Black & White and Green & Red (and Yellow)

I know it's been awhile since my last post, but I'm back! So, the main reason I'm posting this dish is that it looks neat, it's all colorful and fun looking. This is a really easy dish to make, it's not overly complicated and you can impresse all your friends and trick them into thinking you can actually cook by making a fancy looking dish, when in reality it's just a breakfast dish with some fancy tweaks.

The beans I used on the toast are actually dehydrated black bean, and to make them into a paste or a dip just add hot water. 4 parts dried beans to 3 parts water. I got mine from an Oregon company called Garden Valley Corporation here is a link if you'd like to peruse their dried legumes.

Spicy Fried Eggs with Avocado and Black Beans on Toast

• 2 slices of toasted sourdough
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup black beans
• 1/2 avocado sliced
• hot sauce

1. I recommend making your beans before anything else. 
2. Toast the bread.
3. Fry the eggs to your liking, salt and pepper to taste. I prefer to having the yolk just a little runny that way I can mop it with the ends of the toast. 
4. Spread the beans on the toast, then the eggs, sliced avocado, and top it off with a drizzling of hot sauce of your choice, I used Sriracha, because it's delicious.

This is a very simple dish to make, it looks fancy, and it's packed with protein. Even though I made it for dinner, it's a perfect brunch dish. Next post is going to be fried quinoa!

Yam and Quinoa Fritters with Walnut Cream Sauce

This recipe is for the fritters not I'll admit it everything on the side salad was store bought. It's just mixed greens, tomatoes, almonds, and a raspberry vinaigrette dressing.

Yam and Quinoa Fritters

• 2 medium Yams peeled and grated
• 1/2 red onion grated
• 1/4 cup grated gruyere cheese
• 1/3 cup cooked quinoa
• 2 teaspoons of diced garlic
• 2 eggs
• 2 table spoons flour
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
• salt and pepper to taste
• Olive oil (or any kind of oil vegetable, peanut, whale fat)

1. First I would start cooking the quinoa. If you don't know how to cook quinoa, I'd recommend checking out Pinterest, like 90% of the recipes on that site have quinoa in them.
2. Heat the oil in a large pan to medium high heat.
3. Peel the yams and grate them. Grate the onions. Place the grated vegetables on paper towels and squeeze the juice out. Once you've juiced the yams and onions place them in a large mixing bowl with the gruyere cheese, garlic, eggs, flour, and garlic salt. Mix together with your hands, yes your hands. Before you mix in the quinoa make sure it's cooled, because if you put hot quinoa into the mix you'll cook the eggs.
4. Make small patties of the mixture and place into the pan of oil. Brown each side of the fritters, usually about 5 minutes per side.

Walnut Cream Sauce

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1/4 cup crushed walnuts
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1/4 cup grated gruyere cheese
• 2 tablespoons honey
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Melt the butter on medium heat. Toast the walnuts in the butter, just brown them a bit. Add the heavy cream, cheese, honey and seasoning.
2. Once the cheese has melted reduce the cream on low heat for 15 minutes.

Serve the cream sauce over the fritters and topped with basil or some other sort of garnish, I'll admit to not eating the basil, it just looks nice. In my opinion having a nice side salad with the fritters counteracts the oil the fritters were fried in. Enjoy!

The Menu

This post is only slightly food based, so I'm sorry if your evening plans included food porn from my blog. If your evening plans do include sexy food images, then I don't want to know what happens in the privacy of your own home.

This post is more of a menu appreciation post. I found this old menu in some of my great aunt's stuff. There's just something about it that appeals to me. It's a combination of the typography, their use of space on the menu, and just the overall simplicity of the entire thing.

I'm guessing this menu is from the 50's or 60's, I'm sorry the carbon dating lab is closed on weekends and I didn't want to wait until I got the lab results in to publish this post. Also, there's a holiday this week and it just would have taken forever for them to mail me the results, so my guess is the best you're going to get for now.

