A quick raid thru the fridge yielded some interesting cheeses: shredded triple cheddar, Pecorino Romano and Old Amsterdam. Can’t make a toastie without bread so here’s some sesame kind from Ace Bakery, something nice and spongy which will help bind the toastie together. The Cayenne pepper is to tailor heat according to the individual taste, a bit of hum to Sandra, a song to me and a hymn to Natalia who’s a declared spice addict.

I’ve spread a thin layer of butter on both sides of each slice, then loaded them up with the shredded cheese combo, taking care to cover well the whole surface. A whisper of Cayenne pepper followed, according to the individual taste preferences. All that’s left now is to “close” the sandwiches and press them firmly.

There are a few tricks involved in toasting these. It needs to be done over medium-low heat, otherwise the exterior toasts before the interior has a chance of melting. Judicous use of heat will have the inside nicely done just as the exterior is browned and wonderfully crispy. Making sure the base of the cheese filling is a melting one, like cheddar in this case, gets the slices nicely glued together, a must for the toastie’s structural integrity, plus some delicious drippings on the sides. Another trick is to press down on the toasties so their whole surface becomes uniformly browned. Use of a good nonstick pan is paramount as you can imagine and this new griddle I got from Santa last Christmas is about perfect.

Toasted on both sides, nice and perfectly crispy!

Now comes the crazy part, the crown. Another, flat nonstick pan is used for this process which starts by sprinkling a bit of that shredded cheese mix, then setting the toastie in the middle. We’re still using low-medium heat here and soon the cheese starts bubbling and the fat from it starts separating. When the cheese starts to brown a bit we use a spatula to draw it closer around the sandwich, then, using the same spatula we slowly start lifting the toastie from the pan. The cheese stretches a bit before it lifts from the bottom of the pan and will dangle. While still holding it over the pan, the cheese starts to cool and harden, about 30 seconds being enough to have it stiff enough to hold shape when the toastie is flipped up.

That’s quite the crown, eh? You might be wondering how you would eat this beauty, exactly. Well you need to be patient first as the inside is about a million degrees and will mercilessly stick and burn your mouth. While the toastie is cooling a bit, you can start breaking the crown and set it aside to be eaten with the sandwich. It is also good for dipping should you decide to push this dish calorie count even higher via a dip of some sort, as unfortunately, many of them will work beautifully both on your taste buds and on your arteries. Finally you can cut the toastie in half diagonally and have at it. To say they were delicious would be an understatement. We inhaled them. Them toasties will become part of our breakfast rotation!

As there’s not a ton of ingredients here. The base of the dish are the tasty leftovers which only need a little bit of “multiplying” and not much else. So, we’re getting some passata, eggs, parsley and a food dose of garlic. A couple of ciabatta minis complete the picture. Passata is a nice time saving shortcut, keeping you from having to start the sauce from scratch but if you want to go for all fresh tomatoes or perhaps for the tinned variety, there’s no problem, the dish is going to take a little longer to cook, that’s all.

I’m starting cooking with three of the four garlic cloves and the parsley’s minced stalks in the cold pan over medium-low heat. I like to heat the pan gently so the garlic has time to infuse the oil before starting to fry. The parsley’s stalks are also really tasty, never waste them!

As soon the garlic starts frying, I’m interrupting the process with the passata. You may want to brown the garlic a bit, but in this case there’s plenty of roasted taste in the leftovers so there’s no need. Besides, if the garlic is browned a bit too much it becomes unpleasantly bitter, requiring starting over the cooking with a fresh batch. Anyway, we’re going a bit “Marinara” here with a sprig of basil thrown in for good measure. We let this sauce develop a bit on medium-low heat for around 10 minutes or so.

While the sauce is happily blipping away, we can concentrate on giving some love to the ciabatta. I prefer pan toasting it with a bit of salt and olive oil. It becomes crunchy and gnarly and delicious. And then you rub it with garlic. Perfection!

