Soufflé, spinach, cheese, taragon

It's a chance to suspend a few things in egg foam along with cheese. 

Eggs, milk, cheese, it's hard to go wrong. 

All of that was preparation ↑ and now the action starts ↓.

A sauce is prepared. A simple Béchamel. A flavorful sauce but not too flavorful, and thin enough to accept two additional egg yolks. A meringue is also prepared. 

So now the thinking splits between this sauce and the egg white meringue foam. You can only do one thing at a time so pick one, meringue or Béchamel, and do either one first. Then get right to the one you didn't pick.  

The third step is to unite them. The relatively heavy sauce incorporated into airy-light egg-white foam in stages. 1/3 of the foam is stirred into the sauce to lighten it and bring its density closer to the remaining foam. Then the additional ingredients, the grated gruyere cheese and the scallions, along with the lightened sauce are  folded into the remaining egg white foam and turned into prepared baking dishes. 

And I forgot to preheat the oven. 

I learned that doesn't matter. 

Breakfast cheese and vegetable soufflé

* Vegetables heated in olive oil/butter, steamed with wine, cooked to soften, collapse, and release their liquid. We want them to do that now rather than when they're baked with the egg.

* Three eggs, the whites separated from the yolks into separate bowls. The whites whipped to stiff peaks bolstered with cream of tartar. 

* A plain white sauce is prepared with a roux then tempered into the yolks. The cooked vegetables are added to the yolks/sauce along with the grated cheese.  Now we have two bowls along with the two baking bowls that are coated with butter and grated cheese.

Here is where the ingredients of the soufflé come together into one bowl, a portion of the whites are whipped into the yolks/sauce/vegetable/cheese mixture to lighten the contents of that bowl then that lightened mixture is folded back into the whipped egg whites. Now you have one bowl with the puffy soufflé mixture and two smaller prepared baking bowls. It could have easily been one large straight-sided baking bowl. Spoon the fluffy mixture into the prepared baking bowls and bake at 350℉ for 25 minutes or so.

The baking dishes are prepared with butter and grated cheese. The cheese on the inside walls of the bowl give the egg mixture something to climb up and hold onto as it bakes and it creates a wonderfully crispy cheese coating. 

Corn meal souffle

I don't even know what I'm doing any more, or what to call things. Here's what I did. 

Cracked two smallish eggs into the immersion blender cup. Whipped them on high into a froth. Added milk, a palm full of coarse corn meal, about a tablespoon of flour, 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, salt, pepper, then a tablespoon of sour cream to activate the baking soda. This gives me three forms of lift: eggs, baking soda, baking powder. So whatever happens, this thing is going to be lifted. Cut a slice of sandwich cheddar into pieces then rolled the stuck together bits in a small amount of flour so they'd suspend in the mixture. This failed. They sank anyway. So did the corn meal bits. My mixture was thin. Dumped it into a buttered dish and put it in the little convection oven then watched it like a box television, rise and spill out. I cracked open the top with a knife to give the foam inside a bigger exit hole so it didn't continue to  spill over one side. It was fun!

See how this differs from a proper well-considered souffle?  Usually, you'd make a sauce containing the egg yolks and fold it into whipped egg whites. Bah!  I didn't bother with any of that.

The breakfast sausage comes in a big fat log. I cut off two thick chunks and smashed them into thin discs between plastic. Sliced half an onion and used it to lift the fond off the pan.

It would have also been better if I took the time to prepare the baking dish with more than just butter so the crusty bits wouldn't have stuck to the dish.