All posts filed under: vegetables

Farmer’s Market Breakfast with Poached Eggs

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I have a confession to make.  Until today, I have never successfully poached an egg. It’s crazy, I know!  I mean, egg-poaching is a very basic cooking skill and I feel so ashamed that until now, it has completely flummoxed me.  About a year or so ago, I was bound and determined to learn the proper technique, only to end up with a pot of what looked like egg-drop soup.  I tried again and again; and again and again, I failed. I was told my eggs were too fresh. Then I was told that maybe they weren’t fresh enough! And then, this week I happened upon a little article in Real Simple Magazine about the many uses of a meat thermometer that just happened to mention that the ideal temperature for poaching eggs was 180 degrees fahrenheit!  Eureka! That was the variable I never considered in my earlier attempts.  I knew that the water should be barely simmering, but I never thought to check the temperature.  Well, that’s what I did, and SUCCESS!  Beautiful, silky, …

Balsamic Vinegar Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Chorizo and Red Onion

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Brussels sprouts never fail to spark a little conversation.  Seems either folks love them or hate them, but frankly, I think they unfairly get bad press due in part to bad childhood memories.  Oddly, I was never in the camp of Brussels Sprouts Haters–the first time I had them as a child, I didn’t mind them, which is really saying something because back in the 1970s, people did horrible things to Brussels sprouts–namely boiling them to death, which made them very, very bad indeed.  Still, even boiled to death, I could see in my little kid mind that these baby cabbages (as I called them) had promise. I think above anything else, I thought they looked cool and it seemed like a very grown-up thing to eat.  Growing up, they didn’t appear too often on our family’s table–my younger brothers, for one, would never touch them, but over the past few years, I’ve rediscovered them–each fall, tweaking the recipe a bit and coming up with different ways to make them.  Previous Thanksgivings, I have separated …