Once the sauce is reduced a bit we’re adding the leftovers and we mix it all well. A couple more minutes are needed for complete sauce synergy. Umm… perfection?…synergy? I’m starting to sound ridiculous here. Must be the hunger and the rather subversive smell…

All that’s left to do is creating four nice alveoles in the sauce and cracking an egg into each one of them. Make sure the egg is in contact with the pan, otherwise cooking them will take a while. Might even test your patience… Anyway patience is still needed here as we’re slowly poaching the eggs in the sauce. The process can be sped by covering the pan, thus steaming the top of the eggs. I’m not doing it however. I like soft, liquid gold warm yolks and steaming the top makes the process a bit harder to control. If you constantly have to yank the cover off to check on the eggs, and losing the steam every single time you do it, you might as well not use a cover at all. In any case it takes around 8-10 minutes to cook the eggs like shown above.

I went all fancy-schmansy in serving the dish by going all chiffonady on the parsley. Yes, hunger can do odd things to people as you can very well witness here. What can I say in the end but reiterate what I said in the beginning. The eggs are a wonderful vehicle for experimentation and chances are, even when you make a mistake, the results will still be pretty decent and enjoyable. So there you have it, my Leftover Shakshuka with garlic toasted ciabatta bread. Great brunch!

Funny thing, I pressed this dark 500 ml bottle which used to contain Jamie Oliver’s olive oil into regular kitchen service as its just about perfect for the job, but by removing its labels it acts now like a small black hole on my regular ingredients setups. If one would not notice some faint reflections from the neighboring ingredients in it, one would wonder why there’s a gap between the cooking cream and the butter. Anyway, along the ones already mentioned, the ingredients are eggs, green pepper, two kinds of tomato – heirloom and cherry, garlic and Italian parsley. Nothing impressive indeed, just excellent potential for something good to land on our plates in the end.

One way to ensure the silkiness of these eggs is to grate pretty much everything, including the pepper and the garlic and discarding all the skins. Sandra noted that stripping those skins also removes some of the fiber from the dish, maybe next time instead of grating I will pulverize them in the blender instead… will see. I was debating whether to use oregano or rosemary here but somehow I ended up throwing some thyme sprigs in. We have the garlic there as big, bold zing so I thought the delicate thyme will offer a more subtle counterpoint. There’s no need to pick the little leaves apart, the reason for it will become apparent shortly. The grated mix went into a medium hot skillet in which I added olive oil and melted some butter.

Remember I mentioned patience in the beginning of this post? Well you need some to reduce the tomato mix to a rather thick consistency out of all that juicy, wet stuff we started with. The umami in the tomatoes really concentrates this way so you will find there’s little need for salt in adjusting its taste at this stage. Perhaps a pinch is needed to underline the umami even more along some pepper. Also at this point the thyme leaves are already all but stripped away from the sprigs which now can be “cleaned” a bit with the spatula on the side of the skillet and discarded.

The egg mix is my classic one: eggs, cooking cream, salt and pepper only loosely beaten before making it into the skillet. Take your time making the scramble, let the eggs curdle a little, clean the sides of the skillet and slowly integrate the tomato mix in. Remember, this is not an omelette. Don’t agitate things too much and, very importantly, don’t overcook them. We’re not going for popcorn egg nuggets here, but for a creamy, soft texture.

This is how I served it, with a baby spinach, radish and pepper salad and monastery style toast. A bit of balsamic glaze and fresh parsley served as garnish. The result is a dish I would not mind eating for breakfast every day for a good while. It’s the sort of healthy thing you can get a morning boost from, long term without tiring of it too soon. I think I’ll make it more often.

If we split the list in the respective categories, the list of ingredients it’s not all that extensive after all and the most important ones are the ones for the batter itself. Those components are written in stone irrespective if you decide to make it sweet or savory, we’re talking about flour, milk, half a cup of each and 3 eggs. The second category is represented by the batter’s overall taste and aroma. In terms of taste is simple, we either make it sweet or savory, how much it is up to you to decide. I typically use a teaspoon of raw plantation sugar in my batter. Once that’s set, the whole world of aromas literally open up for you. Anything you fancy, you can also try, by itself or in combinations. Rosemary, thyme, cardamom, vanilla, mint, rum extract … shall I go on? The third category is the topping. Here anything goes as well. Chorizo, tomatoes, feta, ham, ricotta, bacon? Berries, banana, dates, apricots, peaches, pineapple ? Just a dusting of icing sugar or a sprinkle of maple syrup? Name your pick as pretty much anything and any combination tickling your fancy will either work or it is worth trying once. Are you looking for the perfect vehicle for your personal tastes, your genius or your madness in the kitchen (sometimes the difference between the two is only a matter of perspective) ? A Dutch Baby will serve you well in this respect. Damn, now I’m hungry !

