spiced fried potato, jumbo eggs sunny side up, bacon

Dinner tonight is this Idaho potato. 

It was stabbed all the way through multiple times to let out steam and dehydrate as it cooks in the microwave until almost done. 

So they had better be good. They need help. Tons of butter or sauce, or soup, something wet. Or fried to crispy and dipped in sauce. This is a run through the spice cabinet the result amounts to American curry. My favorite things. Very heavy doses.

 It has both bacon fat and butter. All of the remnant bacon in the pan is recovered. 

This is a different pan on another burner.

fried potato wedges, eggs, talking tomato

This meal was to have a tomato but a discussion broke out and plans changed.

So much for the tomato.

Par boiled then fried in butter.

Two fried eggs poked with bacon and cheese breadsticks, round ice

Ice spheres, golf balls actually, tend to break in half at the seam when rushed out of their tight molds. Seepage between spheres forms a thin sheet inside sandwiching layers fixing them inside their pockets. They must be melted out and that's a shame, the golfball dimples melt too. 

Plus the wet balls refrozen stick to the ice cubes already accumulating inside a paper grocery bag. 

Ice is weird. It cannot be stored. Not in a home freezer. Ice is an odor magnet every ambient molecule blowing around inside by fan is cleaved to crystalline surface like a wet tongue to a frozen flagpole so every odor present inside the refrigerator and freezer is captured by ice. I'm imagining all this. Because I lifted to my nose a glass filled with ice from an automatic ice maker that deposits ice through the door. Most convenient smelliest ice in town. It's a thing. For drinks, for anything really, ice must be fresh. And here I am piling it up, violating that rule of ice. I'm hoping the grocery store paper bag odor is innocuous. 

I might as well eat a few eggs while waiting for the ice to melt. The usual idea is force it with running water.

The start is enough butter to make popcorn. There will be no problem sliding this egg out of the pan. It's swimming in butter. Butter is 20% water that is sizzled and popped and foamed out first for a minute so nothing is left but oil. 

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Toast is better. 

But what toast has bacon already in it and cheese too? Bacon cheese crackers would be better for egg yolk puncturing and egg slurping. 

I tapped the back with a knife and a few broke showing again they really do need to melt out of their half domes with ridges to make golfballs look like flying saucers. 

Due to being melted out of their spaces then emergency refreezing is needed, the grocery bag already has cubed ice in it so when refrozen the spheres stuck onto the cubes amusingly into little random art forms. 

Mashed potato, fried eggs, breakfast, late night meal

The freezer and the refrigerator and the pantry are fully stocked but this is all that I want.

Bacon and eggs with beans and Swiss chard

Bacon from nearby Tony's Market is very very good (two verys to emphasize how very good it is). Hickory smoked or something like that. 

The bacon is in the beans too in place of smoked ham hock. All the fat from frying the bacon is left in the pot. I used a pressure pot to cook dry beans and that is a little bit tricky. The timing depends both on the type of bean and the size. Anasazi beans will cook much more quickly than pinto beans or red kidney beans and small beans like these little white ones and small black beans cook faster. It takes a bit of trial and error. The error is shown by blown out beans. They explode inside the pot when the pressure is too high. High is 15 LBS pressure and half high is 7 LBS pressure. Best to cook at half pressure and underestimate cooking time. That way you can release the pressure and open the pot to check, and determine by that how much more time is required.  You can release pressure quickly by spraying the whole pot with water, top, sides, bottom everything. The pressure indicator sucks back down inside almost immediately allowing  you to open it right up and check on doneness. Then back on the heat to half pressure to finish now that you have a clear idea how much time is required for your specific bean. 

I did not do that this time. I thought I had the time down already, as a result these beans are overly soft but I like them anyway.

There is no acid in the cooking liquid. Acid makes beans form a hardened surface that does not allow them to cook to even softness, but there are a lot of regular spices. Bay leaf, cumin, coriander. I forget all I put in there, probably chile flakes. Onion and garlic. 

Then taste-tested. At the end I decided they need sugar. And that makes a huge difference. It takes the beans from blah to delightful. They are! These beans are delightful due to the sugar added at the end. 

Swiss chard is cooked in the bean liquid separately. Another pressure session without the beans. This time I decided to cook the stems as well. I just chopped the Swiss chard crosswise across the stem, never minding about removing the stem as usual. And I am glad I did that. I will do it that way for now on. I like the stems for variety.

I over-pressurecooked the chard as well. It nearly disappeared to mush. But, Man is it good. When I perfect this technique I will be bean and chard unstoppable. I like it with everything. I recommend it. I recommend pressure-cooked beans with sugar added and Swiss chard cut with stems included. The whole thing is fantastic.

Then when the egg yolk blends with the beans it adds depth, umami, that is quite extraordinary. A tortilla, toast, hashed brown potato or rice, what have you, would round out the the whole thing  as a restaurant presentation. As it is, this is a wonderfully fast breakfast whipped up quickly due to the beans being leftover and merely reheated. Done in the microwave right on the plate heats the plate too and that keeps the whole thing heated throughout the meal to the very last molecule. I licked my plate like a dog, because I don't care, I am a dog. 

Raisin bread for bacon and egg breakfast with bean polenta

This dough is incredibly easy to make. Brown sugar caused the yeast to take off like a rocket. It is made with milk and brown sugar.

Eunice, I TOLD you keep that rabbit out of the house.

Kidding. They're raisins.

I forgot to add egg to the dough batter so it is brushed on now while the dough is still flattened.

The size of my pan determines the size of the dough.

Dry Anasazi beans (my current favorite) milled to powder in coffee mill, microwaved in 2X water with favorite flavorings,garlic, chile powder, butter. Stirred at least three times between pulses to avoid the powder clumping as it rapidly absorbs water.

Anasazi beans, fried eggs,

In Sam Arnold's book, The Fort Cookbook: New Foods of the Old West from the Famous Denver Restaurant, available on Amazon for 1¢, he writes that one of his cooks back in the day told him that black beans are the Cadillac of the bean world. Either black beans or Anasazi beans, I forget which. 

Sam also said Anasazi beans, the spotted heirloom species with markings like pintos but much brighter and dramatic, have only 25% of the type carbohydrates* that cause flatulence.

* Oligosaccharide, usually 3-9 simple sugars, molecules too large for the small intestine so they pass onto the large intestine where they are digested by bacteria, to the extent they can be digested. 

1) Raffinose, a trisaccharide, fructose, galactose, glucose

2) Stashyose, a tetrasaccharide with the same elements as Raffinose. 

The beans turn pink and lose their bright markings as they cook. 

Aw, bless. 

I was thinking about what makes those hamburgers next door so good and I concluded a big part of it is nice crispy lettuce. Good as this is, the whole thing would be much less without a wide slice of fresh crispy iceberg. You usually do not see iceberg served like a disc but it sure is good in every bite. When the lettuce ran out then what remained became worse.

After a full summer of amazing garden tomatoes, and finally heirloom tomatoes, and finally-finally my own terrace tomatoes, these hothouse tomatoes right here with no flavor at all came as a bit of a shock. Man, I sure hope Tony's or Whole Foods still has some summer tomatoes or I'll be really bummed having to do without them. Peaches I can live without for awhile, I guess, but not tomatoes.