal or vegetable and they are, again, very common in baked goods.

Phew!  So that’s the rundown for today’s Guess that “Food”.

Anyone have any guesses as to what this might be?!

PS. I’m always taking suggestions for “foods” to use for this post which I’m going to try to do every month or so.  You can just email them to me if you have a good one!