The absolute easiest way of making the batter is a blender but a food processor/ mixer or simply some elbow grease will do as well, as long as the result is a smooth, silky batter. The recipe calls for regular skim milk but I tend to use some with significantly higher fat content as I like the nice creamy results it yields. In this case I simply mix 10% half-half with 35% cooking cream in equal proportions. You could use 35% cream but the blender tends to whip that rather quickly and you may end up with some form of whipped cream of some sort. If you decide on high fat milk it is probably better to whisk the batter manually. My “milk” combination doesn’t lead to any whipping however, it’s been tested repeatedly. While the oven preheats I usually mix the sugar and aromas in the milk and let them infuse. A few pulses in the blender it’s all it takes for the batter to come together. Perfection!

You can cook the Dutch Baby in pretty much any oven proof nonstick cookware but the best option here is, by a fair margin, a cast iron skillet. The main disadvantage of it, its ton of unwieldy mass, becomes its main advantage. That much mass also has a LOT of thermal inertia. Once pre-heated to 425F in the oven, anything you throw in it will start cooking immediately. Here we’re melting butter and we swirl it around nicely so it coats well all the skillet’s interior, sidewall included. In fact, the butter starts bubbling the very instant it hits the pan. That’s what we want anyway.

The same thermal inertia helps immensely in this step as well. The batter starts cooking as soon as it hits the pan. The batter would suck up the heat from any thinner, lighter cookware and the process would undoubtedly take much longer. The end result would still be good, I have no reason to think otherwise but I can only venture a more or less educated guess here … I haven’t tried. Anyway we set the skillet back in the oven at 400-425F for around 6-8 minutes.

In 6-8 minutes the pancake will reach for the sky! Look at him go! It looks nicely golden but it needs to stay inside with the heat switched off for another minute or so. It needs this time to “relax” and retract from the skillet’s sidewalls, while any of the still uncooked batter is set by the residual heat. A little bit of patience pays off here… stay strong please, we’re on the home stretch!

Once out of the oven we can see how well the baby had retracted from the walls and released the skillet’s bottom. We can cut it here or take it out on a board, it will come out with absolutely no issues.

Now it would be the time to load it up to the max with whatever you feel like. Here we have blueberries, gooseberries and Ile d’Orléans strawberries, sprinkled generously with maple syrup and topped with wild mint from our backyard. Tell me this doesn’t brightens your eyes, doesn’t tickle your senses and doesn’t put a big grin on your mug! As breakfasts go, I can’t think of anything better. Awesomeness!

This could be a very flexible recipe, ripe for adding or changing some things but apart from the eggs it’s base doesn’t require too many ingredients. Let’s group them in two main categories. For the yogurt mix we have dill and minced garlic, seasoned to taste, but we can have anything from a sprinkle of cayenne pepper to a ripple of some sort of spicy chutney or anything that tickles you fancy really. The second category would be the topping for the eggs, in this case a Mexican chilli, cumin and smoked Spanish paprika infused butter. Obviously olive oil can be substituted instead of butter and rosemary or truffles or thyme or whatever else comes to your mind can be use as spices/ aromas. It might not be Turkish any longer as a result but it will be yours to discover and cherish.

Best thing to start with is the infused butter. It comes together quickly but it needs to be set aside and left alone for about 15 minutes to infuse and develop, so it will be ready by the time we assemble the dish. I melted butter over medium heat and waited for it to start making slight “popping” sounds, a sign it reached the proper temperature for adding the spices. I used more chilli and cumin than the original recipe called for so I’ve also added a pinch of raw sugar to compensate. Cumin is wonderfully aromatic, but in larger quantities it is also bitter, the reason why, upon tasting the infusion I decided to balance it a bit. An eighth of a teaspoon was all that was required. Now I realize I could have added a Canadian twist to the dish by using a few drops of maple syrup instead of raw sugar, once the infusion cooled a bit. Oh well… next time!

