Sweet Potato Hash with Baked Eggs & Hollandaise

Given that May has taken to masquerading as March, today I craved something substantial and hearty for dinner. I had a sweet potato in my veg bin, so I hit the interwebs looking for inspiration. My meal is a scaled down version of this gorgeous hash, with some changes to make it my own.

Ingredients:
Hollandaise (see recipe below)
Two eggs, plus reserved white
Dash paprika
2 Tablespoons shredded cheese
1/2 yellow onion, sliced and caramelized
Sweet Potato chopped into 1/4-inch pieces
Olive Oil
3 dashes Wostershire Sauce
S&P to taste
Chives


To begin, make a 1/2 portion of this simple hollandaise recipe, reserving the egg white in a greased oven-ready ramekin and adding a dash of paprika to the finished sauce.

Preheat your over to 375.

Add two eggs to reserved white in the ramekin. Break yolks with a fork, but do not scramble. Sprinkle with S&P to taste and add a dash of paprika. Cover with shredded cheese, I happened to have parm and some smoked gouda on hand, so I used both. Use enough cheese to cover the eggs in a thin layer.

Put ramekin on a cookie sheet and bake for approx. 20 minutes until eggs achieve a custard-like consistency. The whites won't totally set, but if it's still super-jiggly, keep cooking!

Now is a good time to get that onion caramelized. (Now would also be a good time to turn on the fan, I manage to forget and occasionally get the whole house good and stinky!)

Next coat the bottom of your skillet with olive oil and get it good and hot. Add your sweet potato and fry until your eggs are done. Pull the eggs out and set aside to cool. Seriously if you had your onions and potatoes cut in advance, the timing should be perfect - your potatoes should be golden brown and soft. Add the onions to reheat for about 1 minute with your dashes of wostershire.

Plate your hash first, add S&P to taste and drizzle with the hollandaise. If you properly coated your ramekin (which I didn't!) your eggs should just slide out to nest on top of your meal, and it'll look even better than mine. I made up for my broken eggs by snipping some of my neighbor Jane's chives over the top for color. They aren't essential, but sure add to this meal's appeal.

While this looks like a massive amount of food, I found it to be a perfect portion. I use smaller plates like the salad plate I used in the photo (which is available at Pier 1). It's amazing how much we eat with our eyes. Small touche, like perfectly proportioned dining wear and a touch of color can add enormously to the enjoyment of any meal, no matter how simple.

Spring Veggie Fettuccine

Unlike my better half, I lean heavily on recipes for inspiration, but sometimes that's all they need to be. So many people get caught up in precise measurements and cooking times - me included. If you're making something savory, Adam's taught me two valuable lessons:

1. How much? Until it tastes good.
2. How long? Until it's done.

After a careful analysis of our veggie bin and a cursory glance at our meat drawer, I decided I had enough of the ingredients on hand to make the spring vegetable carbonara from page 212 of May's Cooking Light. I prepped my asparagus and decided that I had enough to substitute for the missing red pepper, I mean really am I going to drive to the market for one veggie, I don't think so!

I beat the eggs in advance and added the cheese, going down my prep list to make sure I had all my trips to the fridge covered. Once oil hits the pan and I fire up the induction, I have learned that all of my prep needs to be done! My last prep work was to slice the pancetta I subbed in for the bacon, and this is where my well-crafted dinner hit the skids. My meat was green, and not the cutesy green eggs and ham kind of green; I could have cultured some antibiotics if I had the inclination or any sort of scientific know-how.

Carbonara is crap without bacon fat, so I went back to the drawing board. I flipped through the mag a bit more and hit on this Spring Linguine with Basil on page 170. It looked tasty too, but it was missing something, the stack of asparagus that would get wasted if I didn't throw it in my dish. So I stashed the eggs and cheese in the fridge for tomorrow's breakfast (ok, I actually threw them down the drain and as I did thought, crap, those would have made a great scramble), and threw together this menu that was bright, flavorful and ideal for spring.

