Poached eggs, polenta, bacon and mushroom salad, red wine sauce

Oeufs en Meurette, considered a difficult thing I think because there are so many pots involved but it's actually easy because the separate elements are done in advance and assembled to plate thus the dish is favored in restaurants.

Except for the eggs.

It is possible. Easy too. You can poach eggs in advance and hold in chilled water. Then doused again in hot water to re-impart heat which only takes a second or two with a slotted spoon. But you have to overcome the unease of holding a bowl of some twenty-four or so tender chilled poached eggs. One wrong move and blam yolk all over the place.

Meurette amounts to red wine sauce reduced to syrup its acid mitigated with puréed carrots. And right off one thinks of a good use for a jar of baby food although you won't see that on any recipes. Carrots cannot be cooked in the wine as the acid will toughen the carrot cells and prevent them from blending. Reduced wine, puréed carrot, shallot, butter, it's a very nice sauce used for fish and for eggs. 

The other nice thing about it is onion confit. In my mind they substitute for a pile of noodles. Here they are hidden under polenta which isn't customary, and under sauce, but the onions are there.

Sautéed mushrooms as well

And lardons, bacon here. 

So you need separate pots and pans for

* slowly sautéing onions

* reducing a bottle of red wine
* softening carrots, this is separate due to acid

* frying lardons, bacon or ham

* sautéing mushrooms

* polenta (here, but not usual) 

* toasting croûtes, little toast rounds as platforms for poached egg, if they're used, but not here
* poaching eggs

So that's a lot of pots.

Once you've made all that mess there you are, you can clean it all up, and then you can assemble things at will. So the stabilized sauce and onions and lardons and toasted croûtes and poached eggs on hold are all good for buffets brunches and such. But if you do, use better bowls than this. Those half-plate half-bowl things are nice.

Apologies for the photo, they are all bad, the lens has no vibration control. 

French fried potato

A potato is sliced through from end to end leaving caps and then microwaved to cook completely. The caps removed and the sliced, cooked and dehydrated pieces shallow fried in hot oil to produce French fried potatoes by a double cooked method.

This is a sorcerer's trick used primarily by males. It allows play with a sharp knife for skillful demonstration and for purpose of supplying a fast and excellent meal of a single potato. 

A pocket knife will do but not recommended. 

A potato will naturally lay flat on one side which can be regarded as its steady surface. Make slice through the center all the way through from near end to end leaving a cap. Then make another parallel slice on each side, perhaps two if the potato is large enough.

Rotate the potato 45˚ and make corresponding cuts all the way through so that the potato is held together by the caps.

Microwave the potato and cut off the caps. The potato is cooked and reasonably dehydrated.

Fry in oil 350℉ / 180℃

I said shallow fried. I meant enough oil to cover but in a very deep pot. The deepest pot you've got. For safety. 

It's a guy thing. If you're female and you do this, then face it, you're a tomboy. 

Pineapple upside down cake

A cast iron pan is prepared with delicious goop of butter and brown sugar with holiday spices and fresh pineapple with all of its pineapple wetness. And obscenely red cherries preserved in a syrup, not a natural product by any means and signaling the cake product is not authentic foodstuff.

Cake is

not authentic foodstuff.

A delicious cake batter is prepared ad lib ad hoc impromptus, extempo raneously.

I don't know how I do it I just do. 

Here's how. Read the ingredients of boxed cake batter. Then read the instructions. Get the idea. Thereafter you're on your own.

Here's the idea. Egg whisked with sugar. Vegetable oil. Vanilla. Almond extract, just a few drops it's killer. Sifted flour folded in. Avoid developing gluten. Baking powder. Salt. Enough milk to loosen the mixture to pourable sludge. 

Or put another way, milk first with liquid ingredients gauged by the amount needed. Then enough flour to thicken at least a cup and 1/4. All adjustments this way or that with liquid or with flour will affect the balance of everything else. You might need more baking powder or corn sweetener or salt or possibly even another egg. 

I did adjust with milk to loosen without adjusting anything else and there's enough wiggle room the cake turned out to be moist and delicious. 

I'm trying to tell you how awesome I am that these things can be whipped out so nonchalantly, so casually, so facile and with daringly cavalier confidence.

Kabong. 

It's flour and sugar, topped with sugar and butter. 

It's not real food.

It's what one whips out to eat in order to punish one's body and to erase the memory of awful gobi aloo that tastes like vinegar, and I mean awful. 

And to get rid of a pineapple on its way out, and preserved cherries in a jar with a fifteen thousand year half-life. I'm glad both those things are finally gone.

Win.

Potato, cauliflower

Gobi aloo. Completely mishandled, don't make this. I don't know what went wrong. I was my usual careless self and it ended up being mushy and tasting vinegary when nothing like that was added. 

I'm only showing it because it was on the camera. 

I hated every forkful and ate only half of it. 

Fail.

Tortillas, beans

The tortillas have lard and butter plus a little baking powder. 

The beans are black eye peas. Dried. Pressure cooked with herbs and spices. Tinned diced tomato added after the beans cooked. 

Mexicana cheese, Italian hard cheese, American cheese.