Posts Tagged ‘eggs’

8 Nov

Vegetable dinners: add an egg! and notes on feeding chickens

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, front yard gardening, greens, herbs, recipe, urban homesteading, Vegetable dinners, vegetable gardening, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .


Like the British cookbook writer Nigella Lawson, I am both greedy and lazy, so I’m full of timesaving tricks for making real food in a hurry. Now if I also looked like her, that would be nice, but two out of three isn’t bad. One of my favorite time-saving tricks is to make a small batch of yeast dough and stick it in the refrigerator with no clear idea what I’ll use it for. Most recently, I used it to make a variation on a hortapita, filled with mixed greens. Since my chickens have started to lay, I decided to incorporate eggs. This isn’t really a recipe. This is the sort of thing you throw together by instinct on days when you need the comfort of the kitchen but if you think too much more, your brain will break.

If you don’t happen to keep dough hanging around, you can use ready-made pizza dough from the Co-op, but making your own is a cinch. My basic recipe is 2 cups water, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1/2 teaspoon dry yeast, and 2 teaspoons salt. Mix together, knead on a floured surface for five minutes, form into a ball, pop it into an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap, and set in the refrigerator for 1-2 days. On the second or third day, take the bowl out before you leave for work and leave it at room temp for the day. When you come home, it will be ready to use for a homemade pizza or hortapita.
Besides the dough, you will need:
about a pound of mixed greens OR a pound of frozen organic spinach and a handful or two of stronger-flavored greens or herbs to give flavor.
an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic
a packed cup of crumbled feta or shredded parmesan or some flavorful but not stinky cheese. Idiazabal, mild cheddar, or mild gouda would all be reasonable. I used Idiazabal because I usually have some around.
3-4 eggs
some olive oil

Preheat the oven to 425.
For the filling, I took a major shortcut and started with a pound of frozen organic spinach. Then I picked some very mature arugula from the yard to give it that wild strong flavor, but since 6 or 7 big leaves will do the trick, the cleaning time was about 5 minutes for the greens. If I didn’t have arugula in my yard, I’d just chop up a small bunch of parsley or the tops of a few green onions for a different but equally “green” flavor. Chop and saute an onion in olive oil, remembering to stir frequently. Between stirs, shred the arugula or whatever you have into chiffonade and put it in a nonmetal mixing bowl with the frozen spinach. Microwave the mixture on high for two minutes. There may still be some frozen chunks of spinach. Ignore them. Squeeze the mixture over the sink, handful by handful, to get out as much moisture as you can, and return the dry greens to the bowl. At this point the onion should be cooked. Add a couple of cloves of chopped garlic, saute until the garlic is cooked, and add to the greens in the bowl. Add the cheese, toss all together with your hands, and taste. It may need some salt, will surely need some freshly ground pepper, and may cry out for a little thyme (to me, most foods cry out for a little thyme, and so there should always be some in a pot somewhere or in the refrigerator.)
On a large baking sheet, smear around some olive oil and dump the dough on top. Pat it out with your hands, using vigorous stroking motions to spread it out into a big oval without tearing it. When it is about 1/4 inch thick and nearly as large as the pan, pile the greens mixture on half of it and make 3 or 4 depressions in the greens. Crack an egg into each depression, salt the eggs lightly, and fold the other half of the dough over the top and pinch the edges together. Smear a little more olive oil over the surface and stick in the hot oven until done, somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes. Eat with the knowledge that a tough day didn’t get you down. A glass of good strong red wine will help give you the wherewithal to face tomorrow. If you have just a little more energy and half a bunch of parsley, pound a clove of garlic, the parsley chopped, and the juice of half a lemon in your faithful big mortar and pestle. When somewhat pulverized, add enough of your best olive oil to make a chunky puree and salt to taste. I love this simple sauce/dressing/relish beside almost any vegetable or egg dish, but it’s especially good for bringing a makeshift hortapita to life. If you don’t have a big mortar and pestle yet, a food processor is okay.