Please note, all of my measurements are total guesses and are for one person. Want a better idea? Check out the recipes in the links above for their portion suggestions.

Ingredients:
3 oz. uncooked fettuccine
1/4 frozen green peas (fresh is better if you've got 'em)
1/4 bunch of green onions thinly sliced
4 stalks of asparagus trimmed and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 tsp. garlic, more if you like it. We cheat and buy the garlic in a jar. Don't judge me.
1 pat of butter, however you define and depending on your current weight-loss goals
An equal amount olive oil, not waste your fancy stuff here, no need for the extra virgin
A good squeeze of lemon
salt and pepper to taste
A dash or dried basil, way better if you've got fresh, but this was all I had!
Fresh grated parm to taste.

Cook pasta per package directions, and while Cooking Light always tells you to skip the salt, I add it. The pasta needs the flavor, and you need to add way more salt later that a dash in your water will give you now. So add that salt! Drain, reserving a few tablespoons of the water to bind the dish.

Meanwhile... heat the butter and olive oil over medium high heat. Add asparagus and cook for 3 minutes. Add peas (still frozen), onions and garlic, cook for an additional 3 minutes. Add the reserved pasta water and the pasta as well as the lemon juice, S&P and dried basil if you have to resort to that. Mix it up, or if you're really brave give it a flip. Seriously, no one is watching, use your wrist and flip it!

Once everything is combined throw it in a nice low wide bowl and top with the parm and fresh basil if you've got it.

Sit at table. Consume.

A note on parm. That Kraft crap in a can is not cheese. Don't use it! As a general rule if the word "product" follows the word "cheese", or if it can sit on a shelf and never expires, don't eat it!

My Personal Chef?

When I tell people that I'm the wife of a chef they invariable tell me how lucky I am. They are right - I am incredibly lucky to be hitched to Adam, but their notions that I have a 24/7 personal chef couldn't be further from the truth.
While the Food Network and the producers over at Top Chef edit crews of knife-kit wielding white-coat donned food-flingers as our generation's rock stars, the reality of the restaurant life is anything but glamorous.
Five days a week my guy peels himself out of bed, hits the Caribou Coffee drive-thru for his daily Mocha (they recognize his voice and cue up his order) and is running through his prep list by 10 am. Sounds late to you corporate types? Sure, but he doesn't punch out until 10 pm on a good night. He comes home, wakes me up for a smooch and hits the showers. On the sixth day rest? Think again. That sixth day is Sunday: Adam's dreaded clopening shift (close Sat, open Sun). He's in by 9 at the latest and works a shorty, home by 3 or 4.
This is when his personal chef resume building starts, and I relish our Sunday market trips and the culinary education I receive as I watch him chop, saute, flip, plate and garnish our meals with a well-practiced hand and no sign of a recipe.
Monday is his day off, and after he gets home from the restaurant (yep, at work on his day off. Orders, you know), he generally offers an encore performance, and I learn the finer points of pressing 12-inch high mounds of focccia, peppers, unholy stacks of beef and I'd wager more than my fair share of swiss into near-dainty proportions.
Satiated and leftover laden, my personal chef punches out for the week, and I'm left to fend for myself for the week to come.
While excellent fodder for a break room microwave line, even gourmet leftovers can only take you so far, and by as early as Tuesday night, I'm nosing through the fridge attempting to find something to nosh on. What I find aren't ready-to-micro nibbles. What I've got is ingredients, and I love to play, what can I make with the goodies Adam's culinary ministrations have left behind.

That's where my personal chef story comes to an end for now and where the story of this blog begins. When I post my news of my experimental kitchen successes on facebook, I'm always shocked at the level of response I get - I'm just a lady with a sorta dull chef's knife throwing some veggies in a skillet, and if I can do it, so can you. So if you've got some ingredients and a decent pantry, I hope I can inspire you to skip the drive-thru and the Lean Cuisine and cook something for yourself tonight.