Preparing the yogurt now. I forgot to mention it’s best to have it at room temperature, otherwise it will suck the heat from the eggs instantly. We don’t want that, OK? Wether we take it out of from the fridge one hour prior cooking or we gently heat it in the microwave, let’s not have it cold. We like garlic in this family. Actually we love it, so I used two large-ish cloves here along with the dill plus seasoning with salt and pepper.

At this point I remembered the Dukkah I made earlier in the year and kept in the fridge ever since. It will go with eggs really well and lend an even more Middle Eastern/ North African vibe to the dish. More details about this nuts/ spices mix here. Speaking of eggs, let’s make them already! We’re hungry!

The recipe calls for poached eggs… well… I was never successful at making them… so should I break out the poacher I use for Eggs Benny? Or perhaps boil them? The recipe will make good use of any sort of eggs with intact, oozy yolks, so fried, sunny side up is how I’m making them.

The moment of truth. Yogurt goes in first and in it we make a nice pocket which receives the eggs. We top it with the butter infusion, dill and dukkah. Toasted ciabatta makes for a perfect vehicle to mop the bowl clean as we ended up doing. This dish made it straight to the top of our breakfast rotation. Not bad for something I didn’t even know it existed a week ago! It is the kind of simple, easy to make, humble, not to mention delicious food which can be easily adapted to your individual liking, truly worth adding to your morning rotation routine.

The ingredients, as I mentioned, are simple and not all that many especially if you think of them as generally divided into a few categories: omelet base, herbs and flavors plus “the filling” this last one being optional. The beauty of an omelet is that, apart from the basic components that are eggs, the variations you can bring into the mix are nearly endless. Any kind of combination, whether “by the book” or “whatever tickles your fancy” is entirely possible, the limit being only your own imagination. Another great aspect is the possibility of “filling” it not only with classic things like ham or cheese but also with God knows what else, from raw onions or smoked salmon to chili jam or chopped leftovers from the last potato stew still lingering in the fridge and begging to be used. To sum it up, the omelet is a simple way, or a pure sign of madness, or culinary genius (often the difference between is only one’s perspective), to create something absolutely personal for breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. Or when you feel like it. In the picture we have eggs, lovage, parsley, dried thyme, green onions, Greek feta and 35% cooking cream.

I’ve said it in the past, and I will most likely repeat it: the 35% cream is indispensable to all my egg mixtures, either omelettes, scrambled eggs or frittatas. The cream makes all these mixtures upon cooking nice and creamy and soft. Additionally the cream protects a little against overcooking the omelet… it’s like one of those storm anchors in this regard, doesn’t necessarily save you but gives you some maneuvering room before it is too late. So if you like a little more color on the outside of your omelet, the cream will help in keeping the inside softer. Any kind of larger percentage fat milk will also work, basically anything between 3% and 35%, the fatter the better in my experience. Here I mixed the eggs with salt, pepper, part of the herbs, chopped green onions and cream. It doesn’t hurt to beat the mix with a fork or even a whisk. We want to “aerate” it a bit.

To keep in true French tradition, some butter is melted in the skillet over medium heat. I’m also mixing, in the true… umm… Italian?… tradition, a little olive oil. This oil raises the “smoking” point of theun-clarified butter. I’m trying to avoid having “burnt butter” here. Some people like it, but I’m not a fan of this particular taste in omelets, however,I’m also far from limiting anyone’s freedom of expression here – it’s just a personal preference. Finally…. once the mixture is in the pan, the French classic method has the pan and the egg mixture shaken/ stirred simultaneously, periodically bringing what’s setting on the edge of the pan towards the center, in order to keep this center as wet and delicate as possible. The omelet is then “folded” by bringing it to the edge on one side and by turning it over directly on the plate on the other side. Bon Appetit, Chef Pepin would say at this point (you can search for his method on YouTube). I’m a little less “Chefy” so I’m just shaking the pan until the bottom sets and the omelet starts moving “together”, like a pancake. At this point, the top is only slightly set, soft and delicate. At this point you can roll it like a pancake and serve it hot if no filling was planned, or if the filling has been mixed in from the very beginning. I do like like a filling however, a little warm surprise inside the omelet!