My eggs come out of my back yard now, and I give a fair amount of thought to feeding my chickens. If you want your eggs to be highly nutritious, you have to give the chickens the nutrients to make good eggs. For maximum security from predators my coop is fixed and nonmobile, so I cut grass and clover from the yard daily to supplement the laying mash. All the vegetable trimmings from garden and kitchen prep go to them, too. Any pumpkin or squash “innards” go to them so that they can eat the seeds. The chickens get oystershell for calcium, and they get any nutritious table scraps that would otherwise be wasted. For example, they will happily devour leftover salad, for which there is no other use, and rice or stale bread or bulgur are right up their alley. If I have leftover oatmeal or yogurt, they wolf it down. Now that we’ve had several frosts there aren’t many green things left in the yard, so I give the chickens some flaxseed every day to keep the omega-3 content of their eggs up (this is how the commercial high-omega 3 eggs are produced.) Flaxseed is expensive, so rather than give it to them dry and permit it to be scratched around and wasted, I mix it into yogurt or chopped vegetable scraps to make a slurry that they can eat out of a small dish.
I also feed their own eggshells back to them for calcium, but I never just throw the shells into the coop, because this trains them to eat their own eggs (yes, healthy chickens with lots of room and food will eat their own eggs if they learn how, and once a flock has learned to eat eggs there’s no good way to stop them.) I set the shells on a plate and microwave them for one minute to dry them thoroughly, then let them cool and set them aside in a bag. When I’ve accumulated a dozen or so, I crumble them roughly by hand and then put them in the blender and grind them to a coarse powder. The powder is added to yogurt or leftover oatmeal and stirred in well. The chickens gobble it up and it helps them make strong eggshells.

5 Apr

Kitchen Staples: Pasta and Eggs, and notes on what makes a good egg.

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, farmers market, fish and seafood, home food production, kitchen staples, recipe, sustainable, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

If you’re a lover of pasta carbonara, you know the rich and lovely taste of egg yolks on pasta. This time of year, if you don’t have chickens yourself (I don’t yet), the farmers markets are full of beautiful eggs with deep orange yolks, and wonderful impromptu meals can be made from them. This one is warm and comforting, but has a little zing to it. You can have it on the table in 30 minutes or less. If you always have pasta, high-quality olive oil, good Parmesan, and anchovies around, you’re never more than 30 minutes (tops) from a good meal. Good eggs in season send the combination over the top.


You will need a small, heavy skillet or clay dish (my preference) with a cover. Clay needs to be heated slowly, so if you’re using it, start heating it over low heat about 15 minutes before you want to start cooking the eggs.

Ingredients: for 2 very generous servings, start with 4 very good eggs, about 6 oz. of spaghetti or linguini, 2 small anchovy fillets (very necessary for the bold flavor of the dish), 3 tablespoons of good olive , 2 cloves of garlic chopped, a few tablespoons of chopped parsley (plus more for garnish if you like,) an ounce or two of the best Parmesan you can find, and half a teaspoon of red pepper flakes (more if they’re mild.)

Start cooking the garlic slowly in the olive oil, over medium heat, while the salted water for the pasta is coming to a boil. Meanwhile, chop the anchovy fillets very finely or pound them in a mortar until they’re paste-like. Stir them into the saute’ing garlic and cook the mixture until the garlic is soft through but not browned. Lower the heat under the skillet and stir in the red pepper. Break the eggs into the skillet a few minutes after you add the pasta to the boiling salted water. Splash a couple of teaspoons of water into the skillet (this makes a little steam to lightly cook the top of the eggs,) cover the skillet tightly, and let it sit over low heat until the eggs are done to your liking. Make sure the yolks stay soft. When done to taste, take the skillet off the heat. Heavy iron or clay will keep them hot. Open the cover so that they don’t overcook.
When the pasta is ready, drain it, toss it very quickly with the cheese, another tablespoon or so of olive oil, and the chopped parsley. Put in warmed bowls and top each with two of the eggs. Pour the garlic/anchovy/red pepper mixture left in the skillet over the top.
At the table, break the yolks, stir them into the pasta a little, and revel in simplicity and ease.
This dish accomodates whole wheat spaghetti if you like it.

Regarding those eggs, I advise buying at the farmers market whenever possible. To have a good life and make good eggs, chickens should run around outside and have access to plants and bugs, not run around a giant stinking building with a tiny outdoor yard, mostly unused by the chickens, that allows the manufacturer (and I use that term advisedly) to call its product “free range.” Don’t support a CAFO with the misimpression that you are getting truly good eggs. Really good eggs come from small producers and backyard growers and are not found at the grocery store. Be sure to bring the cartons back when you empty them, because the small growers pay too much for them and are usually eager to reuse them.

Newer Entries »