The food on this menu though is definitely old fashioned. I mean "cold pork or beef," "hamburger steak," "breaded veal cutlets," and "hot beef sandwich"(which was NOT my nickname in high school). Also their specialty is potato doughnuts!? You never see that anywhere today.

When I open my restaurant I am going to take a page out of this menu, figuratively of course.

Panko Beer Battered Asparagus

This is the first in my new line of recipes in which I make healthy foods into unhealthy dishes. Even though the asparagus is fried, it makes for a great summer lunch or appetizer. Now, I sort of just winged this recipe, so if you feel like there's something missing then I encourage you to add it.

Panko Beer Battered Asparagus

• 1 cup flour (plus a little extra)
• 1 teaspoon backing soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
• 1/2 chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 1 egg
• 3/4 cups beer (something light, no porters or stouts)
• Panko
• Oil for frying

1. Mix all the dry ingredients in a large bowl, except the panko. Mix in the egg and beer. Place the panko in an empty pie pan. Heat the oil over medium high heat. Cut the thick ends off the asparagus and coat in the extra flour. Dip the asparagus in the batter and then lightly coat the asparagus in panko. Fry the asparagus in the oil until the panko and batter turns golden brown. 

Chili Lemon Alioli

• 1 cup mayo
• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/4 teaspoon lemon zest
• 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice 
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt

1. Mix everything together in a bowl and then dip the asparagus in. 

Dip these fried spears in the alioli and enjoy out in the sun with the left over beer. 

French Onion Soup

It's been kind of cloudy and grey the past couple of days in Portland, even though it's terrible June weather it does make for great soup weather. French onion soup is filling and warm, so it's a nice contrast to the cold and wet weather outside.

I'm a terrible food blogger, because when I went to the store I forgot to buy a loaf of French bread. As a replacement I used the whole grain sourdough bread that was sitting in the bread box. The sourdough was a good replacement, I recommend using sourdough if you don't have any French bread.

This is a very simple dish with only a few ingredients. The hardest part about preparing this dish is cutting the onions, it's going to make you cry, so it's a good time to work through some emotions and think about that childhood pet that's now, "living at a farm upstate." If the onions make you cry too much don't worry, eating the finished soup is like a warm hug.

French Onion Soup

(4 servings)

• 3 1/2 medium yellow onions coarsely chopped
• 3 TBS. butter
• 3/4 cup dry white or red wine (just make sure it's not sweet wine)
• 1 pint vegetable stock or beef stock
• 1 TBS flour
• 4 slices of french bread
• 5 oz. grated Gruyere cheese
• salt and pepper

1. Find the largest pot in your kitchen, okay maybe not that big, but large enough to hold a pint of stock and three and half onions. Melt the butter in the pot over medium high heat. Once the butter has melted add the onions.
2. Preheat the oven to 375. Toast the bread, just a little to remove most of the moisture. It should be slightly crisp. 
3. Occasionally stir the onions, until most of them have turned golden brown. This is an import step in the soup, because it's where most of the flavor develops. Once the onions have browned add 1/2 cup of the wine. Stir occasionally until all the wine has cooked out. Then add the flour to the onions and let the flour brown and stick to the bottom of the pan. Add the stock once that's happened. Scrape the flour off the bottom of the pot and add the rest of the wine. Add salt and pepper to taste. Let the soup simmer for 5-10 minutes and allow the wine to cook off. 
4. Grab 4 oven proof bowls and scoop the soup until it fills 3/4 of the bowl. Lay one slice of bread on top of the soup and layer the grated cheese on top of the soup until you can barely see the soup and bread. Place the bowls in the oven and bake until the cheese is melted and the edge cheese browns a bit. 
5. Remove from oven and eat with fork.

The bowls will be very hot! It's a good idea to have a mat or pad to place the bowl on once you remove it from the oven. 

For a soup that's mostly onions, it's very filling. If you want a good red wine to pair with this soup I recommend a Cabernet Sauvignon, because of the wine's rich buttery taste. Enjoy!

Photos by Katy Weaver