Now’s the moment for quick action… not too much time for pictures. The the omelet’s bottom is now starting to brown and the omelet becomes progressively harder to fold. As you can see, the egg on top is only a little set, so the right time to add the filling is now. It is also ideal to “scan” for the proper well folding “halves” and “orient” the filling accordingly, thus making our folding task easier. As filling in this case, I have Greek feta mixed with herbs and green onions, passed loosely through the knife once. It is one of the simplest and tastiest fillings, especially if you have some nice quality feta. Like anything else in life, simple things are both easy to control and delicious.

As you can see above, a great, an easy-to-handle non-stick pan is an absolute must-have for making omelettes. With the pan tilted to one side and shaken a little, half the omelette folds almost by itself. Repeat the process for the other half. That’s pure magic Monsieur!

A very important point here: the serving plates MUST be warm. Without exception. A cold plate sucks the heat from the omelet immediately and the result becomes somewhat flat, a little cold and missing that “spark”. I usually heat the plates in the oven set on “warm”, a method also having the added advantage of keeping the omelettes warm when you have more than a couple to do and serve at the same time. Here I’ve finished it with some herbs, freshly ground pepper and a little sprinkle of smoked Spanish paprika. Sandra made some butter on toast. The perfect way to start the day! Anyone for an omelet? Step right up!

Ingredients group photo. What we have above: Swiss chard, dukkah, eggs, garlic and multi grain seed bread. The bread was lightly toasted and rubbed with garlic. The recipe calls for a bit of olive oil on it but somehow my muscle memory kicked in an I ended putting a bit of butter on top as usual…Heh… a smidge of a French twist I guess…

You need to separate the leafy part of the chard from the stem because their cooking time is different. Here the stems are chopped in pieces about 3-4mm thick for quicker cooking and sautéed along the garlic in a bit of olive oil. I like starting with a cold pan here so the garlic has time to “flavour” the cooking oil a bit. Take care not to burn the garlic, it becomes unpleasantly bitter.

When the stems are almost cooked “al-dente”, the chopped leafy part of the chard also go in, along a bit of dukkah. It takes only about 2 minutes to cook over low heat covered.

The Swiss chard mix is equally distributed on the toasted bread, then topped with a poached or fried egg. Some pepper and more dukkah to finish it up. The result is one VERY satisfying and healthy brekkie, one that will go into our regular rotation.

The main ingredients on display: yellow and red onions, potatoes, Russets in this case, eggs, cherry tomatoes and lovage. Additional things going into the mix but not on display here are baby spinach, 35% cream and mixed shredded cheddar.

The ingredients, except the potato and onions combined together. I loosely ran the knife thru the spinach as it makes it easier to integrate and once cooked, the pieces won’t be too big . It is a bit whiter because I slipped some 35% cooking cream in the mix. The cream makes for a softer, “creamier” frittata but if too much is added the mix will not have enough consistency once cooked. In this particular case a little more works as we have the cheddar which upon melting it will provide the right “support”.

I mentioned patience in the process and the latkes are the part requiring it. It starts with grating the potatoes and the yellow onions together. Together so you can avoid the potatoes oxidizing, a process which starts immediately after you peel them. Then you need to salt the mix and let it stand for 10-15 minutes so some of the moisture from the potatoes is drawn out. Then you need to squeeze that moisture out before starting frying it in the skillet. You also need patience to get a bit of colour in them over medium heat so they cook thru and get nice and golden without drying all up.

Mix it all up and pour the mix in the already hot cast iron skillet. Put whatever stuff you want on top, make it as nice as you want/ feel like. It cooks the bottom while you’re doing this on the stovetop. Finish it in the oven for a few minutes.

All done after 10 minutes roasting at 400F. It is a pretty dense, satisfying meal which would keep your hunger away for hours.